Sorrow’s Knot (18 page)

The little dead were all around them. But Otter’s ward held them all night, and Kestrel’s staff undid them in the morning, and the girls walked on.

The third day was hard going.

Past the waterfall, the way cut into the hill. It was rocky, steep, and narrow. Snowy in the shadows. Icy in places. They needed their hands to grab onto the rough bark of digger pines and pull themselves along. They went up slowly, panting.

All the time the river grew smaller. They met its tributaries: little creeks and less than creeks, shooting out of slots in the rock to join the main stream, or spilling over the lip of a boulder in waterfalls small enough to catch in one hand.

Otter thought they were like squirrels going out to the end of a branch. Eventually the stream would grow too thin to protect them. It would be two strides across, it would be one. It would be the sort of stream that ran dry now and again, or iced over, and the dead would cross it in one slide. This was why there was nothing west of Westmost: The rivers gave out.

They stumbled on and the Spearfish grew smaller. The land kept sloping up and the stream, small as it now was, kept carving down, until they were in a canyon, shoulder high, rocky, overhung with dark pines. They had to walk in the water and it was cold enough to make their feet shoot with pain, cold enough to make a woman clumsy. The current was fast, and in places it had carved hollows. In the hollows, the water was deep, and it pushed at them. Otter fell once, but Kestrel — who had not been sleeping, whose eyes were hollow with grief — fell over and over again.

The third time Kestrel fell, she fell badly, catching herself on one hand, with a
snap
that pulled a cry from her.

“Let me look,” said Otter, as Kestrel tucked her hand against her belly and folded up. “Kestrel, let me look.”

Kestrel held out her hand, her teeth set.

There was little enough to see: a scrape that was bleeding sluggishly, the mottling that came with deep cold. Otter took the hand carefully, and tried to rotate Kestrel’s wrist.

The ranger cried out and pulled her hand away.

“Broken, do you think?” said Otter.

Kestrel answered through her teeth: “Does it matter?”

They were standing in cold water. They could not stop there.

Otter made a sling from some of her cords, tied Kestrel’s arm against her body. They went on.

Where she could, Otter walked beside her friend, and steadied her. But often the canyon was too narrow, and the way too steep: It was less a walk now than a scramble, a clamber over boulders and a creep along thin sloping margins of scree. So Kestrel fell and scraped her other hand to bleeding, fell and had her breath knocked out. And at last she fell into the river and did not get up again.

Otter knelt beside her, lifting her from the water. The canyon was now only a stride across; its wall brushed her shoulder. The cold of the water was of the kind called bitter, because it was a flavor, a poison. Otter was shivering convulsively. Kestrel was no longer shivering at all.

“We must leave the water,” said Otter, realizing it as she said it, and fearing that she might have realized it too late. “We must go into the forest and make a fire. Now.”

What would come over those skin-colored needles — her heart lurched at the memory of Cricket fallen into the sludge of shadows. But what would come would come. Like Cricket, they did not have a choice.

But Kestrel mumbled: “… No … We’re almost … It opens …” She got up, took three staggering steps forward, and fell again. Otter clambered to her, splashing on her hands and feet through the water. The teeth and knives of the water.

But, quite suddenly, the stream was gone. It had become a marshy slope — and at the top of the slope was clear sunlight and sky. Otter heaved Kestrel up and together they went stumbling toward the light. They topped the rise. In front of them, the land slanted down. The sun lay on the west-facing slope like a warm hand.

They went a few more steps out of mad habit, and then Kestrel stumbled and knelt, and Otter knelt down with her and held on to her, shaking. The forest was a bow-shot behind them. The slope was part of the rim of a crater, a caldera. It was huge — two days’ walk across, maybe more — and nearly as round as a dish. No trees grew in it, and there was no snow: It was a bowl of sunlight and grass, and in the center was a great black lake — a lake four times bigger than the whole pinch of Westmost. Open water — no ice — steamed and stirred. In the center of the lake, like a stone in a cupped hand, was a rocky, wooded island. There was warmth coming from somewhere, and a smell Otter did not know. She huddled into Kestrel.

They slept then, on the western slope of their world, their strength used up and their hopes forgotten. They slept shivering all afternoon, as the kind sun dried them, and they woke only as the light began to swing down toward evening. It was a wind that woke them, picking up as the day changed, sending its fingers through the last damp spots of their coats. Otter got up and helped Kestrel up, both of them stiff and still tired, but alive in the evening light.

And that is how they came to Mad Spider’s place, to the ruin of Eyrie, the city of dreams.

The day was ending in a sunset of orange feathers. At the edge of the sky was a line of mountains. They were taller and younger than the mountains that were the home of the Shadowed People, and their rocky peaks were white with snow.

Kestrel and Otter paused to watch the distant mountains become a hem of flame. They were huge and beautiful.
So,
thought Otter,
this is the greater world.
“Does nothing come from there?” she asked. “From the West?”

Kestrel was leaning on her ranger’s staff, weary, unbalanced by her bound-up arm. “Nothing human. Deer. Elk. Mountain sheep. Bears, when the blueberries are ripe. But the streams run a different way from here. And there’s no river deep enough to make a road.”

A gust blew across Otter’s ears; it filled them with a sound like wings beating, and for a moment she could hear nothing else. The wind was cold, but the air, when still, was not. “Where is the warmth coming from?” said Otter. It was a strange place, the caldera. It seemed held in a different season, as if winter could not quite reach it.

“From the potter’s fires,” said Kestrel. “From under the earth.”

Otter knew that it was a potter who made the earth and a weaver who made the sky. But she’d never expected to feel the heat of the pot-firing coals, however faintly. Eyrie, place of stories. Eyrie, where things began.

“Come,” said Kestrel, setting off down the slope toward the lake. “We’re losing the light.” As evening came, the shadows would spread like spilled water, would cover the whole of the world. Otter put her hand on Kestrel’s arm, and the cords in the injured ranger’s sling edged toward her fingers. The knots were awake. Otter’s power was awake.

There might be anything in the shadows.

They went down the slope as quickly as they could.

Despite their hurry, it was fully dark by the time they reached the shore of the lake. The stars came out, thicker and thicker, and the band of small stars and fainter things that they called the Weaver’s Tears spilled itself across the sky.

Otter had never walked in darkness, not away from Westmost. Not in a place where she could see no firelight, smell no cooking, hear no laughter or song or babies crying. The darkness seemed to make them more alone. It made the wind louder, it made a heart-stopping noise of a rabbit bolting out from under their feet. Otter’s heart beat faster. She slipped her fingers under her bracelets, making sure they were loose. She saw that Kestrel — though limping — was not leaning on her staff. She had it lifted in her single uninjured hand. She too was ready.

And yet, as they walked and walked, in thicker and thicker darkness, nothing happened. The slope bottomed out, changing from grasses and yucca to a low meadow of cushion moss and frost-black speedwell, wires of spiderwort curling upward, the red stems of saxifrage spilling from the cracks of the rocks. The soil had a give underfoot. It was not wet, but Otter thought there might be wetness, not far down — the moss underfoot felt like a deer hide over a mud puddle. The strange smell was heavier. It stirred around them.

When something loomed up, shaped like a bear in the darkness, Otter was afraid. But Kestrel said “At last,” and strode toward it.

“What is that?” said Otter, hurrying after. In the starlight she could just see it. A structure: birch poles thrust into the earth in a ring and bent together at the top. It was wound around with blue cords.

“The holdfast.” Kestrel lowered her staff and leaned on it. “A place where the rangers may stand a day or two, and sleep safely.”

“They come this far?” Otter was awed.

“This far and no farther,” Kestrel said. “Late in the summer, this whole bowl is filled with blue lupines. The rangers come here and pick them by the basketful, and pack them into bags for the dyers. This is where blue comes from. This is the true edge of the world.”

Otter walked around the holdfast, touching the cords. There were many: The lowest part of the holdfast was thickly wound as a bird’s nest. And there were many knots. It was not a ward — no one but a binder could have tied a ward, and no binder’s hand had made this. It was … The rangers had wrapped their holdfast as if it were one of their staffs. They’d used many cords, tied many rangers’ knots, small and sure. The knots stirred as Otter touched them, but nothing made to pounce. The power of the place was as faded and fuzzed as old yarn.

It was comfortable. Old. It had protected the blue-gatherers for years, perhaps generations. It would keep back the slip, she was sure.

But somewhere, still in the world, was a White Hand.
Drawn to the human, or to power, or to fear.
Otter could not shake the sense that it might have followed them.

Even if it had, they could do little about it. Still alive, and at the very edge of the world, they went inside.

It was darker inside the holdfast, though not much: The white-barked poles were open as a rib cage against the sky; light and wind came through them with barely a waver. But for all that, the darkness was a sheltering one. There was a floor of woven willow that held them above the damp of the earth. There were piles of dried ferns to make sleeping places; there was wood stacked high; there was tinder already laid in the fire bowl. The holdfast wrapped its soft power around them.

“The ember is gone,” said Kestrel. There was something broken in her voice. She was bent over the nest of grass and dried tinder, and Otter could not see her face. The ranger was holding a contraption of stick and sinew, a fire drill that spun a bit of flint against dry wood. Otter recognized it but only vaguely: The fires of Westmost never went out. Still, she saw at once that it could not be used one-handed.

“Here,” she said, and took the drill. She set the tip in the tinder and fumbled with the cord and bow that made the fire bit spin.

Kestrel turned aside and took off her coat. Beneath it, her shirt was still damp: The leather was dark under the pale quills. She opened her pack and pulled out a new shirt. As the shirt caught starlight, Otter saw that it was yellow. New yellow leather, dyed with prickly poppies, the shirt Otter herself had stitched and Cricket and Kestrel had laughed and laughed over. The pair of them, each surprising the other with yellow. Cricket’s
okishae
-pledge shirt. He had taken it with him when he went out of Westmost, and Kestrel had taken it from his travel bag, after he died. Otter kept the drill spinning — she had to — and Kestrel turned aside and folded the leather shirt around her face.

A moaning wind began: constant, and longing as a voice.

Kestrel was shivering. Otter realized she could probably not take off her damp shirt, not with her arm tied up in binder’s knots. “I will help you with that,” she said. “A moment. I think the fire —”

It was smoldering now, a single eye of orange looking out of the knot of grass and smoke.

“Did we do right?” asked Kestrel. “We did not bind him. What if …”

What if.
Otter knew that
what if
. She had not been able to stop thinking about that
what if
. The dead were bound to keep them away from the world. To keep their bodies from moving while their names were leaving.

What if Cricket’s body moved, though his name was gone?

What kind of creature would he become?

The fire needed her. Otter leaned in and blew softly on the orange spark, feeding it splinters of bark, one by one.

“What if —” said Kestrel. And then suddenly, her voice cracked. “No, he’s not coming back. He died and he’s gone.” Otter, tending the fire, could not even touch Kestrel as her shoulders shook and her grief sounds fell into the leather.

Otter fed the infant fire twigs, then small branches. And she finally found something to say: “He was Cricket.”

Kestrel looked up. There was silence for a long moment. Otter could see her eyes shining in the darkness — turning to the stars. Otter looked up too, picking out the band of light the Shadowed People called Weaver’s Tears, and in them, the seven faint stars called the Cricket.

“There it is,” she said.

“Little stars,” Kestrel said, “for a storyteller. They are not much honored.”

“I would name the moon after him,” said Otter.

“The moon and the
sun
,” said Kestrel.

“The moon and the sun,” said Otter.

And then Kestrel made dinner.

The little holdfast boasted a cooking pot, small sacks of sage and serviceberry for flavor, dried milkweed blossom for thickening stews, forage foods — biscuit-root, wild onion, dried mushrooms — and even dried meat in a stone-lined cache hole.

Otter and Kestrel had only been three days walking, struggling to cook with a walker’s pot — a tough pouch made from the heart-sac of a buffalo. Still, they had been long days, numb days. The two of them had, in their different ways, lost everything. The stew Kestrel made, with the last of their cornmeal, seemed like a feast, and after the feast, a kindly tiredness fell on them. They sat by the fire, talking little. Otter was sleepy, but the name of the place hung unseen all around them. Eyrie: Mad Spider’s place. Eyrie: where Mad Spider had bound her mother too tightly.

They had seen nothing of the city. Nothing human. But even so, Mad Spider’s story hung close. Her story, and the
what if
of not binding Cricket.

And somewhere in the darkness, the White Hand.

The one who had been Tamarack, beloved grandmother, sneaker of sweets.

Kestrel and Otter lay close together in the dry ferns. Warm and fed, exhausted and terrified, they slept.

That night, Otter dreamed of a cord tied around a birch tree — a ward fragment, but not one yearly renewed: It was ancient. The tree had grown around it. The woody flesh bulged. The crackling white bark closed over it like dead lips. Then suddenly, she saw that some of the birch branches were bones.

Otter rolled over, the fronds around her crackling. And she dreamed that bound tree was not a birch, but a willow. And then she saw that it was not a tree, but her mother’s wrist — the swollen skin lipping over the cord. The hand — the hand she had tied shut — was uncoiling like a fern. Even in the dream she reeled back, and thought:
Her hand is only falling slack.
Then she saw the gray fingers fist and flex.