Sorrow’s Knot (2 page)

She
was still breathing. She looked up and saw the blue cords of her casting on her mother’s hands. They were silhouetted against the pale spring sky — the whole sky looked fractured by them. Willow spread her fingers, pulling the scaffold pattern long. The thing inside them went long too. Willow made one more twist, turning the scaffold into a pattern called sky. The narrow black thing burst open, like birds from a tree, and was gone.

Otter blinked, and blinked again, and looked around her.

Help had come: the strong and quiet and practical women of Westmost. They stood tall among the cornstalks, that upright and almost that still. There were rangers in both inward- and outward-facing rings, their staffs held ready. There was Newt, the bonesetter, kneeling now by Cricket. There was Otter’s mother, Willow, who was casting a figure with Otter’s yarns. And there at her mother’s side was Thistle, looking weathered and strong as a digger pine.

“Get up,” said Thistle. “Let us see the earth.”

Otter had almost forgotten the danger they were in, sitting in shadows. All her life she’d known — everyone in that place knew — that any patch of shadow might be home to the dead. And yet, exhausted and terrified, she’d forgotten.

She flinched at Thistle’s words and tried to get up. Her knees buckled.

Willow had the cradle cast across her hands now. She thrust it up in Thistle’s face: three clean diamonds. The strings did not shiver or twist, as they would have in the presence of the dead. “There’s nothing here,” Willow said. She pulled the yarn free of her fingers and coiled the loop in her palm. Then she reached down and took Otter’s hand. Otter felt the warmth and scratch of the yarns between them. Willow pulled; Otter came wobbling to her feet.

“Daughter,” said Willow, “those were strong knots.”

Otter was still breathing in weird gulps; they made her feel as if she were still laughing or beginning to cry. “Cricket?” she asked.

“He’s alive,” sniffed Newt. She seemed almost offended by the fact. Healer she might be, but Newt the bonesetter had not a soft spot in her whole body.

On the other hand, silent Kestrel was all soft, suddenly. Tears were running down her face.

“Alive,” said Otter, half in wonder.

“And you, daughter?” said Willow. “It is no small thing, the scaffold.”

“I’m alive,” said Otter. She spread her hands then, looking over her own skin for the mark of the dead. But there was nothing. “I’m alive,” she said.

The rangers scooped Cricket out of Kestrel’s arms and carried him toward the bonesetter’s lodge.

Otter turned in her mother’s arms and pulled Kestrel to her feet.

Thistle looked them up and down. “Come,” she said shortly. She had the manner of someone accustomed to being obeyed. Kestrel wrapped her fingers in Otter’s. They were both shaking. Surely they had no more need for courage. For surely they had no courage left.

“Come,” said Thistle, more sharply still. Willow laid a palm against each of their backs. “Ch’hhh,” she soothed them, soft as a breeze. “Best to.” So they went. They trailed behind the women carrying Cricket’s body like the drummers at the end of a funeral.

Inside the lodge, the rangers set Cricket wobbling on his feet. Newt pulled Cricket’s shirt off over his head. The boy tottered and tipped to his knees, groaning. There were marks on him: white. One just below his breastbone, one over his spine, as if something had burst from within him, back and front. He pushed both his hands over the mark on his chest — a scrabbling, desperate gesture, as if the white mark were a gaping wound. He folded forward over his knees. Otter held on to Kestrel and stared at Cricket’s bent back. The hunch. The spine like a cord with knots tied in it. The way the waist dipped inward that was different than the way a girl’s waist dipped. The panicked heave of the ribs.

“What shape had the gast?” Newt the bonesetter asked Kestrel. “Did it have hands?”

Otter’s heart skipped. The mark on Cricket’s back was formless, a blotch, but it was the right size to be a handprint. “No,” Kestrel said. “No hands.” It was not clear if she was saying what she remembered, or begging for what she hoped was true.

“Hmpf,” said Newt, and looked up at Otter. “Well? Did the dead thing have a shape?”

Otter said: “No shape. It had no shape.”

Thistle turned toward her. “Are you sure?”

Otter was not sure. She looked at Thistle, whose eyes were flint gray and hard. She looked at her mother, whose face was set and sad. “It was strong,” said Otter. “But we caught it — we held it. Surely it cannot have been …”

Kestrel tore herself from Otter’s side, then, and knelt with Cricket, wrapping her arms around him. “He is not turning,” said Kestrel, and this time it sounded like pure will. Newt seemed far too willing to see a handprint in that blotch — far too ready to cut Cricket’s throat with her healing knife. “It is not inside him. He will be healed.”

Otter looked around. The little space was full of women, looking carefully down at one gasping, trembling half-grown boy.

Otter knelt beside Kestrel. She put her hand over the white mark on Cricket’s back. “Cricket,” she said, and her voice broke, “it’s gone now. It’s not in you. It’s gone.”

For days they waited to see if it would be true.

They were not sure, not quite sure, what had touched Cricket.

The dead were of three kinds. The commonest were the slip. They had no more form than a clump of roots and earth. They had no more will than hunger. Their danger was that they gathered together: Where there was one, there were usually many.

The gast were different: They had form. A limb, sometimes. A way of turning that, though blunt and blind, suggested eyes. They had cunning too. Eyeless, but they could watch. Brainless, but they could wait. They were stronger, rarer. The thing in the corn, with its open mouth — gast, probably.

But they were not quite sure. Because they had not seen its hands.

Who knew what the slip had been in life, or even the gast, with their blunt cunning. But the Ones with White Hands had once been human. And alone among all creatures, humans could be cruel.

Even slip could kill, of course. The touch of one made a numbness and a weakness, and many a ranger had a little limp, a lost finger, a gray place hidden beneath their green leggings. The touch of many slip was a mud to drown in. The touch of a gast could blast open all the knots in a limb. They could weaken a lung, chill a heart. It was rare to take such a touch and live.

But better to be touched by the gast than the Ones with White Hands. The slip and the gast — their touch went to the body. The touch of a White Hand went to the mind.

There are wasps in this world whose sting paralyzes but leaves alive. Inside the bodies of their caterpillar prey they lay their eggs, and later, while the inchworm lies — paralyzed, alive — the young wasps eat their way out. And so the White Hands were also called Wasp Kind.

Their touch did not kill. It weakened, it dazzled, but it did not kill. It was said indeed that Mad Spider herself had been touched and touched and touched again as she fought the White Hands away from her last ward. Touched and touched and touched and still she drove them back, and with a knot made from her own belt she caught and unmade them. Then she went back to her pinch — not Westmost but a different and greater place: Eyrie, the city of dreams. She went back to her home, back to her lodge, undid its lashings, with her power pulled the poles down, and buried herself alive.

The touch of the White Hands does not kill. It transforms. Those touched by a White Hand become Hands themselves.

In the beginning it looks like madness. Probably one of the Sunlit People — a buffalo hunter from the prairies, say, or a Water Walker with his travois and feathered spear, would take it as madness. But the Shadowed People, the free women of the forest, know that it is not madness. It is the White Hand, eating its way out from the inside.

Newt the bonesetter kept Cricket confined and waited for him to go mad.

“She’s looking for a chance to kill me,” said Cricket, when Otter and Kestrel came to visit him inside the bonesetter’s lodge. “One of these mornings I’ll choke on my porridge and she’ll see the foam on my lips and pull out a knife.”

“Try a rising block,” said Kestrel with an arrow-straight face. “I am sure you can best her.”

“Oh!” Cricket gasped. “Don’t make me laugh!” He twisted sideways where he lay on a sleeping platform, propped up on a pile of buffalo robes. He pushed a hand over the white mark on his breastbone, as if pushing the air back into himself.

“All right,” said Otter. “Possibly you can’t best her. But we would avenge your death.”

“We would,” said Kestrel. “It would be epic. A tale for our granddaughters. There would be stars for you, Cricket.”

“On the dark side of that,” said Otter, “you
would
still be dead.”

“That does seem dark.” Cricket, grinning, sprawled backward onto the robes. The gast in the cornfield had unwoven things inside him, and Newt had wrapped him in red-dyed cords, carefully knotted. He still had his hand pressed among them, and for a moment he panted helplessly.

“How are you, Cricket?” said Kestrel softly, when the boy had his breath back.

Cricket’s smile faded and he shook his head.

Otter touched the cords around him and felt their power stir softly, as if she’d touched something sleeping.

Where Otter saw power, Kestrel saw pain. She turned to the heavy clay pot that was nestled in the embers of the fire pit. “Is this willow bark?” When Cricket nodded, she dipped a gourdful and handed it to him. “You’re hurting,” she said.

Cricket took the gourd, slipping his fingers among hers, smiling. “Ch’hhh, I’ll be all right,” he said. “So long as I don’t talk in my sleep, like Red Fox in the story, and wake up with my throat opened.”

Otter stuck her finger in the brew pot, and then into her mouth. The bitterness made her suck in her cheeks. “Is there no honey for this?”

“Oh, the home of Newt needs no honey,” said Cricket. “She’s that sweet.”

“Well” — Kestrel smiled, taking the gourd back from him — “don’t go mad.”

“Keep visiting me,” said Cricket.

Kestrel hooked the curve of the gourd stem over its stick by the fire, and when she turned around her expression was fierce. “Cricket: It had no hands.” She glanced at Otter.

“We held it,” said Otter. “Two children held it. It was no stronger than that. It had no hands.”

Cricket’s face softened, and he reached and took one of each of their hands. “If such a large seed were planted in me,” he said, “I would know it.”

Would he?

“Always in the stories,” said Cricket, “they know it.”

And indeed, as spring spilled into summer, Cricket did not go mad.

He continued not to go mad until even Newt seemed to give up hope that he would. She tightened her bindings around him — which made him wheeze — but she also began to let him out into the air.

The first day, he went leaning between Kestrel and Otter. Because winters in Westmost could be bitter, earthlodges were built with small tunnels for entrances, with a curtain at one end, and a curtain at the other. They were not built for three to go abreast. Otter’s shoulder hit one of the supporting poles in the half-darkness. A moment later, there was an
oophf
from Kestrel, and she stopped too.

“We’re stuck,” said Cricket. “Like a baby too big to be born. We’re doomed.”

“The rangers got you in here somehow,” said Kestrel reasonably.

But none of them wanted to think about that moment. Just the mention of it made Cricket shiver. “I’ve gotten fat since then,” he said, though the lightness in his voice cracked a little. “Newt slips me sweets.”

They shifted and went sideways, and they got out. That first day they only leaned on the southward flank of the earthlodge, and Cricket breathed in the sun, closed his eyes, and smiled.

Soon enough he was walking under his own power. Nearly every day that summer, Otter or Kestrel or both would help him go walking, or sit with him on the grassy roof of the earthlodge while he tried out one of his new stories — he’d been much visited by the ancient woman Flea, the pinch’s storyteller, for whom Cricket had long been a favorite.

The beginning of the Moon of Ease saw him drowsing in a patch of crown vetch — his black braids tangled in the dense lavender flowers, while Otter sat guarding him and Kestrel picked the feathery leaves of mayweed and the first fist-and-feather flowers of bee balm, to tuck into his straw pillow. The mere scent on her hands in his hair was enough to wake him. He caught her by the wrist, turned his head, and breathed deep.

The Moon of Ease closed and the Sunflower Moon opened. Strength came back to Cricket’s body; he and Kestrel would walk the whole rim of the pinch, inside the ward. At first they went hand in hand because he was breathless from the knots around his ribs. But later they went hand in hand without that cause.

Otter watched them and wondered. It would probably be the last summer of the sunflower years, as the Shadowed People called the space between childhood and adulthood, after girls shot into their height, but before they were given their women’s belts. When the sunflower time passed, the girls would join a cord — becoming a ranger or a binder or a dyer or some other thing. The secret learnings and solemn duties of each work would claim them — separate them from one another. And Cricket … Well. That was harder still.

By the time the Corn-Cut Moon began to wax, marking the beginning of harvest, Cricket moved almost as well as if he’d never been injured — but still Newt kept him confined.

Every day Otter and Kestrel worked hard in the garden for the morning — in the harvest, everyone worked hard. They took rest, and then one or both of them would rescue Cricket.

One day, all three of them went. It was a fine day, warm. They wandered along the little river, kicking round stones into the bright, shallow water, climbing boulders for no better reason than that they were young and they could. They drew out the wander, Otter and Kestrel batting a ball back and forth, Cricket practicing sleight of hand with a chipped arrowhead he’d found.

They went down the river as far as they could — which was not far. Between the pinch and the shadows of the forest was the ward.

The ward was like a fence whose fence posts were full-grown trees: a ring of slender birches that circled the pinch. From tree to tree went blue cords of braided rawhide, knotted and knitted together, tied here and there with that most precious of things: yarn. The cords dove into the earth to knot unseen roots. They reached three times a woman’s height. The ward thrummed in the wind and cast strange shadows in the sun.

The ward was the crown of a binder’s work. It was a glory. It was the only thing that kept the whole pinch from filling with hungry shadows. But just then, it was also a fence that was keeping them in.

Kestrel, Cricket, and Otter did not really consider themselves trapped: That they had never left their village, that the dead could be anywhere — it was simply the way things were. Still they pushed a little: They followed the river to the gap it made in the ward. No dead would come through there — the dead could not cross running water. There was not even, that day, a ranger at guard.

“We could go right out the gate,” said Cricket, looking at the open space in wonder.

“Yes,” said Kestrel. “If we were seeking horrible death, we could find it, right over there!”

“Handy,” said Cricket, and sighed. There was, just there at the very edge of their world, a big slab of granite, smooth as a shell, that slanted lazily down to the water. Cricket sprawled on his back on the sun-warmed stone, and Otter and Kestrel sat on either side of him. Strings of shadow danced over them, and they talked the sun down the sky.

It was the last of their sunflower summers: They stood on the edge. As soon as that fall’s great fire — or the next year, or the next — they would be taken into the cords. They would be given a belt — a woman’s belt, an adult’s. They would learn secrets. And then the silences between them, the warm and easy silences, would fill and change. Otter’s heart wrung, just for a moment, thinking of that, even while chickadees still flitted overhead.

Cricket, meanwhile, was holding his arrowhead up against the bright sky. He kept pinching it between two fingers and closing the fingers to tuck the little object into his palm. The third time the arrowhead dropped and went skittering down the slope of granite, Otter sighed at him. “Cricket, you know that I love you, so trust me in this: That’s hopeless.”

“It’s part of my work,” said Cricket, which was true: Many storytellers used sleights of hand and other small magics to knot a gasp or a laugh into a well-known tale.

Kestrel picked up the arrowhead and handed it back to the sprawling boy. “That doesn’t mean you’re not bad at it.”

“Do you think so?” Cricket grinned up at her. He turned his hand over and opened it. There was an arrowhead there already. He closed his hand again, flipped it, righted it, opened it, and there were two arrowheads. He closed his hand a third time, and when he opened it there were three. “Keep near me, Kestrel,” he said, still looking into her eyes. “I’ll show you wonders.”

And Kestrel — unexpectedly — blushed from her hem to her hair.

Cricket dropped his eyes from hers, as if out of kindness. One by one he made the arrowheads vanish. “I will be a storyteller,” he said. By the measure of their people, he should not have said it. The status of a cord should be given, not claimed. But Cricket walked always at the edge of the forbidden. Being a boy, but not a weak one, he could hardly help it. “I will be a storyteller,” he said again. He looked up at Otter and took one step further: “And you?”

Otter had the blood of a binder; she had never wanted anything else. The work of binding the dead was terrifying and dangerous and difficult — but it was her work, and her heart claimed it fiercely.

And yet …

That day in the corn had changed things. Otter had power now — she had power the way a puppy has feet. It came too early. It was too big for her. It made her conspicuous, and clumsy. It marked her out. After she saved Cricket, the people of Westmost watched her carefully. A child who could cast a scaffold? A sunflower girl who could lift and hold the dead? It was extraordinary. Behind her back they whispered: “Here is a girl who will save us.” And: “Here is a binder born.”

But Willow watched Otter practice her loops and casts with a new and cold gleam in her eye.

For years, Otter had helped her mother and Tamarack with the simplest parts of their work. She’d been very small when Tamarack had first pulled her into her lap and showed her how to use a drop spindle to whirl the buffalo hair into yarn. She remembered laughing as she learned it — the little spinning top was harder than it looked. Once, it flew off and hit Willow on her dignified nose. Tamarack had laughed and Otter had laughed, and Willow had made a show of outrage, like a bluejay, before dissolving into laughter too. As Otter’s hands had grown bigger and stronger, she’d spent long winter days braiding rawhide into cord. The binder’s lodge was always warmed by a good fire, well-lit with pine-resin glims, cozy with the coiled cords and knives of the binder’s trade. The three of them often sang, and when they were silent, the silence was well-lit and rich as amber. It had been Otter’s whole life. She’d been warm and safe inside it.