Sorrow’s Knot (20 page)

It reared up, towered over her, so close she braced herself to feel its breath — but it had no breath. It had nothing at all.

The thing was stopped against her cradle-star like a bear stopped on the end of a spear. But it was big. It kept flowing around the edges of her protection, trying to reach over it, around it. She saw the white hand slash toward her eyes.

Kestrel was pressed close behind her. The ranger blocked the blow with her staff and the thing bubbled away on that side, bulging upward. Kestrel reached past Otter and swatted at its edges: up, left, right, right, up — driving it back. Otter could see the cords breaking free from Kestrel’s staff as if fire were eating through them. The dead thing flowed backward a single step.

“To the light!” said the ranger.

They edged sideways. Otter did not dare look away from the dead thing. It bulked large against the sky, pouching and squeezing. One of the white hands was still reaching toward her.

Otter was shaking, begging herself not to stumble. The loose stones rolled underfoot. The stones clicked. The dead thing was silent.

Otter and Kestrel went crabwise, step by step. The thing, though it had no face, swung its blunt side as if watching them. Otter felt the sunlight touch her temple. Then it hit her eyes. Then they were full in sunlight, beside the cowering, shivering drummer.

The stranger tucked his face away from them, lifting his hand as if against a blow, curving his body protectively around the drum in his other hand. “Once —” he said. His fingers skittered against the drum, and he choked out a few words. His voice was ragged, hoarse, wild with fear. He swallowed and spoke again: “Once, when the world was new …”

Then he looked up. A young face, a stranger’s face. A boy their own age. Black eyes wide. Darkness whirling strangely across jaw and cheekbones.

Not Cricket.

No one they knew.

“Who —” said Kestrel.

Otter kept her cords lifted, her eyes fixed on the dead thing. It had not followed them, or at least not with its terrifying, snake-strike speed. It was leaning toward her, like slimy waterweed streaming in a current.

Three of the stretching strands seemed to thicken together, and the white hand appeared at the end of them. An arm. A finger. It was pointing at them.

No, not at them: at her. At Otter.

Binder,
curled the whisper in her brain.

Her own heartbeat sounded like a drum in her ears. She was not sure the whisper was real.

“Tell it,” said the boy. “I have told it — everything. All my tales. Tell it. Tell it a story.”

“Tell it a story,” the boy rasped. “I can’t, I —” His voice cracked, then broke. He asked: “Do you have water?”

“At my hip,” said Kestrel. She had both her hands on her lifted staff, and she did not spare the stranger so much as a glance. “Take it.”

“
Xashi
,” he murmured, a word they didn’t know. The tone of it was gratitude — desperate, broken gratitude. Otter heard his fumbling to pull Kestrel’s waterskin free, and then she heard him swallow. It was very quiet in that bowl of stone. The White Hand made no sound at all — it was like a hole in sound. It was a hole in the world: a rotten softness hidden inside wood.

“
Cu xashi
,” said the boy. He shook, then coughed. His voice was rough as if he’d been caught in smoke. “Thank. I mean, thanks. Thanks to you. I have been spinning tales — I don’t know. Two days. This is the third, and almost over.”

“That …” began Otter, and did not know what else to say. No one could have stood against a White Hand for days — and least of all someone powerless, someone male. But there was no time to sort it out. The sun was slipping, the shadow lapping at their toes. The White Hand oozed forward, and Otter and Kestrel, moving together like dancers, each took a step back.

“We are losing this light,” said Kestrel.

And again the White Hand advanced.

Otter spread her cords. Careful not to let a moment’s slack enter the pattern, she turned the cradle-star into the tree. A more powerful casting. Harder to hold. The Hand stopped. It was still a pole’s length away, but Otter felt its press against her cords. Her pattern was raising no answering pattern in it — no marks in its stuff. It was not falling back.

“I do not know …” she said, and swallowed. Her fingers were already cramping. “I do not know if I can hold it, without the sun.”

Three heartbeats of silence. Then Kestrel answered: “What, then?”

“You must …” the boy wheezed. “
Tomteka
, stories — tell it a story.”

From the corner of her eye, Otter saw Kestrel’s staff jerk, as if she’d turn and strike the stranger. “Stop talking about stories.”

“Cricket told a story to the White Hand,” said Otter. “And it listened.”

“Cricket
died
.”

But not of this,
thought Otter. The Hand had listened.

But this White Hand … this one was different. The Hand that had once been Tamarack had helped Willow to her feet. That one was loss, was sadness. This one — this one was ravening and madness. Still: “Kestrel, it must work.” Otter pointed with her elbow at the strange boy. “It worked for him …”

“Orca,” he said in that smoke-dried voice — a voice that had been talking down death for three days. “My name: Orca.”

Another word neither of them knew.

“We don’t know what he did,” snapped Kestrel.

“What do you think, then?” said the boy, Orca. “That I gave it sweets and hoped?”

“It’s a
White Hand
,” said Kestrel. “It doesn’t
listen
.”

“I don’t know what it is,” said Orca. “It is every horror I ever heard of; it is something new. But I say: It listens.” His rasp broke then into a shattering, bloody cough. Otter thought of Cricket, coughing, drowning from the inside. Kestrel must have thought of Cricket too — she looked around at the boy.

The White Hand seeped forward, into the gap of her attention.

“Tsha!” Otter shouted it down, pulling her casting taut and putting all her power into it.

The thing stopped again.

The cords between Otter’s hands were as alive as lightning, shooting through her. She locked her arms, set her teeth, felt herself become rigid as the second day of death.

Orca coughed and coughed, folding up on himself, then sinking to his knees. He was still alert, though, still watching the Hand, still keeping his hand on his drum in the shrinking light. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t keep talking.”

“Kestrel,” said Otter, “it has to be you.” The shadow was at their feet again. Otter stepped backward. This time it was a moment before Kestrel stepped backward too. It would be their last step: They were out of light. “Kestrel,” said Otter, almost begging, “tell it ‘The Goose Who Got Lost’ — tell it anything.”

In answer, Kestrel took a deep, shuddering breath. Then two more, as Cricket had, dying. And she said: “One day, Red Fox was out hunting when along flew a raven as big as the moon. And the raven —”

And she stopped, startled, because the White Hand had — no, not backed off, but settled in. Its shape eased toward something human.

“Don’t stop,” gasped Orca, even as, in the silence, the Hand changed again, its forward edge sharpening like an axe. Kestrel started talking again, so quickly she tripped over the words: “And the — the raven swooped down and landed on one of the finger rocks, which are like mountains made of one stone. So big — so big was the raven that the stone looked like an egg.”

The Hand’s knife-edge softened again. It was listening. The rabid, liquid thing. Truly listening.

Kestrel lowered her staff, slowly, experimenting. “‘Well,’ said Red Fox. ‘This is something new.’”

“And Red Fox called up to the raven …”

Otter slid in close beside Kestrel as the ranger lowered her staff. Orca fell in behind them, and all at once Otter remembered the day that Tamarack had died, how she and Kestrel and Cricket had slid into an arrowhead of three, becoming one thing without a word between them.

Otter and Kestrel and Orca stood pressed close together. The White Hand stood still, as if looking at them.

Otter let a little slack into her casting, and shuddered. She’d been holding the cords too tightly: so tightly, giving them so much power out of her own body that she herself had no slack to breathe. She found herself gasping.

Kestrel shot her a glance, but kept talking: “‘What do the humans need to talk for?’ said the raven to Red Fox. ‘They are silly enough.’”

Otter lowered her cords. They had no lifted ranger’s staff now, no lifted casting. Still the White Hand did not move. Behind her she felt Orca shift, and then came the sound of the drum. It rose under Kestrel’s story, wove through it, gave it steadiness and strength. Otter found her breath falling into the rhythm of the drumbeat.

As Kestrel told “How Red Fox Stole the Words,” the sunlight slipped away from the bowl of stones. The ferns beyond, under the trees, faded to black as shadows gathered. Soon they could not be seen at all: only the mass of them, the movement. Thickness and stir. Like Cricket up to his waist in the little dead.

Otter tried to stop shaking, tried to think. What were they going to do? They could not tell stories forever. But they could not run. The forest was nothing but shadows, and in those shadows might be anything. Even if they found nothing more than a tree branch to trip over, it would be too much. The Hand — it had been so fast, so fast.

The light was purple now, thickening. Twilight. In darkness — would they even be able to see the Hand, in darkness? The stuff of it was nothing more than darkness clotted up. If they could not see it … might it not creep closer, if they could not see it? Might it not slip around?

Might its hand not fall on her skin from the side? From behind? From anywhere?

Kestrel told “How Red Fox Stole the Words” as the Hand faded from view. By the time she’d given the trickster fox his last word it was — gone? Otter was sure it was not. Its nearness crawled like ants over her skin. Kestrel’s breath snagged at the end of the story, broke for an instant into — was it grief? — and silence.

Orca’s drum, which had flourished up under the ending, was silent for a beat too. And in that beat of silence …

Otter had almost no warning. She felt the yarns jerk on her fingers; she saw something pale hurtle toward her face. She yelled and brought her hands up, casting, cowering. And the Hand stopped. She could see it now, because it was so close. In easy reach. The darkness in front of her was knotting and working like a mouth.

“Keep talking,” gasped Otter. “Keep talking, keep talking —”

Kestrel said: “Once —” and “Now —” Otter heard her muffle a sob. Kestrel was crying. Swallowing it down, trying for control, but crying. She could get no words out. Behind them Orca’s drum hesitated, looking for the beat. Otter pushed her casting out and spread her hands wide. The web of yarn between them bulged inward, toward Otter’s face: once, twice, three times. The Hand. Right there. Pushing.

And then, suddenly, Orca found his beat. He struck the rim of the drum with a
crack
, and then the center, and suddenly he was playing something fast and four-fold, like the knots of a pounding heart.
Lum dum, dum lum
— fast. “Now,” Otter heard herself say, “in the days before the sky was finished, the Weaver worked at her loom. She was happy with her silver bracelet flashing in the blue cords, and she was lonely as one stone, and she worked singing….”

Orca’s drum shifted under her story. The pressure on Otter’s fingers eased. She told “How the Moon Began,” and as she did, the real moon — Sap-Running, waning half — rose up. Silvered light flooded over the round stones. The light made another moon of Orca’s mottled drum. The light caught on the still, human hands of the thing that stood listening. It was an arrow’s length away, less.

Near the end of her story, a thought smashed into Otter, sudden as a thundercrack. The reason for Kestrel’s sobbing: Cricket. If this worked; if a story could hold back the dead … If this worked, then Cricket could have been safe.

Should have been safe.

Should have been cherished. Honored.

Should have lived.

He should have lived.

Her voice skipped with the grief and waste of it — and in the skip, the White Hand tightened. Otter felt it tighten and shot forward in the story: “And then the Weaver’s bracelet fell, and went tumbling into the sky,” she said. So Otter created the moon while the White Hand listened. And Cricket stayed dead.

Otter would not have believed it was possible, with the Hand standing there, to sleep. But the strange boy, Orca, had been standing for three days, and as the moon swung up the sky, his drumming faltered. She remembered how she’d heard it from the water: coming in bursts and silences.

Kestrel was telling the story just then, and Orca and Otter were behind her, pressed shoulder to shoulder. Otter felt Orca lean against her, heavier and heavier, and his head nodded down then jerked up.

“Sit,” said Otter gently. “Stay behind me.”

“My …” he said. “My drum?”

“I’ll hold it.” She would never have asked a storyteller for his drum, but this storyteller held his in hands that were bone-thin and shaking. “Only to keep it safe,” she told him. “I can tell a story without it. If you fall over, you will break the tale. So sit.”

In the moonlight, she could the see whites rims of his widened, desperate eyes. At last he nodded, and passed over his drum. He sat. And Kestrel told a story. Then Otter told two. Then Kestrel. It was more than either one of them could have done alone, facing down the White Hand.
Though,
Otter thought,
Orca did it.
If he was to be believed. He’d done it, and it had broken him. Asleep — or passed out — he lay curled up on the stones like a dead coyote.