Sorrow’s Knot (22 page)

But something in her heart twisted. Something shivered. “Something and nothing,” she said. “Nothing dead.”

And at that moment, the sun came out.

It was low, not long past its rising, and it threw long spears of light along the ground. In that light, the hillocks each wore a gold mask and a cape of shadow. It made them look bigger — and it showed the pattern of them. They were no random humps, no jumbled eggs, no muskrat buildings. They were arranged: They stood in two rings, one inside the other.

“Lodges,” said Otter.

And at the same time, Kestrel breathed: “Eyrie.”

The two girls looked at each other, and looked around themselves, eyes wide. Earthlodges. Eyrie.

Where all stories began.

Orca had his drum out, his fingers wrapped around the laces that twisted and tied across the back of the frame.
“Tveh,”
he breathed. “I think this is not good news?”

“We came here to find this,” said Otter. “We came here to see it. The lost city.”

Orca raised his free hand to the sky, as if imploring. “No stories, they said. And here: a lost city.” The wind curled around them and the sun vanished again. “What happened here?”

Otter answered him: “A White Hand killed this city. So goes the story.”

“One?” said Orca, shivering.

“One,” said Kestrel.

It had been Mad Spider herself who destroyed Eyrie. She’d been touched by a White Hand, touched as Willow had been. In madness and despair, with the last piece of her that was human, she’d tried to end herself. She had unbound the poles and unbound the wattle. She had pulled down her own earthlodge on her head.

Otter knew why. She had meant to die, as Willow had, while she was still herself. But it hadn’t worked. The story did not say why, but standing in that place, Otter suddenly understood: The falling earth had not killed Mad Spider. She must have been trapped, pinned, but still alive. Alive and buried while the Hand ate its way out of her.

Three days later, said the story, the White Hand had clawed its way out of the ruin.
Which one?
thought Otter.
Which mound was it?
This is what they’d come to see: the spring from which the story welled up. But now that they were there — it was bottomless, dark. A dragging, whirling, drowning darkness. Deep in her mind, Otter heard something howling. She found herself backing away.

“Let’s …” said Kestrel, lifting her staff, keeping pace with Otter as they inched backward. Otter could hear the struggle in her friend’s voice. They’d come here to see this, and they should — should … “Let’s go,” said Kestrel.

Orca backed up too. “Yes. Let’s go.”

A swinging wind slapped them and the rain started again. Rain. Let the streams fill up and run fast. Let there be stream after stream to jump over. They turned their backs on the quiet mounds, and they ran.

The three of them rushed down the meadow, loping like wolves, like humans who must hurry but do not know how far. The rain fell on them, and stopped. Fell on them, and stopped. By the time they’d reached the rocks and birches at the meadow’s foot, the sun was breaking free.

The rocks were big, bigger than earthlodges, some nearly as big as trees. There were gaps between them. Some of the gaps were wide as buffalo runs, grassy and easy. Some of them were narrower, twisting with stone on either side, scree and saxifrage underfoot. Some of them held pockets of birch wood. Some of them ended in walls of stone.

It was a maze.

Otter, Kestrel, and Orca went more slowly now, trying to pick their way. They tried to keep heading downhill. The island, seen from the shore, had looked like one hump. If that was so, then heading downhill would lead them to the shore. If it was not so …

They had no way to know.

Something came behind them that was howling and hollow and wrong. It was not wind.

They went down a slot between two stones and found their way blocked. They had to backtrack. Sun hit their eyes as they turned west, back toward Eyrie. They turned back to the east at the next gap they found.

It was one of the wide gaps, a little river of grass between the gray walls of the stones. They hurried down it, the howling at their backs. The rain had been gone for some time now.

“If it dead-ends again, we may have to climb,” said Orca.

Otter glanced at Kestrel. The last time they had climbed, up the mountain and into the caldera, the ranger had fallen hard enough to make something inside her arm snap. It was less than a moon since then.

“My wrist is weak,” said Kestrel to Orca, reluctantly. “I doubt I can.”

He looked at her in turn, and they met each other’s eyes sidelong, both hurrying, side by side. “Then we won’t,” Orca said.

The river of grass went tumbling over some boulders in front of them. They scrambled down, went around a sharp corner, and there —

Otter’s hair rose and her skin tightened.

“What is that?” said Orca.

“Don’t touch it!” Kestrel hissed.

A pole’s length in front of them stood a ward.

Otter had dreamed it, and there it stood. An ancient ward.

It forced itself into her eyes as if she were still dreaming. There was a cord tied around a birch tree — the woody fleshy bulging around the cord. The tree was dead. Long dead, by the look of it. But ancient beyond the life of trees, the ward still stood.

There was another cord, and another. The trees that held them had grown around them and then died and then kept standing, in that sheltered place.

“How can this be here?” said Kestrel. “The gardens are gone, the wind poles, the clay palm — the lodges themselves are nearly gone. How can this be here?”

But Otter understood it. She found herself saying, almost with Cricket’s voice: “Mad Spider bound her mother too tightly.”

Too tightly. The power of that ward. She could feel it, as surely as Fawn once had. As surely as if it were wrapped around her throat. The first ward. Mad Spider’s ward.

In other places, it must have blown down, washed away. Wind could touch it. Rain could touch it. But time alone? Death? No, this ward was too tight for that. It was
standing
.

“This is why there are no little dead,” said Orca. “Like a smudge, a mosquito smudge. This thing keeps them back.”

Kestrel nodded, reflecting. “I have seen neither slip nor gast on this island — few enough on the shore.”

Orca was flexing and unflexing his fingers, as if trying to limber them against cold. “This is … wrong. This is dangerous.”

Otter felt the ward reaching, wrapping itself around her. Pulling her in. And then she saw it. She took one step forward, and then — because it was the only way to stop herself — sat down. She went into the grass as if someone had struck her.

“Otter!” Kestrel lunged to catch her, too late. Otter sat there, panting, with Kestrel crouched beside her. Orca shifted to guard their backs.

“Look.” The word clicked out of Otter; she pointed to the ward. “Look.”

The ward was full of bones.

They were human.

They were nearly hidden by the grass and bramble at the ward’s base, by the shadows that seemed to climb out of the earth and wind up the ward like creeping vines. But they were, once seen, unmistakably human. Femurs. Ribs. The empty eyes of skulls. They were white with age, yellow with age. They should not have been there at all — time should have taken them.

“May the wind take them.” Words poured themselves out of Otter before she could stop herself. “May the rain take them.” She started to shake. “They ran,” she said, understanding — shaking and sick with understanding. “When the White Hand clawed its way out of Mad Spider’s place — they ran. But it was
inside
.
It was inside the ward.
They ran and they were trapped. They ran and the ward caught them.”

The people of Eryie had been caught in their own protection. Right here it had happened. Right here was the true end of Eyrie.

“Then it is alone here,” said Orca. “That mad thing.”

“Mad …” said Otter. Because of course it was. The Hand that they’d faced down was the Hand that had been Mad Spider. It had been trapped by the perfect safety of the island, as the people of Eyrie had been trapped by the perfect safety of the ward.

The Hand that had been Mad Spider — death and time could not touch such a thing. Like the ward, it was still here.

It had been trapped here a long time. It had been alone.

It was mad, and it was hungry.

“We’re trapped,” said Otter.

She could feel the ward — the mad ward, the too-tight ward. It was as if the cords of it went into her, through her palms, through her heart. She could feel them sliding inside her, as if the ward were pulling them like a needle. An impossible thing.

This ward was an impossible thing. An inescapable thing.

“They were trapped,” said Otter. The skulls were looking at her and she was almost crying. “We are trapped.”

For a moment, there was only tight silence. Then Kestrel said: “The ward stands here. But it does not stand everywhere. We can still …” The ranger swallowed. “There must be a way out.”

“Why
must
?” said Orca.

For a moment, Kestrel found no answer. Then she said: “If the ward were whole, it would encircle the ruin. We would have seen the other side of it. We did not, so it is not whole. It stands only in hidden places. In —”

“Dead ends,” said Orca.

Kestrel’s voice oozed anger: “It’s no time for
puns
.”

“I cannot think of a better time for puns,” said Orca, mild as the Moon of Ease. Then Otter felt his hand wrap around her arm, not bruising this time but careful and steady. “Come, Kestrel. Your friend: This magic sickens her. I think we must help her pull away.”

So Kestrel took Otter’s other arm, and the three of them together backed away from Mad Spider’s ward, from the bones that were all that was left of the people of Eyrie.

They scrambled back over the boulder-step, back into the sunlit slot between the stones. It was a narrow way, and the wind made a noise in it. The howling — it seemed to Otter — was now both in front of them and behind. Trapped. She didn’t know if it was true, but it felt true. It felt true as a noose around the neck. She felt sure the White Hand would be standing at the opening of their little canyon. Impossibly across the wash, impossibly across the sunlight. It was impossible that it was real at all, so why should it not be. They came to the opening —

Right there.

But the mouth of the slot was empty.

It spit them out and they went scurrying sideways along the rocks. By unspoken agreement they were going back toward the side of the meadow where the wash ran. Water would know its way through those rocks. Water would cut a short path down to the shore.

Yet they knew the wash was all that separated them from the White Hand.

Otter could feel the Hand waiting. They were getting closer to it with every step.

At the bottom of the open space that had once been Eyrie, the wash divided the meadow from the forest as sharply as a knife wound. On the side where the three humans stood, there was grass and rock. Then the slash of the wash — it had cut itself a gully — and on the far side, a sudden rise of black pines, black ferns, shadows.

Standing in those shadows was the White Hand.

“Good,” said Orca, looking down into the stream bed, “the water still runs. Can we go alongside it? Or must we go in?”

“In,” said Kestrel, pointing with her staff at where the gully cut like a door tunnel into the wall of rock. She looked down into the wash and her nose wrinkled at the cold, tumbling water. “In, but perhaps not for long.”

“Through the rocks, and then …” said Orca.

Otter was not listening. She was looking at the White Hand. Kestrel and Orca had not seen it. But Otter could see nothing else.

The Hand was made of congealed shadow, and it blended into the dark space under the pine trees like a quail into fallen leaves. It was standing quite still. One of its hands was lifted and wrapped around a branch. Most of it could barely be seen, but those human fingers — that easy grip, that stillness — it looked like a mother leaning out of a door frame, watching her children leave.

Otter could see its fingernails.

She could hardly breathe.

Daughter,
came the whisper into her mind.
Here.

Otter reached sideways, fumbling, clumsy with fear as if with cold. She caught Kestrel’s sleeve. The ranger looked at her, falling carefully still, her eyebrows asking a question. But Otter could not even point. She looked back at the White Hand. Kestrel followed her eyes.

“Orca,” whispered Kestrel. She angled her staff a fraction, but her body was still as a rabbit’s when the wolves are passing.

Orca too followed the small tip of the staff, the girls’ locked gaze. “Oh,” he said.

Here,
said the thing in Otter’s mind.
Here.

“I can hear it,” she told them. “Like the wind talking. It’s saying something.”

“That’s impossible,” said Kestrel. She did not sound sure.

“How close can it come to the water?” said Orca.

“I don’t know,” said Kestrel.

They would be waist-deep in water and penned in the narrow channel. If the White Hand could come into the gully, to the water’s edge — they would be in easy reach.

They stood looking at the White Hand, all of them breathing tight.

“While the water runs …” said Kestrel. “The day goes. We cannot wait here.”

There was no time to find another option.

Orca answered with a Red Fox drawl: “Oh, delight.”

Otter was still looking at the White Hand. Her bracelets were crawling round and round her wrists. Those yarn loops had long ago polished a numbness into her skin — but even so, she could feel their small movements, like holding ants. “I cannot both cast and climb,” she said. She could not protect them in the water. The water itself would need to protect them — or not.

Orca’s hand was on the lip of his drum bag. He tore his eyes away from the White Hand and said to Kestrel: “Will you keep front with that stick of yours?”

“
Staff
,” said Kestrel. “Yes. I can guard you.”

“Let’s go,” said Otter.

Kestrel nodded sharply, then slipped into the gully. She leaned backward, picking her way down the steep slope. Stones tumbled under her feet and fell into the water. She put one hand — her good hand — behind her and braced herself, keeping her staff out with her other hand.

Otter stepped forward to follow. And the White Hand stepped forward too. It let go of the branch, and peeled away from the edge of the forest. The light there was dappled: leaves of sunlight, leaves of shadows, rippling.

The White Hand eased and oozed into that light — and stopped. It drew itself smaller, tighter. Otter could see it bubble where the light hit it. She could feel —

“It’s burning,” she whispered.

Orca had his hand on her back. He was steadying her, not pushing — and yet she could feel him want to, feel him shake. “We
go
,” he said fiercely. And they went, sliding down the gully, into the shock and push of cold, bright water.

The water was waist-deep, fast, cold. It swirled around them, tugging at their legs as they hurried through the cut it had made in the rock wall.

“Does it follow?” gasped Kestrel.

Otter looked inside herself for an answer. Her bracelets were wet and still as if they’d shrunk. The hollow feeling that was the Hand nearby — she’d lost it. Was it gone, or could she simply not feel it? “I do not know,” she said.

They went fast and tried to keep breathing. Orca was holding his drum up above the water. Kestrel had her staff lifted in both hands. Above them, the stones gave way to higher ground: first birch and sunlight, then dark pine. It was far above them — a tree’s height up.

“Out?” said Orca.

Kestrel measured the climb with her eyes. “On.”

So they went on — running, stumbling, shaking with wet chill — cutting deeper and deeper into the stones below the forest. The strength of the stream began to give out, the dry wash becoming dry once more. They lost the light: the sky became a ribbon overhead. It came to Otter that they were trapped again, without the water — trapped in a narrow, helpless place. But then, quite suddenly, the gully opened into a pool of stone, with a gap of bright light on the far side. They bolted across the bowl, squeezed through the stony doorway, and found themselves on the shingle of the island’s eastern shore.

There on the beach, the White Hand was waiting for them.

The beach was strewn with boulders, big as earthlodges, some so big they were topped with trees. They cast paths and pools of deep shadows, and in one of them, the Hand stood, a dullness against the obsidian gleam of the stone. Its white hands were reaching for them.

“Mother Cedar,” breathed Orca. “It waits — it
thinks
.”

The Hand came drifting toward them.

“Get behind me,” gasped Otter. The wet bracelets were caught on her wrists. Her hands shook as she tried to peel them free. Light: They needed light. But the beach faced east, and the lowering sun cast the shadow of the forest across it. Two pole-lengths out into the water, the light fell, gleaming blackly off the stirring surface of the lake. The beach itself was three pole-lengths wide. The very best light on it was mere dapple and streak.

It was too dark.

It was too far.

Otter’s fingers felt both numb and blazing as she lifted her star. Behind her she heard Orca trying to raise a beat from his drum. It must have been damp: It made a flat, lost sound.

The Hand came forward, swelling wider. Otter’s cords pulsed.

They backed up against the little cliff.

“I can’t do this again,” said Orca. He did not sound frightened, but merely as if he were giving them a part of a tale that they needed to know. “We must reach the water.”

“Too far,” said Kestrel.

“Have you a better plan?”

“Back,” said Kestrel, and they edged backward, toward the gap in the cliff where the dry stream opened.

Otter could hear them, but she could not answer. Her mind was full of sound. Like the wind across a smokehole, the White Hand raised a howling in her. Sometimes it was wordless and moaning, and sometimes it sounded like a voice. Sometimes it sang.

Daughter,
it sang.
Daughter.

“Mad Spider had no children,” she told it.

It hissed and surged. Otter yelped and yanked her casting taut.

The Hand stopped.

It was close now. Otter could easily have stepped forward into its arms. “Mother,” she said.