Sorrow’s Knot (15 page)

So Otter put on her red shirt.

She went with Kestrel.

And for the third time in her life, she went out to the scaffolds, to bind a binder. Tamarack. Fawn. Willow.

And now me,
Otter thought.
Me in a red shirt.

Cricket’s voice came back to her:
She was too young. She was too frightened. She did not want to let her mother go.

They went beside the river because the ice would not hold them. They hurried because the sun was sinking and because somewhere in the forest was the White Hand that had killed Willow.

Otter went silently, stumbling. Her body was so numb she felt as if she were drifting. As if her feet were frozen. But the embroidered rib cage on her red shirt prickled her own rib cage, as if she were wearing needles. She didn’t cry.

Later she would remember how Kestrel looked hard at Flea, looked long back into the pinch. Cricket never had turned up with the tea. But at the time, Otter went drifting, silent. Her head and her heart were full of knots. She followed the bearers, and the body of her mother, and thought about nothing at all.

They reached the scaffolding grounds later than they should have, long after the shadows swung east. In the ordinary way of things, they would not have set out at all. But things were not ordinary. They were not quite sure that Willow’s body — white-bleached, changed, strange — wasn’t dangerous. It needed to be bound. It needed to be bound right away.

We must keep to our ways, and we must be strong,
Thistle had said.

Thistle had stood beside the ward, in the river gap, and watched them go. She was leaning on her staff. Her face was almost green.
Pain,
Otter thought.
Something hurts.

Then she remembered that her mother was dead.

We must keep to our ways, and we must be strong. Sometimes it is hard.

It was very hard. Very hard. The knots on her mother’s wrists. Her one remaining human hand. Her bare and dusty toes.

She did not want to let her mother go.

It was very hard. The knots were hard. Her hands shook. The cord burned them. The knots fought her, as if the noose did not want to be made, as if her hands did not want to make it. They writhed and snapped as she tried to pull them closed on her mother’s wrists, as if they wanted to take her too.

So. High above Westmost, in a grove of pines overlooking a black lake, on a cold day late in the winter, there stood a binder named Otter. And she had a mother, a binder named Willow. Who was dead. And that was as far as Otter could go.

She bound her mother to the frame and then she just stood there.

There was a blessing to say, but Otter was past all blessing. She stood and she stood. The trees creaked around her. There was — faintly, for it was cold — the smell of death. Fawn, surely.

It was cold. It would take a while for that rope to rot.

I’m sorry,
Fawn,
thought Otter.

I’m sorry.

I’m so sorry.

Finally, Kestrel came and embraced her, whispered to her. “The words, Otter …”

Otter only shook her head.

“We need to go,” Kestrel coaxed. “We will lose the light.”

Cress, one of the rangers Thistle had picked to carry the body, held out her hand at arm’s length and measured the distance of the sun above the horizon. “We’ve already lost it. Six fingers till sunset, or I’m no ranger.” She was a gray-shot woman, Thistle’s second, powerful, blunt as an old knife. The black paint on her face was just a streak across the cheekbones. They’d been that hasty. Even as Otter looked at her, she smeared it away with the back of one hand.

Flea said: “You think, Cress, the shadows will trap us?”

“They have trapped us already. The riverbed will be shadowed now. Full darkness will catch us if we go back. There is a ward here, a strong one. Better to stay.”

That suited Otter. To stay there, to stay lost, to stay with the dead. But Kestrel was shifting foot to foot, looking back toward Westmost.

Flea caught the look: “Is it better to stay, Kestrel?”

“We will stay here,” said Cress.

Flea was still looking at Kestrel. But Kestrel did not contradict, and Flea lowered the drum slowly, and covered her eyes. “As you say, then. Though if it were a story, ‘Five Women and the Dead’” — the old storyteller eased herself down on a fallen log, stretching out her stiff ankle — “that does not have a happy sound.”

And the other ranger, the young one whose name Otter couldn’t remember — the other ranger said: “We do this — rangers do this: Live outside the pinch. We have here a ward; we have here a binder. We have wood and ember. We can live here, one night.”

“Come here, little Otter,” said Flea. Something in her voice made Otter remember that Flea was Cricket’s friend and teacher, master of his cord. She wished it were Cricket: wished it desperately.
That’s strange,
she thought. She went over and Flea put out her arms, pulled her in.
That’s strange. I think I love him too.

“Should I say the words, then, little binder?” said Flea, touching Otter’s face.

Otter could not speak. She nodded.

Flea paused and gathered herself, and when she spoke, her voice was not loud, but her words were right as spring coming, right as anything in the world. “Willow,” she said, “your name is done with the world….”

When Flea said it, it sounded true. As if Willow were not tied like a knot in living bone. As if she would not be coming back.

“Now, child,” said Flea, warm, like a mother, like a grandmother, like a memory, “I think you should cry.”

And Otter crumpled as if an axe had hit her. She wept, and wept, and wept.

Five women and the dead. Otter and Kestrel, Flea the storyteller, the two rangers — one old and one young, and the bones all around them. High above Westmost they stayed, with a fire burning, inside the red ward with the dead creaking overhead.

Night fell. They waited, watched. Only Otter slept — wept herself into sleep and drowsed with her head on Flea’s knee.

Otter expected — she had not really thought about it, but numbly and distantly she expected to die, in the darkness, among the restless dead. She expected the slip to boil up over them like ants. Expected the White Hand that had touched Willow to walk through the ward as if it were a spiderweb.

But none of these things happened. The five women spent the night among the dead, and they did not die.

The dawn woke Otter.

Wood smoke. Cold. Too bright. She had not slept outside in winter before, and for a moment she was dazzled, not sure where she was. What was the square thing above her, caught in the trees, dark against the sky? Too square and too big to belong in a tree. A human thing, a — She saw the red-wrapped bundle. She remembered.

Otter felt Flea put a hand in her hair, motherly. “We lived,” said the old woman. “The storyteller in me is almost disappointed.”

Ah, yes, this would be Cricket’s teacher.

Otter stood up, and refused to look at the square blots against the lightening sky.

The others gathered themselves. The rangers tightened ties and brushed snow from mittens. The light grew stronger and stronger and stronger as they went down from the scaffolds to the river path, and finally, finally, stumbled back into Westmost.

Cricket was not there to greet them.

Cricket did not come to the river gate to see Otter and Kestrel safely in.

He was not in their lodge.

But then, he was the pinch’s second storyteller. He did have work and learning. He did have secrets.

Still, the two girls stopped inside the curtain of their lodge. Looked at its emptiness. Caught at each other’s hands.
“Okishae?”
called Kestrel. Her voice trembled.

Otter’s heart trembled too. A complicated kind of tremble.

The lodge looked different. The platform where Willow had slept was bare. Someone had taken the grass pillow to burn: a small and practical kindness. Cricket? The buffalo robes were rolled up and tucked at the platform’s foot. Willow’s spare shirt, the one that laced across the top of the arms, the one she could not wear, still hung on the wall. Willow’s body had worn the blue one. Otter was wearing the red.

She broke away from Kestrel, suddenly desperate to take off the red shirt. She dropped the belt and the binder’s knife onto the bare wood of the platform — her mother’s platform, her mother’s things. She was yanking the shirt over her head, caught inside its darkness, when Kestrel said: “Otter.”

The frozen voice stopped Otter. She pulled the shirt back down.

“His things,” said Kestrel. “Some of his things —”

Otter did not instantly see what Kestrel saw. They had made of their home a cheerful jumble. And Cricket was not tidy as Kestrel was — a matter over which they sometimes fought. There were no bare hooks that made Otter think:
This is gone, and this.

“His coat,” said Kestrel. “His second shirt. His carry bag and mittens.” She ran her hands over the walls, touching the things still there, seeking the missing ones. “Some food.”

“Food?” said Otter.

The pinch was small enough for an owl to cross in one glide. It was impossible for someone to go far enough from home to need to take food.

Kestrel bolted for the door. Otter grabbed up her coat and ran after.

Cress, the blunt-knife ranger who had carried Willow’s body, met them at their door.

“Thistle’s in the palm,” she said. “She would speak to you.”

Otter’s heart skipped a beat.

They hurried to the edge of the open space at the heart of the pinch. Otter almost stopped: There was a single figure in that empty snow. Lonely as the dead. Her hand bound in red cords. Her face gray. Waiting for them.

“Where is he?” said Kestrel. “What did you do?”

Thistle was her cord master and the most powerful woman in Westmost. But Kestrel did not cover her eyes. “Daughter of my cord,” began Thistle.

And Kestrel shouted: “Where is he?!”

Thistle stood up straight as a lodgepole pine. “He is gone into the West, under the eyes of all the dead.”

Kestrel screamed. Wordlessly screamed, like a hawk, and struck out. Cress stopped her. The ranger second-in-command caught the wild swing easily, and in a blink had Kestrel’s arm pinned and twisted behind her back. “Do
not
,” she said into the girl’s ear. She pushed Kestrel free.

Kestrel staggered. Fell to her knees in the blank snow.

“Why?”
said Otter. “Why did you do this? Have we not lost
enough
?”

“It is because we have lost that we must hold fast to what we have,” said Thistle, and not unkindly. “We must keep to our ways. You know what he did.”

Cricket had betrayed the secrets of his cord. First for Otter, on the day Tamarack was bound. And then for Willow. Otter remembered how Thistle’s gaze had fastened on the storyteller. How Cricket had lifted his chin to meet her eyes.

“He was kind,” said Otter. “To your
daughter
— he was kind!”

But it was more than that. He’d done something
important
. That story …

“Yesterday you did this? Or today?” Kestrel’s broken voice came up from the snow. “Just today?”

Thistle nodded, spoke softly. “He walked out well. He was brave.”

“Always,” said Otter, her voice cracking.

Kestrel stood up. “Then he is alive. I am going after him.”

She did not look back even once as she stalked away.

In the silence of the pinch, a sound rose: a single wail. Flea, getting the news.

Thistle flinched from the noise. She followed Kestrel with her eyes as the young ranger went back to her lodge. “Lady Binder,” she said softly, and for a moment Otter did not realize that Thistle was talking to
her
. “Can you stop her?”

“Stop her?” said Otter. “I am going with her.”

Kestrel was stiff and fast as she pulled food from hooks and put bundles in bags. Otter watched her for a moment, trying to catch her eye, to ask one question. But Kestrel did not turn around. She worked, her shoulder blades jerking.

“He would stay to the river, at first,” she said. “But it is midwinter. One cannot walk that water for long. After that” — she stopped in the middle of rolling cords into a pouch — “he will not know where to go, Otter. He did not even take yarns —”

“Ch’hhh,” said Otter. “I will take them, then. I am better with them anyway.”

Kestrel turned around.

“I am coming with you,” said Otter. And as Kestrel gaped at her, she added: “Don’t argue with me.”

Looking in Kestrel’s face, Otter found she did not need to ask her question after all. Kestrel knew: They likely would not find him. At least not alive. And Otter knew: They had to try.

At the river gap, the rangers had gathered: the sisters of Kestrel’s cord, steady women dressed in green and gray. Otter looked at them and wondered:
Will they try to stop Kestrel and me? Will we have to fight? We cannot win such a fight.

And she looked at them and wondered:
Did they gather for Cricket? Or did they send him out alone?

Kestrel’s gaze was fixed on the frozen path of the river. She did not meet her sisters’ eyes.

“Kestrel,” said Thistle.

Kestrel said nothing.

They were almost to the ward. The high sun cast the shadows of the blue cords: blue gashes on the snow.

“Lady Binder,” said Thistle.

Otter swallowed hard on the title, like swallowing fury. She spun on Thistle. “Would you stop us?” she said. “We are not slave-takers. We are the free women of the forest, and we are leaving this
pinch
.” The word came like spit from her lips.

Thistle did not even lift a hand. But she said: “Lady Binder, there are children here. A moon-count of children.”

The children she’d tried to save, the night Fawn had died. The smell came back to her: the fox-ish stink of trapped fear.

“There are five moons of people, all counted,” said Thistle softly, “but you are the only binder. You leave us defenseless.”

None of the others said anything. No one ordered. No one begged.
They should,
Otter thought fiercely.
They put my mother between them and death and they never even asked. They should beg.

“We are going to fetch my
okishae
,” said Kestrel. “He will not have gone far. We will not be long.”

Thistle said: “And if you are?”

Rangers, even rangers, were lost in the forest. Kestrel’s own mother had gone out and never come back.

Kestrel said: “In Little Rushes, the binder has two sisters and three daughters: a cord of six. Send to them.” She looked hard at Thistle. “Will you stop us?”

“If I could, daughter of my cord.” Thistle closed her hand around her own wrist — a gesture children made, seeking the comfort of their bracelets. “Granddaughter,” she said. Then she stepped aside, and opened her arm toward the gap in the ward. “Go safely, and come back soon.”