Sorrow’s Knot (17 page)

“We won’t bind him,” said Otter again. It was wildly foolish. But it was the only comfort she could offer.

“He was
Cricket
,” said Kestrel.

Otter nodded, her face moving against Kestrel’s hair. “Yes. He was.” Cricket had never been more Cricket than in the moment he’d died.

Kestrel folded up then, as if she’d been struck across the back of the knees, went down so completely and so suddenly that she slipped through Otter’s arms. Otter lurched and caught her and lowered her into the pine needles. “What can we do?” sobbed Kestrel. “What can we do for him?”

“Let’s make it softer,” said Otter. “Let’s make it warm.”

So they took off their mittens and gathered pine needles handful by handful: dry ones, drifted in the nooks of rocks, the roots of trees. They were piercing to gather — their hands were quickly all pricked — but soft when piled. They piled them, handful by handful, into a bed. Handful by handful, it took a long time.

They lifted Cricket’s body by knees and armpits, and laid him in the piled needles. He sank a little, as they’d hoped he would: The bed was soft. They helped him curl onto his side, tuck his knees up. Kestrel took his hair from its braids and ran her fingers through it, over and over, long past the point where it was smooth.

Otter nested his carry bag by his feet.

Thinking twice, she opened it. His storyteller’s rattle was there: red and black, and collared in black feathers. She put it in his hand.

The smell of the needles was sharp and sweet.

She sat down beside Kestrel and pulled the ranger’s hands into her hands, away from Cricket’s hair. The death blessing caught in Otter’s throat —
may the wind take him, may the rain, may the ravens
. She knew they were coming. She did not want to call them.

“Cricket,” she said, “you told wonderful stories. You were braver than you think. You were kind.”

Kestrel said nothing. Her hands shook in Otter’s hands.

“Cricket,” said Otter, “I think you saved me, that day Tamarack died. Did I thank you for that?”

“You didn’t,” said Kestrel.

“Well,” said Otter, “thank you for that.”

Kestrel wiped the cuff of her mitten across her nose.

“Cricket,” said Otter. Her voice caught. “You snored. No one who wanted to be Red Fox should have snored like that. We never had the heart to tell you, but you were very loud. Also, not as good at hoop-and-lance as you thought you were.”

“That was sweet, though,” said Kestrel. “I liked to watch you try.”

“Not me: I was always afraid the lance would go through someone’s foot.”

“Or maybe a wall.” Kestrel laughed, hiccupped, choked on tears. “Belt of the Spider,” she hissed. “I will never forgive this. I will never forget it.”

“I know,” said Otter.

“It is not fair.”

“I know,” said Otter.

“Okishae,”
said Kestrel, and started to weep. “Half my heart, my other half.”

The sun — in that season rolling close to the southern rim of the world — was as high as it would get. The light under the pine trees was pollen thick, full of slant and dapple. The wind had fallen away. They could hear the little creaks of the individual trees, the wings of the chickadees that darted around them, watching them with cocks of their bright-dark heads. They could hear a woodpecker nearby, its resonating
thk-thk-thk
.

Cricket, though, was silent.

Otter got up. By herself she pulled the fallen pine branches she’d gathered. The bare ones she used to build up the fire, to keep Cricket company in his first time alone. The ones still soft with green needles she piled over him. They would keep him warm. Keep him safe, for a little while, from those things she was supposed to call: from the ravens, from the wind.

Midday, the day after the night when Cricket had died, Otter and Kestrel paused side by side by the river. Behind them, the raspberry canes, which had been pulled loose by a terrified boy, were waving aimlessly in the winter breeze. Otter looked back toward Westmost. Their tracks were gone now: The snow curled and eddied as if no one had ever come this way at all.

“I am going to —” said Otter. “I am going to kill Thistle. I am going to push her into the ward. I am going to put an arrow through her open mouth.”

Kestrel paused. Swiped tears away with the back of her mittens, and said: “Hmmmm. It seems a waste to do both.”

It was exactly what Cricket would have said, and just Cricket’s manner too: the soft thoughtfulness that was itself the joke. The recognition brought a scorching ache to Otter’s throat.

She turned and saw Kestrel with her face uptilted into the light — looking west. “I am not going back,” said the ranger.

“What?” said Otter.

Kestrel was looking upstream. Upstream, where the rivers ran smaller, and then ran out. There was no path to safety, and no safety to reach. Upstream, not far, was the backbone of the continent, which was impossible for the living to cross.

But Kestrel kept looking: “I am not going back.”

“Kestrel … there’s nothing —”

“Mad Spider’s place,” said Kestrel. “Eyrie. The place where Cricket was going … It is two days west.”

Otter’s heart spun. She felt caught in a hoop of stories and histories and memories — and the hoop was turning. Mad Spider’s place. Was it really a place that could be walked to? It seemed to her that such a place should be past the edge of the world.

She shook her head, bewildered. “How do you know?”

“The rangers go there sometimes,” said Kestrel. “There’s a holdfast — a lodge and a ward in one thing, that is: a stick frame bound in yarn.” She pointed upstream. The finger rocks rose nearby — slants of bare granite, like the fingers of the potter who made the earth, reaching up to the weaver who made the sky. Beyond the finger rocks there rose the black bulk of the first of the true mountains. “Up there,” Kestrel said. “Two days, or perhaps three: Our start is late. And the snow.”

She turned then, and grasped Otter by both her upper arms. The girls leaned their foreheads together, their breath warm on each other’s faces, steaming in the cold day. “Oh, Otter,” Kestrel whispered.

Otter squeezed Kestrel’s strong arms. “I have hold of you, Kestrel.” Too late she realized it was what Kestrel had said to Cricket. Still, it was what needed saying. “I have hold of you.”

“Don’t kill Thistle. It would hurt your heart.”

“As if I could kill her.” Grandmother she might be, but Thistle was strong as flint, and fast as a striking hawk. And the rangers would protect her. Otter remembered how Cress had spun Kestrel around, had her helpless in a heartbeat, with a twist of the arm.

“From a distance, maybe,” said Kestrel. “With an arrow.”

“I cannot shoot,” said Otter. “And anyway, I’m going with you.”

Kestrel pulled away, still clinging to Otter’s arms but staring now. “Otter.”

“Are you going there to die?” said Otter.

Kestrel did not answer. Her face was tight. Otter could hear the water running under the ice, and the ice creaking and crackling.

“Are you going up there to die?” said Otter. “As if Cricket —”

“Do not tell me what he wants!” Kestrel let go of Otter’s arms and took a deep breath — a shuddering breath, like Cricket had taken, dying. She took three of them, and paused. Three more.

The roof of Otter’s mouth ached: fear, grief, the work of not shedding tears. She had to save Kestrel — she had not saved Fawn, she had not saved Willow, she had not saved Cricket, but she was going to save Kestrel. She would save Kestrel, before she cried again.

Kestrel’s breath went climbing, as Cricket’s had done. Then she whispered: “No. I don’t want to die. But I cannot go back to Westmost. And I would go — I would see what Cricket wanted to see. The beginning and the ending. Mad Spider.”

“The start of the story,” said Otter. The tale the storytellers knew and the binders did not. The story that Cricket had died to share: Mad Spider bound her mother too tightly. It meant something that a binder knew that story now. “Kestrel, I am going with you.”

“It is a secret place,” said the ranger seriously.

“It was a secret story,” said Otter. “And I would see it too.”

“Come with me, then,” said Kestrel. “Enough of secrets.”

“Tsha,” swore Otter.
“Enough.”

And so they went into the West, along the river, over the untracked snow.

They went slowly.

There was no reason to go quickly. Cricket was dead. They were exhausted, hungry, heavy with grief. So they went slowly.

Kestrel’s face was drawn; she was nearly silent. But her eyes were open: She stopped and pointed out the haw apples, stooped and brushed the snow from a crack in a fallen tree trunk to reveal a line of fawn-colored mushrooms, leathery with winter. They picked the haws and cut the fragrant drifts of mushrooms, and Otter began to feel they might not starve.

They stopped early and chopped off a few aspen poles to thrust into the soft ground near the river. Otter strung a ward. Kestrel built a fire bowl of stone and gathered tinder. They had a thin meal of corn porridge and wild mushroom, and spread their one robe on the cold ground. They huddled together on the robe where Cricket had died, with the ice of the river creaking and snapping like a wolf at their ears. They were so tired they were nearly sick with it. They did not keep watch, and they did not dream.

By the morning, the slip had found them.

Otter woke to them: a pair of dark things the size of crows, moving with stiff slowness, pushing close against the loose ward. Otter blinked twice and yawned before she realized that they were not crows, not the shadows of crows, not the shadows of anything at all — simply shadows. Stirring, hungry shadows. She rolled up with a shout, reaching for her bracelets — and Kestrel dropped a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t,” said the ranger. “You’ll only draw more.”

Otter felt as if she were still dreaming, an old nightmare — caught in a small space with the dead pressing in. And as in a dream, she was the only one frightened, and could not speak her fear: Kestrel was still blank-faced, silently feeding branches into the sleepy fire.

“Have you ever watched them?” Kestrel asked. “Sometimes I think they are as much longing as hungry. Cricket had a story — do you know it? — about the lost woman who was starving, and wished that everything she touched would turn to meat? And then she found her children….”

Otter shuddered. “How do we unmake them?”

“The rangers’ way.” Kestrel picked up her staff. “Quietly.” She edged the staff through the woven cords some distance from the slip and made its end flutter and brush in the pine needles, like a mother quail drawing off a fox. The slip nearest bulged and twisted, until its swinging nose faced the quivering knots. Slow as a leech it flowed in that direction. When it was close enough, Kestrel lifted the staff, raised her elbow, and struck the thing through from above. For a moment the shadow stuff clotted and squeezed around the staff, then one of the knots there gave way — and the slip was gone. Kestrel turned to the other slip and did the whole thing again.

When she was finished, she passed the staff to Otter and gave her attention, still blankly, to making a tinder bundle — dampening a bit of grass and tough wood-ear fungus, setting it to smolder, wrapping it tightly in birch paper. She was dry-eyed that morning, though her face had aged by winters and winters.

Otter sat watching by the fire with the staff across her knees, as she had done in Westmost. This — this was how the rangers’ knots came to be unraveled. This simple, quiet unmaking of little spirits, the rangers’ way of dealing with the dead. All the time she had worked in secret on Kestrel’s staff, risking her status, risking Kestrel’s … risking their very lives, for they, like Cricket, could have been sent west. All that time she had thought there would be more to the unmaking of those knots: more of a story.

A story. Cricket.

Otter retied the knots. She undid the ward and reclaimed its cords, wrapping a few up her arms and putting the rest in a pouch outside her coat. By then it was full morning, and time to move on.

It was warmer that day. The last snow was melting away. The river ate at its fringe of ice.

They went without trouble, though there was the creeping sense of eyes on them, of rustle in the forest, though the day was very still and nothing was rustling.

When the sun began to sink and turn golden, they stopped in a meadow at the foot of a waterfall. Ahead of them, the Spearfish came tumbling over boulders. The spires of the finger rocks rose, bare granite, showing like black hands against the brightness of the western sky.

At the edge of the waterfall pool was a single, huge willow, its roots undercut and arching toward the water. Between two of the leg-thick roots Otter cast a small ward — not much bigger around than a pair of beds.

This time, Otter did not sleep easily. Past the scanty cords of her ward she could see the twilight shadows thickening, and tried to guess which of those shadows would clump and stir: which was not a shadow at all, but a little piece of the hunger.

“There will be fewer,” said Kestrel, rolling over on her side and tugging her coat around her. She watched Otter watching. “As we go away from Westmost, we should see less of the little dead.”

“They are not — everywhere?” It was a startling thought.

“They are everywhere. They are always. But they are drawn to the human, and to power, and to fear. There will be less.”

Otter looked again. The waterfall meadow must have flooded in the last spring: The little birches and dogwood scrabble were undercut, standing tiptoe on their own roots. Under those roots were balls of shadow. She could see them, curled up like rabbits asleep. Stirring. Breathing.

Like the thing in the corn, the thing that had first hurt Cricket, first exposed her own power.

Drawn to the human, or power, or fear …

Otter reached out from her bed and put her hand on the cord of the ward. Her fourth ward. Already it was not a wild thing, like the ward that had killed Fawn. It was more dog than wolf. The knots on either side slid toward her, until her hand was like a bead among smaller beads. She closed her eyes and eventually fell asleep.