Sorrow’s Knot (21 page)

When it was her turn to rest, she sat beside him. Her legs were trembling, her throat was dry. She was not going to fall over, but it was no wisdom to stand until that point came close. So she sat, carefully near Kestrel, where she could be kicked awake when the ranger’s voice weakened. Orca lay at her right hand, as still as if his body had been abandoned.

The moon was high now, and Otter had light and time to notice that he was thin — more than thin, starve-haunted. What she’d first glimpsed as a whirl of darkness across his face was actually a pattern of ink set into the skin. Creatures swam on each of his jawbones. They were arch-backed like trout leaping, rising from the swirl of waves that crested along his jaw from chin to ear. Their backs strengthened his high cheekbones, their dorsal fins pointed toward the corner in his eyes, from which tears sprung. Tears: He had been crying. His face was dirty enough to show the tear streaks, even in the moonlight. His hair was knife-hacked, short as a child’s. But his coat was a very fine thing: silvered gray, mottled with black and pale, the fur short and soft.

Otter touched Orca’s coat shyly. It was sleek as a baby’s hair. An animal she didn’t know had given its pelt for this coat. An animal she didn’t know.

A White Hand, listening.

The world was bigger than she’d thought.

Kestrel was telling, at last, “The Goose Who Got Lost.” Otter suspected that the ranger did not know many more stories, or she would not tell that one. She shivered, watching the stillness of the pale hands floating so near she could have reached out for them. But still: It was a comfortable sound, a comfortable thing, falling asleep to the pulse and ebb of that story.

That long, silly story.

The horror of the White Hand, breathed in and out.

And Orca sleeping, his hands curled loosely on the river stones.

River stones.

A river …

It began to rain, softly. A cold drop that fell here, fell there. Clouds were coming up, thickening around them, covering the moon and stars. Darkness was taking their view of the Hand away. A drop here. A drop there.

Otter drowsed, tucking her chin against the rain, bending her body protectively over Orca’s drum. The story touched her here, touched her there. She drowsed, not knowing if she would ever wake.

It was near dawn when Kestrel nudged Otter awake with the side of her foot. The light was gray and murky. Otter had never been more than half asleep; now she struggled to come more than half awake. She squeezed her eyes closed and then stretched them wide. A story — she needed a story. She was not sure how many more she knew. Kestrel’s voice, coming from above, was growing hoarse and flat.

They could not keep doing this.

The light was coming up. The Hand was visible in it, even through the slow rain. It made the half-darkness clump the way blood clumps.

Kestrel’s voice was hoarse, her story coming to its final twist.

Otter got to her feet.

They had to think of something else.

But first, she had to think of a story.

All the stories in her mind were told in Cricket’s voice. Her coat was wet through and hung heavy on her. It was still raining.

Kestrel’s story was coming to its end. Otter, without thinking, struck the drum in her hand three times, as storytellers did in her country to close a tale, or a life. At her feet, Orca shifted in his uneasy sleep, stones rattling.

She struck the drum again,
lum, dum
to begin, and said: “A long time ago, before the moons were named, there was a binder named Birch. And she had a daughter, a binder named Silver. And she had a daughter, a binder named Hare. And she had a daughter, a binder named Spider, who later was Mad Spi — Oh!”

Because in front of her, the Hand did not stand as it had all night. It was not soft and listening. It was tightening itself, twisting itself like cords being twisted into rope.

Otter caught herself before she was silent more than a heartbeat. “And that is as far as the memory goes. Now, it was said of Mad Spider that she could tie a knot in living bone.
Kestrel, take the drum; I want my cords.
Mad Spider had that much power. What she bound stayed bound.”

Kestrel took the drum. Otter felt her move, heard her say: “Wake up, boy! Wake up!”

“Am I a dog?” muttered Orca. “Stop kicking: I wake.”

Otter could feel them move; hear Orca getting to his feet behind her, but she didn’t turn. The Hand was taut in front of her, twisting, reaching. She saw its white hands splay into claws and flex. Her breath coming faster, her fingers fumbling with the wet yarn of her bracelets, Otter kept talking: “So. Mad Spider was not much more than a sunflower when a blistering fever came, and her mother died. And her mother’s second died. And she was left the binder and she was very frightened. She did not want to let her mother go.”

The Hand was all knot now, drawn back like a wolf’s snarl. Otter kept talking as she lifted her yarns, trying to keep the thread of the story and the dance of her casting moving at the same time, even though she was beginning to shake. “She was frightened, but she had to do it anyway. She had to bind her mother in a tree….”

The White Hand wasn’t moving and it wasn’t making a sound, but it was howling at them. The howl made Otter’s teeth chatter, her hands shake. “Tell it something else,” said Kestrel.

But Otter was as caught in the story as she was in her casting. Neither of them could be dropped without consequence, without a beat of silence in which the Hand would surely strike. “So she went out to the scaffolds, under the gray winter sky,” Otter said. She made the last turn and twist to finish the cradle-star, and lifted it against the Hand.

The Hand did not fall back. Slowly, slowly, its own hands — grown longer than any human’s, grown thin past even the thinness of bone — its hands lifted. Its claw tips were just a sparrow-hop away from Otter’s fingertips. It spread its fingers as if it too were holding a star.

“And —” said Otter, her voice trembling. “And —” It was no time for silence. “And she bound her mother there. She put knots in her bones.”

The Hand struck.

Otter screamed and sprang backward. She came down on the round stones and stumbled, her hands still lifted in front of her, the casting taut between them. Orca and Kestrel caught her and dragged her backward to the edge of the fern.

Otter stood panting. The cords between her fingers seemed to be made of living fire. They blazed into her. She could not hold them, not long, she could not hold them. Kestrel and Orca were holding her up, each with a hand on her.

Then Orca, in her ear, said: “I hear water.”

Water.

They had their backs to the forest, and the Hand was writhing and snarling right in front of them and Otter could not hold it long. They had to do something and it could not be
run
— not in the murky twilight, not into the entangling forest, not with the Hand that was faster than any of them.

But water. The dead could not cross water.

“I hear it too,” said Kestrel. She had her staff lifted in both hands, lowering it at the Hand like a spear. With a jerk of her chin she pointed diagonally across the bowl of stones. “That way. Not far.”

Otter tried to think. She had had this thought, drifting into sleep: river. These stones were round. River stones. Or, not a river, but a dry wash — a river that ran only when it rained.

It was raining.

Her hands were on fire. Her voice came out in a rush of air and pain: “Hurry.”

“There,” said Orca, pointing across the stone bowl with two fingers.

“I don’t see it,” said Kestrel. The light was still poor.

“Trust,” said Orca. “My eyes are sharp.”

“Hurry,” gasped Otter, again. The shaking of her body was beginning to lock, making her once again as rigid as someone freshly dead. She was not sure she could run.

“Get ready, then,” said Kestrel, hefting her staff.

And before Otter could ask
For what?
Kestrel had struck past her with her staff.

The staff, with its wrapping of rangers’ knots, went into the heart of the White Hand. A gap opened in its stuff, and for a moment Otter could see right through the middle of it, like seeing blue sky through clouds. Then it twisted itself closed and grew arms and things that reached and slashed. Kestrel’s hip pushed against Otter’s as she leaned out and struck the Hand’s side — neck — shoulder — it had none of those things. Cords were springing free from Kestrel’s staff. A little silver charm came loose and flew across the stones like a tooth flying.

Kestrel struck again, her side pressing against Otter’s side.

She was pivoting, Otter realized: pivoting the whole battle. Knocking the White Hand to one side and turning sideways to face it. She struck and struck and struck. They hadn’t moved; the Hand hadn’t let them go. It hadn’t given them so much as a step. But, where, before, their backs had been to the dark forest, now they were side-on to the forest, and at their backs was a clear space of stones.

“Ready?” said Kestrel.

“Yes,” gasped Otter and, “
Uneh
,” said Orca —

They turned and ran.

Otter, Kestrel, and Orca pelted across the field of stones. They did not dare look back. They could not even think about where to set their feet. They dashed like panicked deer, and stones rolled and clicked and shot backward from their feet. They should have fallen — especially Otter, whose arm muscles were locked, whose hands were still caught in a web of yarn. But they did not fall. Otter stumbled once, and Orca — he was taller than her, and for one dazzling instant she was surprised by that — grabbed her under the armpit and yanked her forward, bruisingly hard.

And then there was water.

They tumbled down the bank of the wash and staggered forward into the rush and toss of the running water. Orca fell in; Kestrel heaved him out; they all ran. Otter could feel the Hand close behind them. Power reached out of it. Loss and madness reached out of it. Wrongness radiated from it, like the cold that comes off a coat.

They hit the far bank of the wash and scrambled up and kept going, tearing through the ferns into the woods, until Otter gasped: “Stop, stop!” She staggered to a stop, folding forward, hands on her knees. “We have to —” she panted. “We have to see —”

They had to know if it had followed them. They had to know if they were safe, or if they needed more.
There was no more,
Otter thought.
Let us not need more.

The three of them moved close together, their breath loud in one another’s ears, and looked back at the water rushing in its channel of stone. Beyond it was …

Nothing.

Of the Hand, there was no trace at all.

“It can’t cross that,” said Kestrel. Without confidence.

They looked again at the stream. Nothing. Nothing. A shivering, prickling nothing. But nothing.

“It could not,” said Kestrel. “Nothing dead could cross that.”

“What was it?” said Orca, even as Otter turned to him and asked: “Who are you?”

Kestrel made a sharp slash between them with her staff. “Not here.” She used the staff to point. “Look, there’s light.” The forest around them was dim. Rain fell with
plinks
and
plops
from the pine needles to the bowed backs of the ferns. But the forest did not get dimmer as it got deeper: The distance was bright. Otter had no forest craft, and did not know what this meant. But Orca said: “The trees end. Sunlight.”

Kestrel made the ranger’s sign
Let’s go
, which made Orca blink at her. Otter said it aloud: “Let’s go, then.” The Hand might not be the only dead thing, and the woods were thick with stirring ferns, stirring shadows. They ran.

The sun was just rising as Otter, Kestrel, and Orca stumbled out of ferns and forest, into the high and rocky meadow at the heart of the island. It was still raining — a cold, slow wintery rain; a miserable rain that had saved their lives — but the clouds were torn-edged and moving fast. The ragged sky was visible here and there. Orca collapsed against one of the hillocks that dotted the space. He sprawled there with his mouth open to catch the rain. Otter took a moment to arrange her bracelets and cords. Then she wrapped her arms around herself and shivered.

Kestrel simply stood. Otter knew why. Cricket was still dead — and he didn’t have to be.

Anger came off Kestrel the way wrongness had come off the White Hand. Even Otter was afraid to talk to her. Cricket could have
—
but that thought, Otter swallowed down. It stuck in her throat.

“Mother Cedar,” said Orca. His voice was not so ravaged as it had been, and they could hear now that he had an accent, flowing and strange. “Mother Cedar: What was that thing?”

“A White Hand,” said Otter.

Orca raked his fingers back through his hair — short and unbraided, it stood up into spikes, like a grouse’s crest. “Three days I stood there, telling it stories. It broke my voice and nearly my mind. Then you came and held it back with a bit of string. How did you do that?”

“I am a binder.”

“Binder?” he said. “What is a binder?”

How could he not know?

“What are you?” said Kestrel. “How did you keep back that Hand?”

Orca gave her a puzzled frown. “As I said. As you did.
Cu tomtekan
— I told it stories.” He had snatched up his drum to run, kept hold of it even as he dragged at Otter, crashed through the stream. Now he bent his head to it. Water was beaded on the face of the drum, and here and there droplets soaked in and made the skin mottled and dark. Orca wiped his hand dry on the inner surface of his coat and ran it in circles over the drumhead. It made a
hish
and
hiss
. “If it comes back, we will need more stories. Tell me your stories. That one you were beginning — tell me that.”

Kestrel and Otter looked at each other. The story Otter had begun, of the first White Hand — she was not supposed to know it. The gift of that story had cost Cricket his life. To be asked to hand it over, like a spare pair of mittens …

The drum was as dry as Orca could make it. He slipped it carefully into a padded bag at his hip. They watched him, silent, and he frowned at them, baffled. “Well, names then. Kestrel and …”

“Otter,” said Otter.

“You are angry, Kestrel?” he said. “Here, I’ll make you a trade — a gift. I am Orca, son of Three Oars, of the Salmon Running People.
Tomteka-xi
: a storyteller.”

Kestrel looked at him, tight and silent. Otter was afraid that when that silence broke it would lash out like a cut cord. To forestall the moment, she asked: “What’s an orca?”

“This.” Orca lifted a hand, sweeping fingertips from jaw to cheekbone, over the twisting tattoo of wave and eye and fin. “Like a fish, but bigger than a man, and a breather of air. Great hunters of the western sea.” He opened his arm toward the wall of black pine — toward the West.

“There are mountains to the west,” Otter said slowly.

“And beyond them, a sea.”

“Nothing!” Kestrel snapped. “Nothing comes from over the mountains.”

Orca put up an eyebrow. “Strange news. That would be strange news to the people of the abalone, the people of the cinnabar, to the Great Sea itself. Help me off this terrible island, and I will make you a map.”

“Why should we?” Kestrel had grown dangerously quiet. “Why should we help you?”

“Kestrel!” said Otter, shocked.

“I am human,” said Orca, with great dignity. “That thing is not.”

Kestrel struck out, hitting the storyteller in the chest with the heel of her hand, her arm stiff behind the blow. Orca cried out and fell over, sprawling against the strange little hillock, and Kestrel spun her staff after him, pressing the butt against his breastbone. “If I have to pin you to the ground and put a knife to your throat to get truth out of you, I will do it.”

Orca didn’t fight. He lay flat under the push of the staff, his long arms and legs splayed. He looked fragile as a daddy longlegs, though his face was fierce. “Kestrel …” Otter began.

The ranger shot her a flinty look. “Think, Otter! What manner of thing comes from over the mountains? Nothing helpless! Nothing harmless! No” — in fury, she fumbled for a word — “No storyteller!”

“Storytellers —” Orca snapped. And then he dropped his voice: It hissed and thrummed like his hand rubbing across a drum. “A storyteller can spin a web that will hold the dead listening until they dry up like stranded eels. A storyteller can change men’s minds. Tell their futures. Compel their help. Create their love. With a little work and time, Kestrel, this storyteller could drive you quite mad.”

His voice had become stronger and faster as he spoke, picking up like a drumbeat. Otter found herself breathing in time to it. Kestrel let her staff drift out of line: She stood holding it as if halfway into a dream.

Then Orca stopped and gave himself a little shake. “I can do those things,” he said plainly, the power gone from his voice. “My father could do them, and he taught me.” He dropped his gaze away from them, and for a moment he looked haunted and strange. Then he turned back. “I am not helpless, and I am not harmless,” he said. “But then, I did not claim to be.”

Otter swallowed. For a moment, there, he had held her — held the rhythm of her breath, her heartbeat, her thoughts themselves — held her as tightly as if his words were a binder’s cords. Power. A boy, and yet he had power.

Orca stood and swung up his pack. “It does not matter what you think of me. The rain will stop soon. We must go. I will help you, and you will help me, because we are human. We will leave this island, and then I will leave you, if you want that.”

Kestrel looked at him, fiery — and finally nodded. Just once. Sharp like an axe swinging.

“Do you know this place?” asked Orca. “Which way?”

“We don’t know it,” said Otter. They had not come far inland, so the nearest shore was probably the way they’d come, across the wash. Only a fool would go that way, back past the White Hand. She looked around. The meadow was not narrow — it was nearly as wide as the whole pinch of Westmost — but still, it was longer than it was wide, and it sloped strongly. There were black trees at the top of the slope, to the west, and birch and jumbled stone at the bottom, to the east.

“Water runs downhill,” said Kestrel, pointing eastward with her staff, toward the stones.

“Then so will we,” said Orca.

He straightened up and put his hand on the bag that hung on his hip. Otter recognized the meaning of the motion, though not the motion itself. He was checking his drum in the same way she checked her cords.

“We should fill our waterskins,” said Kestrel. “But it would mean going back to the wash.”

“Oh,” said Otter, channeling Cricket. “Let’s not.”

Orca laughed. “
Uneh
: Let’s not indeed. There will be other streams.”

Kestrel nodded.

They went quickly, the beaded grass shaking droplets as they cut through it, soaking the knees of their swinging coats.

“Kestrel,” said Orca then, “who is Cricket?”

“Don’t say his name,” said Kestrel. “Say his name again and I will break your leg and leave you here.”

“Will you indeed?” Orca walked along a little, before he added: “And you said you had no stories.”

They picked their way among the boulders and the winter-bronze grass, down the meadow, in the cold rain. A cold rain that was slowly giving out. There were gusts in it now, splattering bursts followed by long gray moments.

If it stopped raining, how long would it take the wash to run dry? How far was the shore?

They didn’t know.

Midway down the meadow, they found themselves among a cluster of hillocks. Where they’d first stumbled in, the hillocks had been scattered: Here they were gathered like eggs in a nest. They were shapeless slumps of earth, nearly woman-tall, grass-grown. They looked like muskrat houses or prairie-dog towns, like something animals might build — but bigger, and older. Otter trailed her fingers over the flank of one mound as they hurried past. Something answered her touch. Made her bracelets shiver and twist. Without stopping, she slipped them loose, holding them looped around the fingers of one hand, ready.

Kestrel said, “Otter?”

Orca slipped his hand into the bag that held his drum.

“I’m not sure.” In the center of the mounds, Otter paused and cast a cradle-star, quick as thinking. She pulled it taut and held it steady. It did not twist.