Sorrow’s Knot (24 page)

“How can you not know?” Kestrel twisted around to look at him, her voice tilting from puzzlement to anger. “You must know.”

“Uneh,”
said Orca sharply. “Yes: I am lying to entertain you.” He shook his head, spraying the last drops of water from his loose hair. “Do you not see — this wrongness, this White Hand — it is new to me. These handprints on your friend’s face — I do not know them. What I know is that I owe you and Otter my life. So: Tell me what we must do.”

Otter was looking mostly at Kestrel, who was still kneeling in front of her. But she spoke to Orca, or to the air, her words heavy. “I am touched by a White Hand,” she said. “You will have to kill me.”

While I am willing,
said her mother’s voice in her memory, said some ghost inside her.
Promise me it will be you.

Kestrel stiffened at the words. “I …” she whispered. Otter could feel the knots of her friend’s body tightening and pulling. The body was knots — Willow had said that. The body was all knots. “My hunting — training —” Kestrel made an aborted gesture at Otter’s throat, her face green and sick. “I can do it quickly.”

Orca said something short and sharp that Otter could not understand.

“What?” said Kestrel.

“I said
no
.” Orca grabbed Kestrel’s shoulder and wrenched her up and around. “Mother Cedar, no! How can you think it!”

Kestrel spun in his grip, digging her thumb into his elbow and striking with her other arm at the nape of his neck. Orca stumbled, dropping his drum — one hand flew up to the place Kestrel had hit him. The other arm was wrenched out behind him by Kestrel’s hold on his elbow. She let him go and he fell onto the moss. “Don’t touch me,” she said, cold.

Orca lay sprawled for three heartbeats. Otter could see the bunched muscles across his shoulders. She watched as — slowly, deliberately — he let the tension go. He rolled over and sat up. “That I haven’t fought you, Kestrel, doesn’t mean that I can’t. Lift your hand against Otter and you will learn exactly what I can do.”

Otter heard the rhythm behind his voice, felt the power she knew he could call on. Inside her, the White Hand stirred and tightened, listening too.

Orca stood up, and snapped both wrists in the air as if shaking off water.
The body is knots,
thought Otter. He was still trying to loosen his. Trying to put off his anger. She could almost see it fly from his fingertips. The leather of his leggings was wet and clung to the long muscles in his legs. His loose, long shirt was almost black in its wetness: the black of dried blood. The bottom hem was fringed with tiny shells.

From nowhere she remembered the night Tamarack had died, how she’d leaned with Cricket into the flank of an earthlodge, the summer cheatgrass prickling her back. She had pressed into his warm body and wished they were younger. She did not wish for that now. Not to be younger. But she felt the same twist of wish and fear. She was not sure what it meant. It was not exactly hunger.

Changing — she was changing. She had nine days.

Kestrel had picked up her staff; she stood silently. Orca pulled his coat from where it was folded on a nearby stone. He made as if to flip it on — then changed his mind and draped it around Otter. She was wet; the air was cold. She should have been cold. She wrapped her arms around herself, rubbing the silky stuff of the strange pelts between her fingers, trying to feel cold so that she could get warm.

Orca sank down in front of her, balancing on the balls of his feet. She saw his eyes flicker, looking at the white handprints that marked her. The prints flared cold under his gaze: the opposite of a blush. She thought he would touch them, but he spoke instead, almost a whisper. “
Cu xashi
, Otter,” he said. “Thank you for my life.” Feather soft, he put a finger on her lips.

It took them most of the day to walk along the eastern shore of the lake, halfway around the island that had once been Eyrie.

Otter could only go slowly. She felt light as if her feet had been cut off. She felt heavy, as if her shadow were a weight. It fell in front of her and she watched it darken the bright-green moss. It had a human shape. It had hands. Sometimes it seemed to take a grip on a stone and jerk itself forward. Otter stumbled after it.

Orca had his drum out. Kestrel lifted her staff in both hands.

But nothing came at them in that sunny, safe place, the safest place in the world. The sun swung up from the rim of the caldera, and then back down toward the western ridge, and then they came to the holdfast. And Otter thought:
Here is the place where I am going to die.

Evening came. In the holdfast, Otter sat by the fire and watched the stars come out beyond the birch poles. One by one. Three times three days. Nine days.

Or, eight days now. One was gone.

Then, suddenly, something touched her face. She jerked around. It was Orca. He was so close she could feel his breath, but he did not pull away. One finger swept up her cheekbone, then traced the white blotches at the corners of her eyes — the places where the Hand had touched her. The skin of the blotch was cold. The skin that bordered it shivered and blushed. Orca pushed softly with the pads of his fingers and said: “Does it hurt?”

She leaned back, out of his reach — his touch made her feel strange, as if something were twisting inside her. “No,” she said. “It is numb. No.”

“Numb …” The firelight made his tattoos swirl: For a moment he looked utterly alien. Then he gave her a little slip of a smile. “I took a sting, coming across the dry hills — a spiny-haired spider, do you have them here?”

Otter shook her head.

“It hurt like a spear going through me. And then it was numb.”

Otter did not know what to say. The fire crackled. Kestrel was tending the stewpot, and the holdfast smelled of leftover goose melting into wild carrot — a rich, yellowy smell. At last Otter offered: “I have never seen a spiny-haired spider.”

“Otter,” he said, choking on it — and then, unexpectedly, he laughed, faint as starlight. “I cannot kill you,” he said. “No more than water can run uphill. We must find another way.”

“There isn’t another way.” Otter was trying to be brave, to look this in the eye. She didn’t dare look in any other direction.

He took hold of both her hands — her white hands. “We must try.”

“What do you know of this?” said Kestrel. Otter heard her stirring stick clunk against the clay pot, hard. “You know nothing.”

“This is your shoreline, not mine.” Orca let go of Otter and extended his forearms toward Kestrel, palms up. The gesture was foreign, but it seemed to read:
I am unarmed.
“You know its currents and its tides. I respect this. But — surely — to kill a friend: This is wrong on all the beaches. This would be wrong in the open desert.”

“You know nothing, storyteller.” Kestrel spat out the title. “Otter’s mother died of this. Willow. The greatest binder of the age. She was touched by a White Hand. She
died
.”

Orca looked to Otter. “Is this true?”

“You don’t need to make her speak it,” said Kestrel. “I say it and that will be enough for you.”

And Otter whispered: “It’s true.”

Orca was silent a moment, his head tucked. Then he said: “Did she die, or did you kill her?”

Otter stood up. The movement felt sudden, sharp — as if she were a spider leg unfolding. As if her shadow could shift and harden like the edge of an axe. The White Hand: She was turning into a White — Otter bolted for the open night.

Outside, she took a dozen stumbling steps toward the lake edge. It was better outside. She had not known it, but now that she was released, she could feel how much the knots of the holdfast had been pressing around her. Turning on her. As if she were already one of the dead.

She bent forward with her hands on her knees, breathing hard. Warmth stirred around her: the breath of the lake. She looked up at the dark bulk of Mad Spider’s island. The sliced moon setting behind it.

She did not turn until she heard footsteps behind her.
Kestrel,
she thought. But when she turned, it was Orca.

He stood silent for a while, then offered: “Kestrel said if you were crying she would murder me. I thought: best to go check.”

She could only see him as a shape against the darkness. He must not have been able to see her expression either, because he came forward. In one step, she could see his face. In the next, his thumbs brushed her cheeks. “You are,” he said. “That’s a pity, because I —” But whatever joke he’d been about to make he dashed aside, with a sudden snap of his other wrist. “
Cu mullen
, Otter. I’m sorry.
Cu mullen.
Don’t cry.”

“I killed her,” said Otter. “We killed her. Oh, Orca — I don’t want to die.”

There was a drumbeat of silence, and then Orca said: “Then don’t.”

“I can’t — you don’t —” She drew deep for air. “Are there no horrors where you are from?”

He turned away. She could see the line of his nose and lips against the starlight.

“Horrors enough,” he said.

She waited, but he said nothing more.

The restless lake murmured and shushed. At last, Orca held out a hand to her: “Come and have stew, before Kestrel hunts me down.”

So she put her hand in his. It was bigger than hers, bony, warm. They went in and had stew. Otter lay down and drifted above the surface of sleep, listening to Kestrel murmur to Orca about how they had murdered Willow. She lay very still, as if lying in snow, which was said to be a gentle death. Eight days.

Seven days.

The madness rose in Otter like a bog welling into a footprint. Anger: Willow had been angry. Silence: Willow had been silent. Otter understood that now. It was like having water in the ears: There was thickness and pressure between her and the world.

In that thickness, Orca asked question after question. What had happened to Willow? How? When? In what order? Had they ever seen another of the touched? What had they tried? He asked and asked until Otter wanted to smash his head with a rock. “Stop,” she begged him. “Please, please stop.”

And he would stop and play his drum softly, or do some useful thing — hauling in driftwood for the fire, catching fish — but soon enough he would start again.

When night came, Otter could not sleep. She could feel the prints the Hand had left in embracing her, the prints hidden on her back. They were numb, but they were like lying on stones. She tossed on her bed of ferns until Kestrel came and sat beside her, holding her hand. In the dimness, the ranger looked weary as a wounded deer. She was holding still. She was watching the wolves come.

Kestrel sat and Otter clung to her. But it was not enough.

“Orca,” Otter whispered. The name was strange. It wanted to break into its two sounds, drop free from meaning like beads from a string. She put her hand to her throat as if to catch them, and felt the word move there again. “Orca,” she said to the boy whose silence she’d begged for. “Orca, tell me a story.” And Orca did, a lullaby of a story, with a murmuring drum. But it did not catch her attention; it did not comfort her. The White Hand inside her had heard it before.

She reached sideways and wrapped her hand around one of the birch poles. One by one, in the darkness, the yarns there unwove themselves and came to wrap around her hand.

Six days. Otter woke late and the holdfast was empty as a cup of bones.

Of course there was foraging to do: Even the dying must eat. They must be foraging, her friends — for a moment she could not remember their names. She was losing herself.

From somewhere nearby came a
tick
and
tap
, like a bird breaking a snail against a stone. But louder, sharper. She got up and followed the sound toward the lake. The ground had a give as if half-thawed. The speedwell was blooming, blue as if scraps of the woven sky had fallen. Otter walked and felt so strange that she could have been upside down. Walking in the broken sky.

Kestrel was sitting on stone. Her coat was off in the fine morning. Her back was to Otter, bent, moving. She was making a knife.

She had a chunk of obsidian already shaped into a blade like a willow leaf, and she was knapping it sharper. A round stone in one hand. A bit of leather across her knee to work against. She struck the stone. Shook the new fragments off the leather. They fell, and jingled as they fell, like black teeth.

Kestrel was no flint worker, but the black glass of obsidian was easy to work. The knife on Kestrel’s knee was sharp already. So sharp that it would be fragile. The kind of blade that could be used only once.

Sharp. Once.

And Otter knew exactly what the knife was for. She could feel it against her throat already.

The delicate rasp and tap of the strike-stone against the blade. The jerk of Kestrel’s shoulders.

The body is knots. Otter had power over knots. She could undo them all at a touch, as Willow had undone the ward — as Willow had undone Thistle’s hand. Otter could unmake Kestrel with one touch.

She took one step. Her hand out.

Kestrel turned around.

She looked at Otter. Her eyes darted to the blade. Then she looked back into Otter’s face. Her eyes were strong and clear, behind their sudden tears.

“Thank you,” said Otter. The knife. It was practical. It was kind. It was Kestrel. “I need it to be you,” she whispered.

“Not yet,” said Kestrel.

Six days.