Sorrow’s Knot (26 page)

“But there was another thing, not a White Hand, but a different horror. Horror enough,” said Orca, and laughed a little, low and bitter.

A madness that came out of the forest, that made men eat other men. Even their friends. Even their children. A mad hunger that made them grow taller, leaner.
Nalisque
, they were called. The bottomless. They were holes into which you could pour the sea.

Rarely, yet too often, the
nalisque
came. Rarely — and yet too often — one of those that traded the fish oil overland would come back across the wall wild-eyed and drum-skinned, tall and hungry. The storytellers wrapped them with stories and weighed them with stones and helped them walk into the sea. Learning, little Orca had done that. At his father’s side.

Learning the stories of before the world was made; the stories of after. All the stories: thousands. The bone needles dipped in black ashes: the tattoo, the pain. Taking a name. Making a drum. Dancing on the stones by the edge of the sea.

Orca’s left hand added a brush and tap to the triple beat, and suddenly the drum was playing the sea.
Slip
and
hish
and
crash
. Stones rolling. Breakers.

A two-man kayak. Orca and Three Oars, who was his father. They had gone to gather listening shells from one of the unhumaned islands. And something came from the red shadows of the cedars, out onto the beach, something very tall, thin as lightning. Something past listening. Even to Three Oars, greatest teller of the age.

Three Oars, my
— Three Oars, his father.

They fought it and they lived. But his father was torn across one ear. Bitten. Bleeding. All the way Orca rowed them home while his father slumped, bleeding. Salt into salt.

He unfolded from the kayak taller.

And soon enough he was hungry.

Otter, leaning her whole heart into the story, made the casts again and again. The tree, the scaffold. There was something wrong with them. There was a horror in the knots: Mad Spider bound her mother too tightly.

Orca, son of Three Oars, too young, but the teller of stories. The weights he’d been meant to tie around his father’s ankles. The story he’d tried to tell, about the man who became a whale and went deep.

But I
—

But he couldn’t.

I couldn’t. I had to, and I couldn’t, and I ran.

“
Any
story. Any story can have more than one ending.” Orca’s voice was passionate, low and rough. His hands trembled on his drum, making the heartbeat rhythm flutter. “And I don’t know how my father’s ended. If he walked into the sea or into the forest. If something taller and hollowed walked back. There was a horror tale that followed me. I heard it on the trade trails, before I left my country behind. But I don’t
know
.”

He lifted his eyes.

Sitting there, listening: something that was both a binder and a thing to be bound. White hands wrapped in blue thread. The body seemed human but the face — slashed and shadowed by Otter’s hanging hair — did not bear looking at. The silence of the thing was a hole into which the drumbeat was pouring like the sea.

“That is my last story,” Orca said to that silence. “I do not know how it ends. But it is all I can tell you.” He struck the drum, center, edge, center, edge. Slower. Softer. Center. Edge. His voice, when it came, could hardly be heard. “I don’t want to die. Not like this.”

Center.

Silence.

The White Hand that was Otter stood up. She felt herself do it, felt herself unfold, felt her too-soft body stiffen like an insect after molting.

“Please,” whispered Orca. “Please come back, Otter. I don’t want to die. Please come back.” But he did not step away from her. And he did not strike the drum.

“Otter,” said Kestrel sharply, “what is in your hands?”

Otter looked down. Around her birch-bark fingers the blue yarn made a familiar pattern. The tree, the scaffold. The sky …

As if from far above, she watched as the pattern moved backward. The sky, the scaffold, the tree, the cradle — and forward again. The white, alien fingers worked restlessly, like a child with a question, like a wolf with a skull. Mad Spider bound the dead too tightly.

What if they could be unbound?

Otter blinked. Looked up. Her face grew softer. Became human again.

What if the dead could be unbound?

Orca was still standing there, only a step away. He was trembling with fear as if with fever. His chin was tilted up as it had been when she’d broken the beads from his throat. But as he had not then, he did not now back away.

Brave,
she thought.
He is brave
.

“It was not wrong,” she heard herself say. It was a soft voice, a human voice. “To let your father go. It was not wrong.”

She stepped close to him.

“I’m afraid to touch you,” Orca whispered. He knuckled tears off his cheekbones, leaving a smear of damp that made the black tattoos shine. “Do we really have to kill you?”

“Yes,” she said.

And then, a small hope broke her heart.
Any story can have more than one ending.
Any story, and she was caught in a story. Her voice came out like a small child’s: “… Any story … ?”

“Any story,” said Orca. He lifted his shaking hand and drew a blessing circle in the air between them. And then he leaned forward and kissed her.

It was Otter’s first kiss, and Orca was no craftsman. There were things they didn’t know, such as what to do with noses. And yet they kissed each other, both of them frightened and broken — but their brokenness seemed to fit together to make a whole. Their noses found their tilts. The soft brush of lips just missing lips became something dead center, something sure and hungry. Otter felt it rise up from the deep places of her body, like the binding power finding the perfect balance in a knot. Orca made a grief noise in his throat and knotted his fingers in her hair. His thumb went under her cheekbone, pressing as hard as if he were sculpting her. She felt her tears pool against his thumb joint. She was crying. They were both crying.

The binder’s yarns tangled and snared her wrists and hands.

When Orca and Otter pulled apart, they were both wide-eyed and gasping for breath — and both entirely human.

“Well,” said Kestrel. There was a nudge of Cricket’s laughter in her serious voice. “Well. It seems a shame to kill you now.”

“What?” gasped Orca. “I —” Beneath his tattoos, his swirling strangeness, he suddenly seemed about twelve years old. His voice squeaked. “What?”

Kestrel laughed at him, though not unkindly. “What do you think, Otter? Would he be any good at hoop-and-lance?”

“Oh …” Otter felt a ridiculous smile split her face. A blush began at her heart and moved both down and up. “He might be.”

“Well,” said Kestrel again, and Otter was startled to see tears welling and dripping in the corners of her eyes. She was not sobbing, though: Her face was aglow. “I suppose there is a night — maybe night and a day — I suppose you could find out.”

“What?” squeaked Orca again. But Otter understood. Kestrel had held Cricket as he died. She had kissed him hard. If Otter had only a day or two left, then Kestrel would wish it to be spent in kisses.

Otter looked down again, at her entangled hands. There was a binder’s knot tied around one wrist. It was, she saw, sorrow’s knot: The noose that bound the dead.

Looking at that noose, she said: “No.”

“Why not?” said Kestrel softly. She could hardly be heard over the
snap
and
chat
of the big fire. “There’s little enough I can give you, Otter — a little time, that’s all I can give you. Why not?”

“Because I need to hear a story,” said Otter. “Tell me ‘Mad Spider Bound Her Mother,’ Kestrel. Tell it quickly. Tell it now.”

Kestrel’s smile swallowed itself. The secret story. The story for which Cricket had died.

“But …” said Orca. He tugged at the hem of his shirt, smoothed back his rumpled hair. “But, on the island. The White Hand …”

Yes. On the island, Otter had started to tell the story and the Hand had tightened; had reared and struck. Even now she could feel the thing she was becoming coil itself up like a rattlesnake. Mad Spider….

She jerked on one end of the knot and the noose bit into her wrist, bringing her back into herself with a bite of pain. “Tell it now.”

And Kestrel did.

Orca stood very still, listening. A line formed between his eyebrows, and grew deeper. Otter pulled and pulled on that string, using the pain of it to keep herself listening. Keep herself human.

Give herself hope.

Kestrel told Mad Spider’s story as goose feathers eddied around them and the roasting fire chuckled and snapped. A dark story on a beautiful day.

Mad Spider was afraid, and she did not want to let her mother go. She bound her too tightly. She left her up a tree in the moonlight. She left her in the living world.

When the story was finished, it was still a beautiful day. The three of them stood in silence and the caldera held them like a cupped hand.

It was Orca — at last, and of course — who spoke: “Then it is the tying of the dead that makes these things. Mad Spider bound too tightly. Her dead became things that could not leave the living world.” It took a stranger to see it. A traveler, in a land to which no travelers came. A storyteller, in a land where stories could be deadly secrets. “Why do you bind the dead at all?”

“Since before the moons were named,” said Kestrel, “always and always, we’ve done this.”

Otter pulled on the cord that caught her wrist. The white skin was bulging around it now. Her fingers throbbed with each heartbeat, a frostbite pain.
My heartbeat,
she thought.
Human. Living. Mine. Stay here.

But the heartbeat was slow. Loud as a drum. Pounding against the knots. Too strong, the knots. And quite suddenly, came the voice:
Since I was a child, they have been too strong.
Willow had said it:
There is something wrong with the knots.

“Just a drying line,” Otter said. “Just something from which to hang our coats.”

Otter did not know who she was, and so it felt like a memory. Not something she had heard. Someone she had been. Her brothers waking up covered in dust and sneezing….

Orca and Kestrel both stared at her. Orca in pure bafflement. But the lights of thought were moving in Kestrel’s eyes.

Otter’s heart — her heart was slowing. Its four-fold knot drawing tighter and tighter. Too tight to pulse.

Too strong. There was something wrong.

“Too strong,” said Otter, and her tongue moved thickly, like the tongue of the dead.

“Too strong,” repeated Orca, bewildered. But Kestrel — very slowly, Kestrel nodded.

“The binders,” she said. “With Mad Spider, since Mad Spider, they became too powerful. They made our scaffolds into snares.”

“We bind the dead too tightly,” said Otter. Her white hand twitched. Her voice seemed to come from the hollows of her bones. “We need to let them go.”

It took a binder to see it, a binder who traveled like a ranger, a binder who knew a storyteller’s secrets. Moons of moons it had been, years of years, since such a woman had walked in the world. “We need to let them go,” Otter said again.

And her heart stopped.

Kestrel said: “How?”

And from beyond death, Otter answered: “This.”

She pulled the cord around her wrist.

The noose closed onto her skin.

And then it closed through her skin.

And then the knot — as nooses do, when closed on nothing — pulled through itself, undid itself. And was gone.

Otter dropped the unknotted cord and folded inward, clutching her hand to her chest. It had been so numb, as if it were made of twigs and fingernails, and now it blazed as if on fire. She could not even feel the other hand against it — only pure instinct made her push it, protect it, hide it. Her shoulders were pulling in, her knees were buckling —

Kestrel and Orca dove to catch her.

Otter breathed heavily through her nose. She shook. It was sickening, impossible — the cord had gone right through her skin.

Kestrel stuck a hand under Otter’s armpit and took a firm hold. Otter leaned, and felt safe leaning: Kestrel could hold up a tree.

Seeing Otter steadied, Orca crouched down to examine the squiggle of yarn that lay in the goose feathers and the moss. It looked as if it had lain there, dropped like a snakeskin, for a moon-count of years. The blue dye had faded. The strands had frayed.

The storyteller looked up at Otter, his head tilted, his eyes dark. Then he touched the yarn with one finger. It did not grab at him. The fibers were loosening, as if no drop spindle had ever whirled them. Orca poked the yarn and it fell apart — smaller than speedwell blossoms, tufts of faint blue among the black flight feathers and the drifting down.

Orca looked up. “What does this mean?”

Kestrel, meanwhile, had caught hold of Otter’s forearm, just above her blazing hand. She coaxed it away from Otter’s body. “Look.”

Otter’s hand was brown.

Human.

Young.

The binder’s calluses that she herself had earned. Her own constellations of freckles and scars.

It hurt — Otter finally recognized the feeling — it hurt as if she’d slept with it pinned, with not enough blood in it. It hurt worse than that, hurt as if no blood had been in it for days. She shook it. Made a fist and then flared the fingers open. The roar of the nerves began to fade.

“Look.” Kestrel stepped away but kept her grip on the transformed wrist. She raised Otter’s newly human hand and lowered her own face into it. Otter felt her tears. “Oh,” said Kestrel, her eyes closed. “Look.”

But Otter stretched out her other hand. It was still made of twigs and fingernails; it was still white as teeth. And it was holding, by the hand, another hand — a hand made of shadow. The White Hand was beside Otter, a shadow standing free in the air.
Sisters,
Otter thought. For a moment, they stood hand in hand, like sisters.

Orca looked up at the shadow. His eyes went round, his body tight. The White Hand, the monster that had already almost killed him. It had him — it had all of them — in easy reach. “It —” he stuttered.

“Cricket was right,” said Kestrel, exultant, eyes closed, heedless of the danger. “Cricket was right.”

“Otter …” whispered Orca, his face rigid with fear.

Otter shuddered — and then breathed in, letting the shadow thing, the White Hand, move back into her body. Suddenly her heart was pounding, beating in her ears, louder than a funeral drum. Dead — she’d been dead.

“I tied my mother in a tree,” she said, the Hand inside her said. “She tightened like drying leather. She rotted like a rope. We must go and save her.”

Willow, mother of Otter.

Hare, mother of Mad Spider.

Fawn, no one’s mother.

All the bound-up dead.

Kestrel opened her eyes and said: “Yes. We must go.”

Before they went, of course, they cooked the goose.

Even those caught in stories need to eat, and roasted meat can be carried better than raw. Kestrel sat with her staff on her knees, redoing the knots. Otter watched her, trying to remember a time when she herself had made those knots — when holding a ranger’s staff had seemed like a terrible risk. When a cord keeping its secrets had seemed like something right, something sacred.

She’d been wrong. All her life. About everything. Wrong.

It was a very big thing. She sat with it awhile. Her hands on her knees were quiet: one white, one brown.

With a thumb and two fingers, Orca was tapping something high and sweet as a lark’s song on the edge of the drum. Otter listened to the notes looping themselves higher and higher, like the geese lifting from the lake at dawn, that seemed to pull up the sun.

It was music to dream to.

Otter spun her bracelets around her dead wrist with her living hand.

“Why do you not pull it through?” said Kestrel.

Otter held out her hands and said: “Try.” She flipped off the bracelets and tied sorrow’s knot in one of them. She slipped her white hand into the noose. “Try.”

Kestrel pulled her eyebrows together. She set aside her staff and came over. Took hold of the tail of yarn. Pulled softly.

“Try,” said Otter, again.

Kestrel pulled harder. Harder still.

The noose bit into the white wrist. Into skin that did not dimple and fold, but crinkled and split.

“Try,” whispered Otter.

Something came out of those splits that was not blood.

“I —” said Kestrel.

And the yarn tail snapped.

Otter lifted her alien hand. Worked her living fingers into the broken noose, loosening it. The not-blood stained her, stuck to her like pine resin.

She remembered Cricket’s and Kestrel’s hands glued together with sap.
Look, this is where light comes from.

“You knew that would not work.” Orca had set aside his drum.

“Look at me,” said Otter. She lifted her head. As if she stood outside herself, she knew what they saw. The white that washed across her face like funeral paint. Her bleached eyes. She stood and turned around, pulling off her shirt. “Look at me.”

The White Hand had held her in its arms. It had put handprints on her back. They had spread their ache and roots, they had become —