Sorrow’s Knot (30 page)

Mad Spider, who had been wrong, but who had been powerful and clever and brave, had freed the Hands of her time. Other binders had made and freed other Hands. Otter had freed Mad Spider. In her death on the scaffold, she had freed the Hand that was caught inside herself, freed Willow, freed Fawn, freed all of Westmost’s restless, twitching dead.

There was one left. Solitary as a daytime moon.

Trapped as Otter had been, on the scaffold, with her hands pulsing.

Otter knew she would be coming.

And she came.

In the dark pause between the Moon of Blossoms and the Moon of New Grass, as the spring fires burned their highest and the Water Walkers rolled their tents to travel and told their last tales, the White Hand came.

The pinch came running for Otter, of course. She might have strange ideas, she might be at the center of a strange story, she might be young, she might even be mad — but she was the binder of Westmost.

So Otter put on her funeral red and walked out into the evening. She went to the water gate, the gap in the ward where her mother had stood on the day the river had frozen. Here, Willow had slipped. Here, Willow had fallen into the hands of a White Hand.
This
White Hand.

“Don’t go,” she called to the women who were running, to the rangers who were herding the children of Westmost to the binder’s lodge, where they could — if they had to — make a desperate stand. “Stay,” said Otter. “This needs witnessing.”

Some of them went anyway. But most stayed, rangers holding their staffs, Water Walkers with wide eyes, the ordinary women of Westmost waiting in the safety of the running water. It was nearly full night: The sky beyond the birches of the ward was like water saturated with blue dye, dark but full of shining. The ward itself was just a shiver in the twilight.

Outside the ward was something darker than the darkness, hanging at the edge of the black pines. They could see its hands.

Otter took off her spring slippers, eased into the water, and walked out toward it. At the forest edge she climbed onto the bank. She stood in a patch of marsh marigold, bright and soft under her feet. She held out her hands toward the White Hand — a foreign gesture, but one that read
I am unarmed
— and let her voice ring.

“Welcome home, Tamarack. Binder of Westmost.”

Otter stepped closer to the Hand in the darkness. It drifted toward her out of the pine shadows, into the scrub meadow. Almost to the ward. She could barely see it: only the hands. The hunch of what might be shoulders, carrying something heavy. “I am sorry,” she said. Her hands were still out. “I am sorry that we kept you here. I am sorry that we bound you up. To all of your kind. My kind is sorry.”

She stepped forward one more time. The yellow flowers cast petals at her feet, like a dapple of moonlight, though there was no moon. The ward was at her elbow. The gathered rangers behind the strings. The women of Westmost. The silent men of the Sunlit Places.

Otter slipped off her bracelets. She cast nothing. She looked at the cord for a moment. The White Hand seemed to look too. Then Otter made a single slip knot, with a loop no bigger than might hold a cradleboard. “Tamarack?” she said. And held it out.

The pale hands stirred in the darkness like moths. Fluttered, fumbled. Plucked.

The loop lifted from Otter’s fingers. She felt the air stir as the white hands moved next to hers, but not so much as a moth’s feeler touched her. And then the loop was around one white wrist. Around both.

Otter stepped closer still and took the free end of the cord. “I loved you in life,” she said. “I let you go.”

She pulled the loop closed.

There was just one moment where the noose bit in, held. Then it went through the shadow stuff of the White Hand as it had once gone through Otter’s own wrist. There was a fluttering, an urgent movement, like quail flushed from the grass.

And then nothing. The blue yarn fell into the flowers.

Otter lifted her chin and let her voice rise, ring out over the silent pinch. “We will never bind the dead again,” she said.

And then she picked up her slippers and walked back to her lodge.

“It is a good story,” said Orca, leaning on the flank of Thistle’s lodge, watching the chaos near the ward — rangers, dyers, Walkers, children — a fuss of voices and torches such as serious, stable Westmost rarely knew. “A good ending.”

Too much time walking with death had robbed Otter of her quick tongue. On the other hand, she’d become better at listening. She turned to Orca. “But … ?”

“I —” He ducked his head aside. “I must go, Otter. I must go back.”

“To your people.”

“To my father. To find out what happened. To put right what I can.”

The great fire of the spring festival was burning in the palm: It made Orca’s tattoos leap and change, though he was holding very still. Otter said nothing. To go back — it would be a terribly hard thing. But she had little standing to argue against doing terribly hard things.

“I will make the story first,” he promised. “Your story. When I am done, those who hear it — those who hear it will weep. They will never tie a binder’s knot again.”

Otter thought about this, silently.

Orca had pulled a bit of bindweed. The flower was closed against the night, a curl of softness against one of his fingernails. He looked down, then up. His eyes were dark and serious. “It will break me, Otter. It will tear me like the drumskin, to leave you.”

For a moment, she felt her own heart tear. Then she blurted: “But I’m coming with you.”

His face fell open. It was a perfect mirror of Cricket’s look of foolish surprise, and behind her, Otter heard Kestrel laugh.

“Of course she is, storyteller,” she said, coming over. “Did you not see that coming? Otter and I are going west. We have been for some time.”

“Otter
and
you?” Orca tried to gulp down his gape, which made him look even more foolish.

“I have left enough of myself here,” said Otter.

“If she goes without me, she will probably be eaten by a bear,” said Kestrel. “She has no woodcraft. And she’s stupid with love.”

Orca tucked his chin, blushing. “Is she?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Otter.

“Hmmm.” Kestrel pointed across the gardens to where Newt the bonesetter was trying to keep back a small pack of women who looked likely to storm over to the unbinder and demand answers. “I’d best help take care of that.”

She left, and Otter found herself alone, watching Orca spin the bindweed in his fingers as if he were making a rope. He was blushing deeply, and the waves on his jaw quivered as he tried not to let himself smile. “You don’t know … ?” he murmured, his head bent as if speaking to the sealed flower.

“I just came back to life, Orca,” she said. “You must give me some time to find out.” She stepped in front of him, trapping him against the earth wall. He glanced up at her, shivering as if with fear.

“Take time now,” he said, his voice rough. He put one hand on the flare of her hip.

She slipped a hand behind the back of his neck. She felt him tense, and then — as she kissed the point on his jaw where the waves turned to whirlpools — she felt the fear knots in him releasing.

Something rose in her, certain and sure, as she sought out his mouth. She slid her hand around him until her fingers curled over his collarbone. She pulled herself up on tiptoe, and pressed the other hand over his heart. His heartbeat matched hers.

Their hearts, together, made a music like drums.

A few years ago, my then-five-year-old daughter asked: “What’s taking you so long with your book, Mommy? Is it all the words?”

There’s a lot of words in my life, and I want first to thank my husband, James Bow, who has loved me through more than a million of them. Thanks also to my early readers Rebecca, Seánan, and Susan, who walked me through chapter by chapter, step by step. Seánan in particular was there for long Internet chats, usually in the middle of the night her time, in which she helped me feel my way to the story in a dozen lost-in-darkness places. Thanks and love to my in-person writers’ group, the Hopeful Writers — Kristen, Nan, Pamela, Susan again, and our much-missed late friend Esther — who read bits and held hands. My online friends at Wri, too many to name, listened to me whinge about stuckedness. Thank you all.

Now, research. As my last book was set in a fantastical world that was recognizably Eastern European, this one is set in a fantastical world that’s recognizably North American. (It’s worth noting, though, that the Shadowed People are not meant to represent any particular indigenous culture.) It takes a lot of research to build a rounded world. My characters and I would like to thank the folks at the ethnobotany project at the University of Minnesota, for tending to our aches and pains; wild food and foraging experts Mike and Christine, for keeping Kestrel and Otter from starving; ancient technology expert Ashti, for tending to the fires; and sacred drummer Nicholas, for helping Orca find his beat. The late Buffalo Bird Woman’s ethnographic testimony gave Westmost its lodges and gardens. There were more folks lending a hand along the way, setting dyes, knapping flint, ruining cities, and more. A thousand thanks to all of them.

This book took some time to find its shape. Thanks to my agent, Emily, who believed in it when it was shapeless. And thanks to Arthur, the other Emily, and the rest of the folks at Arthur A. Levine Books and Scholastic for their keen editorial eyes. I hope that Otter’s book is sharp, strong, and sweet — but if it is, it’s because Arthur and Emily helped me see.

Finally, this book in which so much family stuff goes wrong would not be possible without a life in which family stuff goes right. Thank you to my parents, who thought they were raising a scientist but embraced the writer without hesitating, and only occasionally express their worry that I will end up under a bridge. And thanks to my own two lovely little girls. Vivian, Nora: You are the music of my heart.

Erin Bow was born in the Midwest and studied particle physics in college, eventually working at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. She then decided to leave science in order to concentrate on her love of writing. The
New York Times
called her debut novel,
Plain Kate
, “outstanding,” and it went on to win the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award. She lives in Kitchener, Ontario, with her husband, James, and their two daughters. Visit Erin online at
www.erinbow.com
.