Sorrow’s Knot (8 page)

Cricket was making a porridge and Kestrel was drowsing. Otter had Kestrel’s staff planted between her feet, and yarns wrapped around both hands. The curtain moved.

Otter jerked, power running down her fingers and up her arms — and there was no way to lay such power down quickly.

The curtain stirred aside, and in came Fawn.

She stopped with her back to the curtain and looked at them. Kestrel sat up. Otter had managed to wrap the yarns around her wrists like bracelets, though one cord still tangled the staff, even as she tried to set it aside.

Fawn shook her head. “Don’t. I have seen already.”

Around Otter’s wrists the yarns itched as if they were crawling with insects.

They all stared at one another. It was Cricket who spoke: “What now, then?”

“It does not matter to me,” Fawn said. “Let those who can knot tie knots. That is the way of the prairie.”

It should have been a fear lifting — and yet Otter flashed with anger. “We’re not on the prairie,” she said. “You came here. We are the Shadowed People, and you came here.”

Fawn paused. She was dressed in the manner of the Shadowed People now — a shirt and leggings, not a dress; her face unpainted. But her hair was still coiled around her head, almost as if it were short as a child’s. The ends of the braids quivered like wolf ears above her eyes. She still looked strange. Her voice was soft and child-high: “Need we be enemies, Otter?”

They had never given each other their names — but, of course, in a place so small, they knew them. As Otter knew Fawn, the binder’s apprentice, so Fawn would know Otter, the binder’s rejected daughter.

There were three drumbeats of silence.

“We need not,” said Cricket firmly. “Come to the fire, Fawn, binder of Westmost. We welcome you.”

So Fawn came in. She perched daintily on the bench by the fire. Otter, defiant, pulled Kestrel’s staff into her lap. The little binder watched the cornmeal bubble for a few moments, and then said: “I come to seek your help.”

“With what?” said Otter.

“The binder,” said Fawn, as if the word were difficult. “Your mother, my master. Our binder. Something is wrong.”

“So they say …” said Cricket.

“But they haven’t seen,” said Fawn. “Her power is …”

She fell silent, and they were silent with her. Cricket leaned forward to stir the cornmeal. He sat back and said: “Here is what you’ve seen: Her power turns backward. It pulls too hard, and breaks its travois. It turns too fast, and it entangles her.”

Fawn blinked at him.

Cricket tilted his head. “It does not take a binder to see it.”

“No one else sees it,” said Fawn.

“The day the last binder died, I was still wrapped in healing cords,” he said.

Fawn looked blank, and so he pulled his shirt up a moment. The firelight showed the slickness of the scar between his ribs. “A gast,” he said.

“In the corn,” said Fawn. “I heard.”

“The day Tamarack died, Willow came to us,” said Cricket. “She was frightened. She touched the healing cords — she touched me.” He tugged his shirt straight. “It is not a binder’s power, is it, to make knots undo themselves like snake-balls in the spring? That is something gone too far. Something backward.”

A pause.

“She cannot dress herself,” said Fawn, very softly. “The brown shirt — the one that laces … ?”

“With the shells on the collar,” said Otter.

“It laces across the top of the arms,” said Fawn. “And she cannot lace it. When it touches her, it — the cords — come loose. They move by themselves. Her — her shirt fell off.”

Otter stared at her.

“Is she marked?” said Kestrel.

“Marked?” said Fawn.

“A handprint — a white handprint. Anywhere on her?”

Otter felt the knots of Kestrel’s staff pulse in her hand.

“No,” said Fawn. “I … do not think so.” It was clear she had not looked.

“She wasn’t,” said Otter. “When she touched Cricket, when she bound Tamarack. She wasn’t then.”

“It is not a White Hand,” said Fawn.

“You are from the sunlight,” said Otter. “You have never seen one.”

“Neither have you,” said Cricket gently. The White Hands, the horror at the heart of all horrors. They were that rare.

“It is not that,” said Fawn. “It is … an unbinding. It takes all my power to lace that shirt,” said Fawn, spreading her little hands. “And I do have power. I know I do not look it. But I do. To lace her shirt is the barest edge of what I can do, Otter. I cannot go further — and yet Willow goes further, every day. I need your help.”

Otter looked down at the staff in her hands. “What can I do?”

“You are a binder,” said Fawn. “I know you are.”

Otter laughed bitterly. “I’m nothing. Haven’t you heard?”

The cornmeal had thickened now. They could smell it coming to sweetness, hear it glub. Cricket leaned forward, branch in his hand, and nudged the pot to a cooler part of the fire. Fawn looked at the yellow, stirring stuff.

“Do you know a story,” said Fawn, “about a rope that rots?”

All three of them looked up, sharp and silent, like deer when they hear a twig snap. They looked at one another, and then Cricket said: “Will you tell it?”

“I don’t know it,” said Fawn. “Maybe it is secret? We do not speak much, my master and I. But she begins sometimes to tell this story — or perhaps it is the end of the story. She says that Mad Spider bound her mother too tightly. She says everything is too tight but the rope is rotting.”

The cornmeal gave a last great
glub
, like someone drowning.

A silence tightened, and Fawn said: “She says it will be soon.”

So, winter.

The summer — the last summer of Otter’s childhood — had been dry. As the winter grew colder the river ran shallower and slower than it should have. Somewhere in the Moon of Wolves, it froze solid.

The frozen river was a thing to fear. The dead were shy of running water, but they had no fear of ice.

The Wolf Moon passed and the Hunger Moon grew fat while the slip clotted together in the shadows, and the gast lingered like wolves just under the forest eave, waiting.

“What do they wait for?” said Cricket, when Kestrel reported it. A storyteller’s question, and a good one.

“There is something coming,” said Fawn.

She was often with them. It was like living with a little owl: her watchful eyes, her strange, silent presence. She said she could no longer breathe deep in the binder’s lodge, that the backward powers that surged there made her braids undo themselves. So, often in the evenings, she would bring some of her work, and Otter, no longer shy of her, helped as she could: braiding rawhide, boiling saxifrage to set dyes. Fawn did not offer the secrets of the ward knots, and Otter did not ask for them. But sometimes she watched Fawn’s hands closely as the young binder practiced casting figures, keeping her hands busy as the corn roasted.

“Willow says something is coming,” said Fawn.

Cricket looked at Kestrel and Otter. “So the rope is rotted.”

It was what Mad Spider had called to the bound form of her mother.
I’ll see you when the rope rots.
Tamarack’s rope was rotted.

Kestrel’s face grew tight and thoughtful. “The rangers have seen something. Out near the scaffolding grounds, sniffing its way toward us. They track its coming. It will be here when the moon is full.”

“But that is only three days,” said Otter.

Three days.

By the next morning, and who knew how, the tale was all over the pinch.

They did not panic, the free women of the forest. They prepared.

The binders were sent out to cast a ward — in so short a time, it could only be a weak one — across the river gap. Fawn did it willingly, spending her power until it pulled the color from her skin: She looked pale and small. Willow did it fitfully, and often fell simply to staring into the forest.

All the women of the pinch rewound their bracelets. Those who could shoot tied dead-knots around their arrows. Rangers renewed their staffs. Plans were made to send the men and the children into the binder’s lodge. It was one of the largest lodges, and the best warded. Lodges were built of woven wattle overlaid with clay, then sod. On their inner surfaces the women of Westmost tied knots for luck and protection. In the most ancient of the lodges, generations of knots lined the wattle as feathers line the nests of birds. In a binder’s lodge, of course, those knots would have power. Even the most powerful of the dead, surely, could not burrow into a binder’s lodge. They would have to strike at the door. And a door could, in a last effort, be defended.

Three days was too short, but they did what they could. On the last day, toward sunset, Cricket and Otter and Kestrel shared a roasted pumpkin, stuffed with corn and bits of venison and sage — a feast. “Well,” said Cricket, who was the cook among them, “you’ll need your strength.”

He looked at Kestrel with fear plain on his storytelling face. Not fear of the White Hand. Fear for her. He stumbled through stories that day as he never did, as Otter wove a few last knots around Kestrel’s staff and Kestrel wound and unwound her bracelets, casting the figures she’d learned: the tree, the scaffold, the sky.

Outside, a drum sounded three times. Cricket broke his story mid-sentence. He reached out and wrapped his fingers around Kestrel’s wrist, weaving them in and out of her bracelets. She looked up from her careful fingering of the knots.

“Ward me well,” he said.

Kestrel caught his wrist in turn, so that they were joined as if to pledge
okishae
again. “I’ll be careful.”

She let him go, and he raised a hand to his chest, and then held it out to her. “Do you need two hearts to be so brave? Because you can have mine.”

Kestrel covered her eyes to them, and she went.

Cricket was not a child. But he was male, and had no power — could not possibly defend himself. And Otter had no belt, no status. So they went with the children.

Otter and Cricket went to the binder’s lodge as the light poured out of the sky. They could see the women of Westmost as black figures against the white gleam of the frozen river. They were gathered at the river gate — all of them. The rangers in front, but all of them. The Shadowed People did not hide from danger.

“I could help them,” said Otter. “If they’d have me.”

“Oh,” said Cricket, his voice too light. “Come help me, instead.” He lifted the outer curtain of the binder’s lodge. The silver disks on it fluttered red in the setting light.

Otter had not been in the binder’s lodge since the day her mother had cast her out. It seemed different. The deer-hoof rattles on the door curtains — so often they had clattered a welcome — now seemed to jangle in her ears. The door tunnel seemed small and tight. Inside it was …

She remembered how it had been to go into the empty lodge, the first night of her life alone. Silence had been like a thing that watched her enter.

Fear was the thing here. Thick, choking fear. Something winding through the air.

Her mother wasn’t there. And Otter was glad.

The children of Westmost — a moon-count or so, from babies to girls in their sunflower years — were already gathered. Otter knew them all, at least to call by name, though she did not really have friends among them. They looked up at her and Cricket in the dimness of the lodge, their eyes shining dark and big like rabbits’ eyes.

Cricket paused at Otter’s side, then moved with quick kindness over to the children. She watched as he threw a few planks of sweet-smelling larch onto the sleepy evening fire. The new wood smoked and then flared, and with words and nudges he herded the children close to the leap of light and the fragrant smoke. Soon he had them all seated near the fire and was telling them something small and silly.

Otter should have gone too: should have helped the children, cast figures with them, led them in string games and singing. She didn’t. She stood with the curtain against her back.

The lodge was warm with the fire, and with the breath-heat and heart-heat of the many who sheltered there. But Otter stood at the curtain, and the air that came under it was bone-cold.

Westmost’s handful of grown men sat together on one of the sleeping benches, talking quietly. One of them had an infant in a sling, another bounced a babe on his knee, little fingers wrapped around one of his big fingers.

Helpless: They were all helpless. The firelight picked out the inner wattling of the lodge, and all the blessing knots tied there: a small ward, almost, it must have looked. It must have made the others feel safe. But Otter could feel something restless and rotten coiling around Westmost. She had seen sparrows huddle under the eyes of kestrels. Kestrels can take a bird from the air, but not from a tree. And yet, always, always the sparrows broke first — flying into cold fear, into their own deaths.

Something was coming. Something was about to strike. The men sat talking, and Cricket told “Mad Spider and the Stuck Sheep,” while all around them the blessing knots undid themselves, one by one.

All at once the deerskin curtain behind her jerked and its rattles glattered. Probably it was only the wind, but for a moment Otter felt a fear as if something dead had a hand on her throat. She gasped —

The feeling was gone.

This time, she hadn’t been the only one to feel it. Cricket was looking at her, his eyes wide, his story stumbling. In fact, everyone was looking at her, and past her at the door.

The door that could, in a last chance, be defended.

And it was a binder’s lodge, after all. There were cords.

Otter took loops of blue yarn and rawhide from a hook on the wall. She went out.

Otter went into the door tunnel and let the inner curtain drop. For a moment she was in darkness, and she was alone. She paused there a moment, and then slipped a hand between the great smooth log of the doorframe and the edge of the deerskin curtain, making a cold little eye that looked out into the night.

This is what she saw: The white birches of the ward. The river gap, like a hole where teeth had been knocked out. Her mother, standing there, her shoulders tight as if she had been carrying something heavy for a long time. It seemed to Otter that her mother was looking back — not to the forest, not to the danger, but back. To Westmost. To the binder’s lodge. To her.

Then Willow turned, her form dark against the silver ice of the river that gleamed in the rising moonlight.

Willow turned and faced — nothing.

Something.

Otter only glimpsed it: a lightning flash, a nightmare flicker. Against the moonlit ice it twisted: a human shape, but pulled into lumps and long places, like a shadow cast on rough ground. It looked as if it were made of shadow: a hole in the air, a hole in the light, a place of refusal and rot.

Willow lifted her hands, with the cradle-star strung across them. The thing lifted its hands, which were not like the rest of it, but white.

Cold hands touched Otter’s neck. She spun, thrusting up her bracelets as she turned: But it was only Cricket. He flinched back from the lifted yarn. “Sorry,” he said, soft. And then, softer still: “What did you see?”

Otter swallowed and stared at him: He held a lit pine glim in a stone cup in one hand, as if he were turning into a constellation, as her people said happened to the most honored of the dead. His face was golden by its light, but hard, pinched with fear. She didn’t know how to tell him. It was real. It was here.

“A White Hand,” he said.

And she said: “I saw it.”

For a moment, he looked foolish with fear.

Something outside made a sound, a howl or a moan that might have been human.

Cricket’s breath caught high; he took Otter’s arm. “Come away from there,” he said. “Come away from the door.” He lifted the inner curtain. But Otter didn’t move.

“We should ward it,” she said. “I should — a White Hand. If it breaks through —”