Sorrow’s Knot

Like a baby named for her midwife, this book is dedicated to Seánan Forbes, who walked me through all the stuck spots.

The girl who remade the world was born in winter.

It was the last day of the Nameless Moon, and bitterly cold. For as long as she could, the girl’s mother, whose name was Willow, walked round and round the outside of the midwife’s lodge, leaning on the earthen walls when pains came fiercely. Willow’s hair was full of sweat, and her body was steaming like a hot spring. She was trailed by a mist of ice that glittered in the bitter sunlight. She looked like a comet.

She looked like what she was: a woman of power.

Willow was a binder: a woman whose power and duty it was to tie the knots that bound the dead. But her knots could do more than that. When the time was right, she went into the midwife’s lodge, and there, as the last binder had taught her, Willow let her power turn backward and undid the knot between herself and her baby, and made an easy birth.

“Ah,” said Willow as the babe was placed on her belly. “Ah, look! Look at you!” The baby gave a great squall and started to cry. “Look at you,” said Willow, touching the little face. The baby turned toward the touch, rooting for milk. “Just look.”

“A girl,” said the midwife. “A beautiful girl. And in the lucky moon too. What will you call her?”

Willow touched the black hair, which was spiked into small peaks with dampness and looked like the thick, wet pelt of an animal. “Otter,” said Willow. She kissed the closed eyes, and they opened, fathomless. Willow cupped her daughter’s little face and gave a mother’s blessing: “I name you Otter. May you be clever and happy. May you have a fierce bite. May you always be warm.”

She touched the dark hair again, and at the touch of her power — still backward, still — the straight spikes sprang into curls. The baby gurgled. The midwife frowned. But Willow did not see, and only smiled, falling into those dark eyes. “May you live with joy.”

So Otter was born, and so she came to girlhood, among Shadowed People, the free women of the forest, in the embrace of mountains so old they were soft-backed, so dark with pine that they were black in summer. A river came out of those mountains, young and quick, shallow and bone-cold. Where it washed into a low meadow, the people had cleared the birch saplings and scrub pines and built a stronghold of sunlight.

The name of their pinch — a forest town was called a pinch — was Westmost, because it was the westernmost human place in the world. If one traveled farther west, upstream, the mountains rose, and the rivers were too small to run in the cold winters, and only the dead lived long.

The dead. Otter grew up almost without fear of them. After all, her home was the safest place in Westmost: the binder’s lodge. Otter and Willow lived there with the first binder, Tamarack, who was old by the time Otter was born: a woman with hair as soft as milkweed seed and fingers as strong as rawhide knots.

Tamarack, as first binder, was a woman of status; when people came up to her, they covered their eyes. But for Willow — though she was only second binder — for Willow people did not simply cover their eyes. They told tales. It was said that Willow was the greatest binder since the days of the Mad Spider, whose time was sinking from memory to legend. It was said that she had given birth without a single sound. It was said that her ward knots were so strong they could stop the very dust, and leave it hanging, glittering, in the air.

They lived a quiet life, Otter and Willow and Tamarack. Inside their lodge, no one visited, and they were easy with one another: daughter and mother and something near to a grandmother. Outside it, they were honored.

And so Otter grew up as a princeling might grow, or the acolyte of a great priest. Her shirt was made of the skin of a white deer, embroidered with quills and silver disks. But though she could have held herself apart, held herself proud, Otter did not. She was a tumbling child, strong and happy, like the best puppy in the litter. She was the one who led the children in sledding down the snowbanked sides of the earthlodges in winter, splashing in the cold river in summer, spearing fish with sharpened sticks. Her fine clothes were always mud-smeared and tattered. Her mother mended them, and sometimes the embroidery curled loose in Willow’s hands, sinewy threads springing free from the shirt, twining around the binder’s fingers like questing tendrils of morning glory.

Otter was a child; she did not notice the clothes unstitching themselves. Tamarack was old, and her eyes were failing. She did not see it. Willow saw it, watched it, and dreamed of it. But she said nothing.

At the edges of Otter’s childhood, the black trees cast shadows, and in those shadows, the dead were always hungry. But Otter did not look too closely at the shadows. As her mother had wished for her, she was clever and warm-hearted and fiercely happy. For a while.

Otter and her friends were in trouble again.

There were three of them: Otter, Kestrel, and Cricket, who was the only boy. They were not related by blood, but they were close in age, and they’d grown up together like wolf pups. Now they were the oldest children of Westmost, and a solid little pack.

On that day, they’d been given the work of pulling up last year’s cornstalks — muddy, messy, hard work — and they’d done quite a bit of it. But the gardens of Westmost were large, and the day was lovely: earliest spring, the Sap-Running Moon. There was a warm breeze and the sun was soft as a blessing, though snow still clung in the shadows under the pine trees. After the long winter in the lodges, such a day tempted them.

Kestrel had started it. There had been one thrown mudball, and then another — and then a storm of them, and a broken hoe. And now they were facing down the cold and careful judgments of —

“Who started it?” asked Thistle.

Otter would never betray one of her pack to one of the stiff, serious adults of Westmost — particularly not this adult. Thistle was the chief of Westmost’s rangers, one of the most powerful women in the pinch, and the person who had given them the work in the first place. And, though Otter rarely thought of her so, she was Willow’s mother, Otter’s grandmother. There was something old and broken between Thistle and Willow. Otter did not know what had happened, but without even wondering, she took her mother’s side.

She would not turn in Kestrel. And even if she had, Thistle would not have believed her. Kestrel started it? Kestrel was dutiful and upright. Only Otter and Cricket knew how mischief would slip out of that sober exterior like a turtle poking out of its shell. Only Otter and Cricket knew: Yes, Kestrel started it.

“Well?” said the ranger captain. “Speak. Cover your eyes and speak.”

The three of them each covered their eyes. Otter saw Cricket sneak a sidelong look behind his lifted hand — over Kestrel’s head, his gaze met Otter’s. His eyes were dark and bright as a chickadee’s and he had mud streaked across his nose. Otter had to swallow her grin. “Lady Ranger,” she said, “I don’t know what you mean.” A clump of mud chose that moment to slide down the front of her shirt and plop at Thistle’s feet.

“Binder’s daughter,” said Thistle, “I mean there is a hoe broken. There is a field half-done.”

“I tripped,” said Otter.

Cricket was trembling with silent laughter. Kestrel dipped her dutiful head and appeared to study the knots in the yarn that wrapped the foot of Thistle’s staff.

“You tripped,” said Thistle. “And your friends?”

“Helped me up,” said Otter sturdily. It was quite true. She left out that her friends had also knocked her down.

Thistle put up both eyebrows. Otter, Kestrel, and Cricket stood united in their silence. Mud dripped from them, incriminatingly.

“Do it without the tools, then,” said Thistle. She took the broken hoe from Kestrel; Otter and Cricket surrendered their digging sticks. “These come from the forest. Such things are not without cost.”

And off she strode.

The three of them watched her go.

“There are tales,” said Cricket, tugging on one ear, “of a woman who was never young. I think I now believe them.”

“Are there stories you do not believe?” asked Kestrel as they walked back into the squelching corn. “I didn’t know.”

Cricket was in love with storytelling. He’d been known to spin the wildest ones with a perfectly straight face.

“There’s one about a binder’s daughter,” said Cricket. “She
tripped
.”

Kestrel laughed her sweet and secret laugh, the one she used for them alone.

“It’s only a stick,” said Otter. She spun her yarn bracelets, making sure the mud hadn’t snagged them — a somewhat sulky gesture, in a place where yarn meant safety. Cornstalks, even the half-rotted ones of the end of winter, had a sullen grip on the earth. Clearing them without their digging sticks and rakes would not be easy. “A hoe is bit of wood and a bit of bone. How costly can it be?”

Experimentally, Otter tugged at a cornstalk. It didn’t budge. It was lifted on its little roots, standing above a small cage of shadow, and it looked fragile, but it was going nowhere without a fight. Otter braced her foot against the corn hill and pulled hard. The stalk, of course, gave way suddenly, and Otter stumbled backward.

Cricket caught her. “Clearly, Otter, you are growing into a woman of grace and power.”

“There is still mud to throw, Cricket.”

Kestrel was tugging at her own cornstalk, and she too was struggling. “I side with Otter,” she said. “Sticks” — tug — “are not” — tug — “so scarce.”

“Thistle is thinking only of your safety,” said Cricket. “I was planning a devastating surprise attack.”

Otter’s second stalk gave way then, and she fell again. The clots of earth tumbled down the little hill around her.

“Grace,” sighed Cricket, shaking his head, “and power.”

There was a clot the size of a snowball right by Otter’s hand. She threw it. It splatted against Cricket’s heart and slid goopily down the already-mud-slicked deerskin of his shirt. “Tsha!” he said. “My hand was out to help you!”

“Grace and power, you say,” she said, rising to her knees among the clots.

Cricket’s eyes widened and he dodged backward, tripping and landing on his tailbone in the sticky mud. Otter was laughing even as she stood up, armed.

“Otter!” Kestrel’s voice was stretched between delight and caution. “Oh, Otter, don’t….”

Cricket was a pole’s length away, and the low spot gave him shelter. He stretched a hand behind him, seeking a clump of dirt.

Otter was laughing so hard it was bending her up like grief. She was hiccupping. Cricket fumbled, reaching — and in the place he was reaching toward, Otter saw something.

Something was resting in the nest of shadows under a cornstalk, something stirring as Cricket’s hand came near. Something gawk-stretched and ugly as a new-hatched bird with no feathers and skin over its eyes. Something that moved subtly, like the earth moving above something buried. Something struggling and starving.

Cricket reached backward, fumbling toward the shadow-cage, and the dark thing opened its dark mouth like a baby bird, like a snake. It opened so wide that if it had had a jaw, its jaw would have broken. Suddenly it was all mouth, and it was reaching —

There was one heartbeat in which Otter couldn’t move. She was still hiccupping, though her heart had nearly stopped with horror. Kestrel shouted: “Cricket!”

Cricket grinned up at Kestrel, groping unknowing toward the shadow — and Otter dove to save him.

Anyone in the pinch would have counted her as a child. But it never occurred to her that most people would have dived the other way.

“Ware!” shouted Kestrel.

Cricket’s smile froze, his head whipped toward the warning. He was halfway to his feet by the time Otter hit him. She’d meant to knock him sideways, but because he was twisting she hit him wrong. He fell full backward, into the corn.

Onto the dead thing.

It vanished under him for a moment, and in the next heartbeat it was coming out of the muddy trail over his breastbone, where Otter’s latest mudball had hit him. It had pushed up through him like a shoot breaking free of a seed.

“Ware!” shouted Kestrel, her voice cracking then ringing out: “Ware the dead!”

Otter, meanwhile, had thrown herself backward, out of range of the uncoiling darkness. She fell into the cold, sticky mud — and Cricket gave a single raw scream.

A shadow fell across Otter and her heart lurched — but it was Kestrel, yanking her to her feet.

Cricket was thrashing. He managed to roll over onto his stomach, but the dead thing only moved with him, rolling him as a wolf rolls a deer, breaking now out of his back. Kestrel’s fingers dug savagely into Otter’s arm.

Otter yanked free, pulling at the yarn that wound her wrists. In three drumbeats, she had the long loop hooked around her spread fingers and was making a pattern of crossed strings in the air.

Cricket pushed himself up on his hands for just a moment — and then fell, his face in the mud. By then, Kestrel had her bracelets free too. “Not the cradle,” said Otter, looking at the pattern Kestrel was casting. It was a cradle-star, the simplest of casts; done well, with intention and power, it could both detect and repel the dead. “Not the cradle — we have to pull it out.” If they repelled the thing, it might only seep back down into Cricket’s body.

The fallen boy was gulping in panic, swallowing earth.

“I can’t cast anything else,” said Kestrel.

Very few could.

There was an instant when they simply stared at each other. Kestrel shot a look at the ring of earthlodges. From the ring, and from the river and from the ward gates, there came shouting and movement.
Ware the dead,
Kestrel had called. It would bring help running. But the garden was big and they were on the far side of it, just a pine’s length from the ward itself. Even Thistle had long since left them. It would be a hundred heartbeats before they had help.

And Cricket did not have that many heartbeats left.

“Is there only one?” said Kestrel.

“I only saw one.”

That meant nothing. The dead were drawn together like raindrops into greater drops. There was never only one.

Kestrel looked down at Cricket, at the shadows he was lying in, the little pockets and knots of shadow cast by the jumbled earth. Any one of them might have contained something hungry and nearly invisible, something deadly. And yet Kestrel dropped her bracelets, which were her only defense, went to her knees in those shadows. She lifted Cricket by the shoulders, jerking his head into her lap so he wouldn’t drown in mud. She took both his hands. She looked up at Otter. And she said: “Pull it out.”

So Otter stood over her two friends, with help coming, but not quickly enough, and the dead thing close enough to taste in the air. The world seemed to narrow. Wind beat wings in her ears: the only sound. The strings dug into the roots of her fingers. They crossed and opened: the only movement.

Kestrel’s fingers were laced around Cricket’s fingers, two tangles of knuckles, white with panic. Her hands were still. His hands jerked open and closed even as she held them. Otter could hear him gulping, see his back arch like a torn deer trying to rise.

But he could not rise. The dead thing rose out of him. It was an arrow tall now. It had thickened until it almost had form — twisty like smoke, gelatinous like frogs’ eggs, rising up from Cricket’s spine. It was so close to Kestrel that her breath seemed to stir it. It wove in front of her frozen eyes like a snake rearing. But still she did not let Cricket go.

Otter’s pattern had come together. The tree: roots in one hand, branches in the other. She braced herself and lowered the hand that held the roots into the sticky-looking shadow.

The dead thing flowed up into the strings.

It was the first time Otter had held the dead. She’d made the loops dance around her fingers before; she could cast patterns fast and fearlessly, but she’d never before used them. Until that instant, she hadn’t known what it meant to use them. Whether she
could
use them.

But she could. The cords between her fingers felt to her, suddenly, as real as her fingers themselves. As real as if her blood vessels had been pulled outside of her skin and held stretched open. The touch of the dead thing on those cords was like plunging the hand into winter water. A shock, and then a slow-building pain. That was power: the ability to feel that cold. And beyond that: the ability to feel that cold, and stand still.

Otter lifted her hands. She held them high, and as far from her own body as she could. She pulled the dead thing up, stretching it thin — and then it came free of Cricket’s back. The boy made a wet and broken sound.

It was all in Otter’s hands now. She started to shiver, and then shake as if taken by a seizure. How long could one stand in such cold? The tree she’d cast made the dead thing climb — it could no longer reach down for Kestrel and Cricket.
Good,
she thought, but her hands shook as she moved the pattern, trying to change the tree to the scaffold. Her fingers were nearly numb. They would drop the cast — they would drop it and then …

The narrowed world was tiny now: Otter could see only the blue cords and the black eel of the dead thing pulsing and struggling inside them.

And then she saw other hands reaching into her pattern.

“Otter. Otter, give it to me.”

It was her mother’s voice: her mother, the binder, Willow. Willow’s fingers seemed to shine as they reached in and mirrored her fingers, slipping into all the right places. Otter’s vision was fading: She could see willful darkness pulse around the cords, and the cords themselves flaring like lightning and beating like red hearts. She knew she was close to passing out. Breathless, she managed the last twist — the one that would move her pattern from her hands onto her mother’s.

And then she found herself sitting on the cold wet earth.

Cricket was curled up on his side, with Kestrel still clutching both his hands. His mouth was black and dribbled with swallowed earth. That black mouth moved. For a moment Otter was frightened, but then realized it was good news, that moving mouth. Cricket was still breathing.