Sorrow’s Knot (14 page)

“This.” Willow had made it big — big enough to go around a whole body. “Tie them like this. Then pull —” Her voice became hollow again. “Closed.”

A noose with nothing in it pulls open. Willow had said that when Otter had first tied this knot, the day they’d bound Fawn. It was meant to be a release. A noose with nothing in it …

Willow drew the noose slowly closed. But not all the way. She stopped when it was still large enough to slip around the neck.

Her drifting eyes sought Otter’s. They had changed, but there was still something in them that hooked right into Otter’s eyes, into her heart.

And in that moment, Otter knew exactly what that noose was for.

“Mother.” She choked on the word.

“Let me go …” said the hollowed voice.

It was what Tamarack had said, dying.

“I love you,” said Otter.

“Always,” answered Willow — answered the last of Willow. “Now. Go.”

Otter hugged her mother — what was left of her mother. Felt the heat of her and the coldness, the movement of her ribs. The fierceness of her returned hug. And Otter did the bravest thing she’d ever done. She let her mother go.

Otter burst from the earthlodge, where her mother was dying, and bolted into the cold. She spun away from the clutch of lodges and ran across the top of the snow — a handful of heartbeats, another handful — then the snow crust broke under her and she staggered, tumbled.

Ice bit her hands. She was panting, gulping. Not yet crying. The light shot rainbows into her eyes. A cold wind whipped her hair everywhere. It howled in her ears like a lost thing.

She knew exactly what the noose was for.

It wasn’t something she could run from, but as she knelt in the snow her body jerked and jerked as if it needed to run. “Belt of the Spider.” The words seemed to come through her from somewhere else. “Belt of the Spider. By the potter and the weaver — by … Mother.”

She felt a hand on her shoulder. Kestrel, crouching by her, balanced on top of the wind-sculpted drifts of the snow. Cricket was there too, though the snow wouldn’t hold him. He kept breaking through it, stumbling, loud as a buffalo.

“Better she choose her time,” said Kestrel. “Better her own noose than a spear to the heart.”

“There’s something wrong with the knots —” said Otter. She knew, even as she said it, that she was not making sense.

“Otter?” said Cricket.

She pushed herself up. “Where’s Thistle?”

Kestrel stepped forward and caught Otter in a hug. She held on ferociously.

Otter struggled loose. “Where’s Thistle?”

For five drumbeats no one answered her. “She’s … helping,” said Kestrel. “Willow … would need help.”

“I hate her,” said Otter. “I hate her.”

A howling silence. Then Cricket said: “Thistle does this so that you don’t have to.”

“I hate her,” said Otter again, shivering — and started, at last, to cry.

“She loved you,” said Cricket, not meaning Thistle.

The three of them held on to one another, shivering and crying, shin-deep in the broken snow.

Thistle, as rangers do, took care of things.

Took care, perhaps, of too much.

When Otter and the bonesetter, Newt, went back inside the lodge, they found Willow’s body already cut down from its noose, already wrapped up — as Fawn had been — in a buffalo robe. Otter was left to imagine her mother’s hands — one white, one human — curled up on the chest. She was left to imagine the scorch of the noose on her mother’s throat. She could see a bit of hair escaping from the top of the shroud. She could see toes.

It did not seem real.

Willow. Her mother. Dead. Right in front of her.

Surely, it could not be real.

Thistle sat, as still as a hunting heron, one hand cradled against her breastbone. Her eyes looked blank and she wasn’t crying. Otter could just see her shoulders twitch as she breathed.

Newt was brought up short by the figure in the shroud, but she blinked and turned. “Lady Thistle,” she said briskly, “let me see your hand.”

“The body is knots,”
said Thistle. “Willow used to say that.”

Then she held out her hand.

It was not marked white, as it would have been if the dead had taken it. But otherwise it was a dead-thing touch-wound: The hand was slack were it should not be slack, swollen like spider bites. Unmade. The sudden strike of Willow’s white hand had unmade it.

Otter swallowed down bile.

She looked at her mother’s hair again. It was still now, no longer moving as if made of snakes. A little wind lifted three strands. Otter turned and saw the curtains were still hooked open. She went back into the cold, back to her friends.

Newt came out sometime later and spoke to the women clustered in the open space of the palm. “This has happened,” she would be telling them. “The binder has killed herself so that the White Hand will not hatch from her. You do not need to be afraid.”

Newt always did like to be first with the news.

“Willow has killed herself. Don’t be afraid.”

Or would she blame Thistle? Give Thistle the credit? “The woman so strong she could kill her own daughter. Thistle, she has defended us.”

Thistle, she is broken.

Otter didn’t even know which story was true. Which one she wanted to be true.

There was no story in which her mother wasn’t dead.

No story in which Otter would not have to put on a red shirt and walk into the forest. Bind her mother as Fawn had been bound. As the mother of Mad Spider had been bound. There were eyes on her, glances coming from the palm.

She would have to wear red.

The sun had rolled halfway along the rim of the world before Otter saw Thistle again.

She and Cricket and Kestrel had gone to the only place they could think of, though it was the last place they wanted to be: the binder’s lodge. The place where Otter had grown up. Where Tamarack had died. Where the children had huddled in fear of the White Hand. Where Otter had cast her first ward — her only ward. The ward that had killed Fawn.

“It smells like Red Fox’s den in here,” said Kestrel. And then she said: “Sorry.”

The lodge stank with urine and fear and worse. It had only been five days.

Hanging on the wall hooks were blue cords for casting a ward. Red cords for binding the dead.

Sitting at the foot of Otter’s old sleeping platform, folded neatly, was a red shirt. A white belt with silver disks. And a knife with a handle of human bone.

A binder’s funeral gear.

Otter stood and stared at it and shivered, shivered. “Can you sleep?” said Kestrel, her hand on Otter’s shoulder.

Otter shook her head. Not there. Never. She would never sleep again.

“It may yet be a long day,” said Kestrel.

Cricket snorted. “I think the sun might be lost, this day has been so long already. And of course she can’t sleep here.” He looked at Otter. “Could you drink something? A broth? A tea?”

She didn’t answer him. The shivering was bad.

“Something hot,” he murmured. She could hear the damage in his voice, the price of four days telling stories. The fire pit was gray and cold. Cricket frowned over it.

“Never mind,” said Kestrel.

Cricket said: “No, I’ll go,” and went to borrow an ember from someone else’s fire. Otter wondered if he’d go back to their home — their had-been sweet, cheerful home — that held the body of Willow and the silence of Thistle. She didn’t ask him. She sat down beside the red shirt.

Cricket didn’t come back, and didn’t come back.

Otter raised her fist up to measure the movement of the sun — but her eyes hit only earth and darkness. Of course they were inside.

But surely, it had been two fists of sun. Maybe three. Strange. Too long.

But Cricket didn’t come.

Thistle did.

For a heartbeat, Otter didn’t recognize her. She’d aged a moon-count of years. She leaned on her staff — the spear-point gone, the ranger’s knots burned away by the strike of Willow’s white hand — and came to them almost shuffling.

But her voice was strong. “We must bind Willow,” she said. “Kestrel: Will you go to guard?”

Kestrel shook herself as if trying to wake up. Then she tipped her head and covered her eyes to the master of her cord. “Of course.”

“Good,” said Thistle. “I will ask Cress and Feather to bear the body. And send for Flea, to be the drum.”

“Flea?” said Kestrel. Flea, not Cricket?

“Flea is first storyteller,” said Thistle.

Otter’s gaze snagged on Thistle’s hand — not the one that gripped the staff, knuckles yellow, but the one that hung, half-hidden, in the folds of Thistle’s long shirt. It was elaborately splinted, bound in many small red cords. She could barely imagine how much that must hurt.

“That will do, then,” said Thistle. “The fewer, the better. Otter: Put on your shirt.”

“The fewer …” said Otter. It sounded in her ears like
I hate her.
“No. No. She was the binder of Westmost. We should all go.”

“She was a White Hand,” said Thistle. “And we will not.”

The whole pinch had walked out for Tamarack. And Willow — she’d been better than Tamarack. She’d been stronger.
She’d been
— Otter thought —
she’d been everything.

“She wasn’t,” said Otter. “She wasn’t a White Hand. Not yet, and now she won’t ever be.”

Thistle’s ruined hand stirred. “You don’t know that. And it is dangerous to leave the pinch. The White Hand that touched her — it was never undone.”

The shivering came back to Otter.

“Otter.” Thistle lowered her voice. Otter thought she might be trying to be kind.
I hate her,
she thought.
I hate her.

“Otter: I must keep us safe. Sometimes it is hard. Willow — Willow knew that. You know that.”

It was not kindness, it was pleading.
Forgive me,
that was what Thistle was saying.

Otter didn’t.

“We must keep to our ways, and we must be strong,” said Thistle. “You must be strong, Otter, Granddaughter, Lady Binder. Put on your shirt.”