Sorrow’s Knot (16 page)

So they went out.

As the forest closed around them, a drum began to play.
Lum dum, lum dum
: the heartbeat of the world, the drum that was played only when the dead were walked out.

Otter’s breath caught — and the drum caught too, and began again, its beat backward:
dum lum, dum lum
.
Come back,
said that drumbeat.
Children of Westmost. Come back safely. Come back soon.

The funeral drum was a secret of the storyteller’s cord. Flea. Cricket’s cord mother and master, his teacher and friend.

Find him,
said the drumbeat.
Come back.

“Flea,” said Kestrel, who knew this too. Otter nodded. And then they went on without speaking, and the drum went with them, softening slowly, staying a long time. Otter listened to it even as it became faint, and sometimes lost, like the sound of someone breathing on the other side of a lodge.

The day was windy. The trees were shaking off their coats of snow, shaking themselves clean like dogs. Still, the snow had — as snow often does — made it warmer. The still and shattering cold that had frozen the Spearfish and laid the pinch open to the White Hand was gone. The river was thawing, from the bottom up. The ice that had been blinding white on the day of the White Hand was dark now, blue. They could see the water push bubbles of air across its thinning underside. In places it was thin as a sheet of mica. In places it was gone.

It would not hold their weight.

They went beside the river, down its fringe of grasses, down the path in the snow they had broken earlier, coming home from the scaffolds. Kestrel had her staff lifted in her hand. Otter had her bracelets loose. They were not defenseless.

Cricket had been defenseless.

They could see his footprints, sometimes on the path, sometimes dodging onto the ice of the river. There, sometimes, breaking through: dark holes in the ice, water bubbling in them and freezing white around the sharp edges.

What had he been dodging?

On the riverside path, their own footprints, returning to Westmost, overlaid his, going out. They had walked past this. Walked past him. They had not known.

Otter watched Kestrel’s face grow tight.

Otter shifted the pack on her back: the unfamiliar weight. Kestrel had, with haste, shown her how to pack a ranger’s travel bag: cornmeal and sunflower meal, pemmican and dried saskatoons. She’d shown her how to strap an axe to her hip. How to wrap a live ember in birch bark and a bit of tube cut from the horn of a mountain ram. Some of those things were probably secrets of the rangers’ cord. Otter did not care.

The drum was gone now. Either Flea had stopped beating it or it had vanished into the slough and rush of the wind in the trees.

They went past the path up to the scaffolds, beyond the edge of the world that Otter knew. And following them, it seemed to her, came patches of shadow, shifting from branch to branch in the black pines like crows.

She began to be afraid.

They had ranger’s gear — wolf-fur hoods and mittens, boot coverings made from the sacs that hold the hearts of buffalo, which could hold out water. As they slipped past the path up to the scaffolds, Kestrel pulled her hood down, to track better. Otter pulled her mittens off, to free her fingers for the yarns. There were still footprints in front of them: only one set now. Deepest at the toes. Cricket. Running.

Running, with nowhere to go.

The footprints were always on the fringe now, not the ice. His feet must have been wet, cold — the kind of cold that blazes. It was like the touch of a gast, that cold. Even without the dead, it could kill him quickly enough.

The prints went slower. They were no longer deeper at the toe. They were unevenly spaced. The wind picked up, swirling the snow across the river. If it covered the prints then how would they …

Otter put her mittens back on. Kestrel put hers on too, and slung her staff down her back. It was reckless to put away their defense, but their hands were freezing. They needed speed more than safety. They went faster — as much as they could — knowing the day was short, and that they had only the day. They nibbled balls of sunflower meal to keep their strength. They chewed juniper berries against the fear that dried their mouths.

And all the while, the wind scoured away the footprints they were following, and the ones they’d left behind.

Otter would never have found Cricket. But Kestrel was a ranger. A hunter, among other things. She could track a deer, spot a rabbit run, and tell the best place to set a snare. She could follow a wild sheep up a rock face.

She found the place where the footprints left the river. The river wore a skirt of snow-covered grass, hemmed with aspens. Under the trees, raspberry cane stuck up through the snow in half hoops. Kestrel spotted a place where the tops of the raspberry wore no snow. Where one of the hoops had been wrenched free of the ground and now wandered half-upright in the air, like one of Willow’s yarns.

“Here,” she said.

The sun was low by then: pink where it shone down the river, catching the breaking, jumbled sheets of ice with gold. Under the trees, it was blue and purple, thick as if coming through smoke. Slanting in here and there in yellow beams, solid-looking as the trunks of birch.

“He would have …” said Kestrel, and then: “He needs a fire.”

Otter peered past the smooth gray trunks of the aspen. Under the pine trees, little grew. Indeed, there was very little snow. The slopes were covered in pine needles, smooth where the ground was smooth, drifted next to boulders: long fallen needles the color of a dead woman’s skin. There was nothing in those shadowy woods: nothing at all. Nothing looked at her. She could feel its eyes.

To go into the woods — Cricket must have had some urgent need. For instance, fire. He could only have been driven in by the coming darkness. The same darkness in which they now stood. “It cannot have been long ago,” she said.

“Quickly,” said Kestrel, pulling her staff into her hands. “Let’s go.”

It was louder under the trees: The branches rustled and murmured above as if talking to one another. Otter had lived all her life in sight of this forest, but she had not stood in it before, not in a trackless place, not alone, not like this. The thick light shifted and coiled as the high branches moved. The trees spoke. And the dead: Otter’s bracelets stirred and twisted.

Otter pulled the yarns free and cast a cradle-star between her fingers: a knot to detect and repel. The loops burrowed like leeches toward the soft places between her fingers. The crossed strings pulsed and tugged. But there was no direction to that tug. It was as if something was … everywhere.

She lifted the cradle-star as if it were a torch.

There was nothing near enough to see.

But the pulsing strings, her prickling skin, told her differently. If the cradle had been a torch, it would have cast a circle of light. And right outside that circle, the cords told her, there would be something watching.

Kestrel had stooped. There were footprints again: places where the needles had slipped under a foot, making little curls of bare earth. Kestrel’s eyes were on the ground, but her staff was lifted. They crept forward. The needles gave way under their feet too. The darkness rose up out of the earth and began to swallow them.

But before it did, before it quite did, they found him.

First it was a stick, and then two. And then, as the track cut upward toward a huge nest of boulders, each twice a woman’s height, Otter found a bundle of fallen sticks. Fallen pine branches, all aligned, but sliding over one another. Firewood. Dropped firewood. She met Kestrel’s eyes. Raised her cradle-star, so that the ranger could see how the strings were pulsing.

Kestrel ran her hand down the knots of her staff, making the little silver charms wink in the last of the light. She nodded. They edged forward.

The trees surged and roared in a gust of wind, and then suddenly dropped into utter quiet.

And in that quiet, something drifted to them from behind the gray stones. A voice. Warm and weak, beloved and afraid. “Now,” it was saying, “even Red Fox had to sleep sometime.”

Kestrel hefted her staff and sprang around the flank of the standing stone, and Otter lifted her casting and charged after.

Cricket was sitting on the slope above them, his back to a boulder, his head in a streak of twilight, his legs so deep in shadow they could hardly be seen.

Not just sitting, Otter thought: He looked as if he’d been thrown there, like a jointed doll. His head was leaning back, his braids splayed over the stone, glossy hair catching on the rough places.

He heaved a huge breath when he saw them, and his voice jerked. “Hello,” he said, and swallowed once, twice, three times, “I was just telling it a story.”

The strings on Otter’s fingers jerked sideways. She whipped around. Standing beside her was the White Hand.

Otter raised her cradle against the White Hand. It flowed backward — not far. Mostly as if it wanted a better look at her. A handful of strings suddenly seemed like a flimsy thing against the rising darkness, and the strongest of the dead.

“It hasn’t touched me,” said Cricket, uneven — almost laughing with fear. He did not get up. “I don’t want it — can you stop it? I don’t want it to touch me.”

Otter took a step backward, to get away from the Hand, to be closer to him — and Cricket said: “Stop.” A gulp of a word. “Stop, Otter.”

She spread the cradle taut, and risked a look backward.

Cricket — the stuff around his legs wasn’t shadow. It was slip.

They had gathered around him like leaves, drifting into the corner where he lay. He was up to his waist in them. He had one hand in them. The other was held up, straight out from the shoulder, the elbow bent, the arm shaking. He turned his head against the stone to look at Otter, but didn’t lift it. “Mind your step,” he said, and tried to smile.

The stuff around him eddied sluggishly, like boiling soup.

Kestrel was there, using her staff — prying at the edges of the stuff, pulling off fists and clots of shadow, unmaking each. But Otter could do nothing. She couldn’t even watch, not with the Hand right there. She felt the yarns shift against her fingers, and she turned back around.

The White Hand. She could hardly see it in the purpling light. It did not hold its shape, but drifted and billowed, swarmed and bulged. Only its hands were clear: white as peeled roots, five-fingered human but twig skinny, bone skinny. You could have taken them for a birch twig, if you were just glancing — but then your hair would rise in warning and you would turn slowly back and look again.

It was just — what? Watching. Waiting. “Tamarack?” whispered Otter.

It jerked at the name. Stretched taller, thinner. Its top stretched out and then bent down toward her like a wasp flexing to sting. Otter shouted with pure fear and swung the cradle-star upward.

The sting stopped. It hovered over her head, and horror seemed to drip off it like venom.

And Cricket, behind her, said, in a strange, wet voice: “Now, even Red Fox had to sleep sometime.” The flexed shape in the darkness seemed to soften. “But he knew that as soon as he closed his eyes, Old Mother Wolf would drop from the tree like a bolt of lightning.
Snap!
So much for clever foxes!”

An old tale, a children’s tale, a trickster’s tale. But the White Hand softened into itself as if listening.

“Otter,” whispered Kestrel, “can you cast us a ward?”

Again, Otter glanced around. The slip were gone now. Cricket was still leaning into the stone, his hand that had been lifted was curled into a fist in his lap; the other fell at his side, limp as if frost-blasted. He did not get up. His eyes were closed. But he was still telling the story.

Otter looked at the White Hand.

It was still listening. Otter lowered her cradle-star slowly. The Hand did not move.

“I’ll get the firewood,” Kestrel whispered.

The place where Cricket had fallen was sheltered by two trees. A digger pine grew from a crag on top of the boulder to his side. Those three points could hold up a ward — no longer than a lodge, and much narrower, but enough, perhaps. Especially if they had light: a fire. Enough.

So as Kestrel drew out her tinder bundle and coaxed up a fire, and Cricket told a trickster’s tale in a voice that kept wandering off into weakness, Otter cast her second ward. She knew more this time: to fix each section with a knot that Fawn had called the navel and Willow had called the child. To twist the cords in twos to make the knot called mother. To bind each cord to the tree with a constricting noose, the too-known knot that made her heart shake: sorrow’s knot. It looked thin, the ward: a handful of cords cast up against the huge and muttering darkness. But she could feel the wind making it sing. The song hummed in her blood and she knew the ward would hold.

“And if she hasn’t come down,” said Cricket, “Old Mother Wolf is up there still. And that is why …” He sighed, then pulled hard for air, pulling his voice back up from the strange place it was sinking to. “That is … That is why the trees will sometimes howl.”

Overhead, the trees howled.

Cricket slumped sideways.

“Cricket!” said Kestrel. She had been facing down the White Hand — lifting her lopsided cradle-star, just in case. But the whole time Cricket was telling his story, it hadn’t moved. It moved now, drifting forward, as if to see what was wrong. Kestrel dove away from it, and was just in time to catch Cricket as he slid into the pine needles.

Otter watched the Hand three breaths more. It pressed toward them — and she could see the lines forming in the stuff of its body. Lines that had the same pattern as the cords of the ward. They would hold. The cords would hold.

She closed her eyes and shuddered with pure fear and release of fear. And then she turned to help Cricket.

Kestrel had him laid out on the pine needles, his head near the fire. The orange light leapt over his face, caught in the twisted gloss of his braids. “Thank you,” he said, lifting his one hand, reaching. Kestrel caught it. “Thank you.”

“Cricket.” Otter picked up the other hand: the one that had been in the pool of slip. It was limp, cold. Softer than it should have been, like meat going bad.

“I didn’t want to die,” he said. “I didn’t want the Hand to — I wanted to stay myself. I wanted to die still Cricket.”

“You’re not going to die,” said Kestrel.

Cricket opened his eyes. “You’ve never lied to me, Kestrel. I beg you: Don’t start.”

The fire cracked and popped; the trees howled. Then Kestrel said: “I won’t. I swear.”

She stroked the hair out of his face, tucked braids behind his ears.

“I was afraid you’d come,” he said. “But I hoped too — dreamed it …”

“Of course we came,” said Otter. “And we’ll take you home, Cricket. We’ll get you home.”

“Oh, good,” he said. “Because in my dream you did not have wings.”

“We cannot carry him such a distance, Otter,” said Kestrel.

Cricket coughed raggedly: a wet sound.

The touch of many slip was a mud to drown in.

The cough went on. Cricket turned his head away from Kestrel, rolled away, his shoulders pulling in, his back shaking.

Very gently, Kestrel pulled on his shoulder and turned him back. “Don’t go before you go,” she said. “Stay with me.”

He closed his eyes a moment, and swallowed so hard Otter could see it, a shuddering that ran all the way down him. “Lie down with me,
okishae
. Hold on to me. I don’t —” his voice cracked. “I don’t want to die.”

In answer, Kestrel reached for her pack. Otter put down Cricket’s already-dead hand to help her. They pulled out what soft, fine things they had. Their wolf hoods. Otter folded them into pillows. One buffalo robe between them. They spread it out next to the fire. They eased Cricket onto it.

“Like Fawn,” he whispered, and closed his eyes again. He lay panting a moment, then reached out, blindly, for Otter’s hand. She squeezed it. “Don’t take my body back,” he said. “Don’t even try. You’ll be killed, trying. Don’t even try.”

Otter choked back her “But —”

Kestrel lay down beside Cricket, slipping her arm under his head, pressing the length of her body to his.

Around Otter’s fingers, Cricket’s hand suddenly tightened. The cough came into him. Kestrel held him. He shook and shook.

“I’ve got you,” said Kestrel. “Cricket, I’ve got you. I’m not leaving you.”

But what Cricket said was: “Don’t bind me.”

Even Kestrel said: “What?”

“Mad Spider,” he said, “bound her mother too tightly. That’s where it started. That’s why the story —” His words were coming in bursts. He coughed again, but just once. “That’s why the story is a secret,” he said. “I was going there, if I could — I knew I couldn’t, but if I could. I was going to Eyrie. To Mad Spider’s place. Eyrie.
Is the ward still standing?
Willow asked: She was right to ask. The story” — he gasped — “ends where it begins.” He swallowed, another hard, shuddering swallow. “Don’t bind me.”

“Cricket —” objected Otter.

But Kestrel said: “We won’t.”

“I’m so frightened,” he said, his eyes closing, his voice going high as a child’s. “I’ve always been so frightened. Don’t let me go, Kestrel. Not yet.”

“I have hold of you,” she said, breathing into his ear, wrapping a leg over his, stroking his hair.

“I can’t feel it,” he said. “Hold on to me.”

Kestrel lifted his head and pulled him against her. And then she kissed him, fearsomely, fearlessly, until his eyes opened again. “Feel that?”

“Past the edge of the world, I would feel that.”

Then he coughed again, helplessly, horribly, endlessly, while Kestrel held him and Otter pushed both hands over her own mouth so she wouldn’t scream. But it didn’t kill him. He fought back into his breath, and said: “I’m so sorry, Kestrel.”

She dug her fingers into his hair, leaned her forehead into his, their noses touching. “I am not sorry.”

“Good enough.” He sighed, letting go of fear.

Otter’s hands were wet where the tears ran over them.

There was a huge gust of wind: The trees loosed a prickling fall of snow onto them. The fire sent up a whirl of sparks.

Cricket gasped, pulling air in deep. He took three hard breaths. Paused. Took three more. It went on. He seemed to be climbing. Resting. Climbing.

His eyes floated open. “I saw a new kind of bird today,” he said.

And then he died.

Kestrel held Cricket’s body through the night, kissing him softly sometimes. Talking to him. Otter tended the small fire, carefully: There had not been that much wood in Cricket’s dropped bundle. The world shrank to the size of the firelight: the little ward, the one robe, the two lovers pressed close. Otter wept and kept watch. Sometimes she drifted into sleep, but when her head jerked back up, the world was still small inside a big darkness, and Cricket was still dead.

Willow. And Cricket.

The fuel was gone when the sun came up, and the fire was sinking into embers. Otter stood and walked, just two steps, to the ward. She stood there, and was still standing when Kestrel came up behind her. “There’s cord enough,” said Otter. “There’s no scaffold, and no way to raise it, but —”

“We won’t bind him,” said Kestrel.

Otter looked at her. The ranger’s face was still and blank. Her eyes were swollen from tears but the rest of her was just … washed away. “I won’t lie to him,” she said.

Otter’s heart seemed to spin between grief and fear. The dead: They must be bound. They must be kept safe. Her fingers still hurt from pulling the knots shut on her mother’s ankles. The binding was all of her history, all of her training, her whole life.

“I
won’t
,” said Kestrel, snapping like thunder, loud and sudden.

“Ch’hhh,” said Otter. “We — we won’t, then.” She turned and caught Kestrel in her arms. The ranger was rigid, braced against the loss that had already ruined her. She did not melt.

“He died,” Kestrel said. “He died still Cricket. The White Hand didn’t touch him. He’s not coming back.” A shake went through her tight body. “He’s not coming back.”