Sorrow’s Knot (25 page)

The whiteness spread across the back of Otter’s hands, pushed up her arms in roots and streaks of infection. It opened up her back. It bled out from her temples. One of her eyes turned blue.

Five days.

Orca and Kestrel fought until Otter wondered if Kestrel might test her new knife against that foreign skin. Orca did not understand the White Hands; he did not understand that Otter needed —
wanted,
she told herself,
wanted
— to die. That it would be better if she died.

But Orca did not think so. He questioned and argued until his voice became like a rope around Otter’s neck.

“But it is not a monster, or not merely,” he insisted, as they built up the fire against the chill evening. “On the island, the White Hand listened to stories. And it spoke to you, Otter: You said.”

There was a long pause. Otter was watching Kestrel’s face: She was struggling to accept this impossible news. At last she asked: “What did it say?”

Otter tried to find an answer, but before she could, the word whistled out of her as if she were hollow. “Binder,” she said. “Daughter. Binder.” The voice had not been hers. It was a moan and a hiss. It was a cold draft under a door curtain.

Both Orca and Kestrel looked at her, their eyes wide.

Orca murmured something in his own language, then said: “Is that a curse? Binder?”

“No,” said Kestrel. “It is — it is what we call the women of power, the women who tie the knots.”

Orca mimed holding up a cradle-star. “This?”

“That, but more than that.”

“The bones in the string,” said Orca. “On the island. That?”

The image flashed before Otter like something lit by lightning: the ancient ward fragment, thick with shadows. A human skull with a binder’s cord moving, impossibly, through its eyes.
Is it still standing?
Willow had once asked, and Cricket had said she was right to ask.

“It’s called a ward,” said Kestrel. “It’s meant to keep out the dead, not trap the living. But — yes, that.”

“And?” said Orca. There was a deep crease between his eyes: puzzlement, concentration. Perhaps disgust.

“We bind the dead,” said Otter — and again the voice moved out of her, coiling and knotting, tightening and chilling.

Orca looked at her carefully. “What does that mean?”

“We bind the dead,” said Kestrel. “We — when we die, our bodies are tied to a scaffold. Up in a tree.”

She looked at Otter as she said it. Between them pulsed the memory: Cricket.
Don’t bind me.

“Merely the body?” said Orca.

And the White Hand inside Otter answered: “More.”

“Otter,” said Kestrel. Otter felt a touch at her elbow, distant — and then one on her hand. Kestrel’s hand wrapped around her dead white one. “Otter. Come back.” Fingers squeezed hers. Living heat burned against her cold palm. “Not yet, Otter,” said Kestrel. “Come back.”

“Perhaps you should let it speak.” Orca had his drum out. It sat silently in his lap, but it drew Otter’s eye as if he were holding the moon. “Perhaps we need to know.”

“Not yet. I won’t let her be a Hand. Not yet.”

“More,” said Otter again. She closed her eyes, but behind them was only pulse: red cords pulsing. Her mother’s wrist, her dead hand moving. Was this madness? Was this hand — this Hand — the thing that would claw out of her? She could feel it moving inside her, moving in the pit of her body. “Mad Spider bound her mother too tightly,” she said. “There is something wrong with the knots.”

And Cricket said — No, it was Orca, he was Orca. He said: “Tell me the story.”

Behind Otter’s eyes the red pulsed. She could see fingernails. The swelling of death around the nail beds. Her mother’s wrist bloating around the cords. She opened her eyes, but the red pulse was still there. Knotting around the faces of her friends.

And all at once, something came rising in her with a rush of horror. “Don’t bind me,” she said. “After you kill me, Kestrel, don’t bind me. I’ve been trapped. It’s terrible. The cords.” The cord growing through the sockets of the skull. She could feel it moving inside the softness of her eyes.

Kestrel’s fingers twitched around hers. “That’s what Cricket said,” she whispered.

There was a pause as long as a moonrise. And then Orca said: “Who is Cricket?”

Kestrel rounded on him, her arm thrusting out to strike — the heel of the hand, against the throat, against the nose — but this time Orca moved to meet her. He swept his arm in half a circle, catching Kestrel’s wrist with the strongest part of his forearm, knocking her blow aside.
“I said, who is Cricket?”

Kestrel had pulled back, cradling her wrist with her other hand. “And I said, say his name and I’ll break you.”

“Yes,” said Orca. “I remember. On the island. I stood for three days. I was exhausted and nearly helpless, and you said you would break my leg and leave me to the monsters. Now things are different. We are in safety and your friend is in need. And so I ask: Who is Cricket?”

“Storyteller,” said Otter, trying to fight free of the red knots in her mind and keep her friends from hurting each other. “A …” she had no words for what Cricket had been.

“But who, to you?” pressed Orca.

Anger was coming up in Kestrel, like sap rising in the spring. It was oozing out of her as sap oozed out of a tree: through the wounds. She stood up, still holding her wrist, and said nothing. Thick, vital nothing.

Orca tilted his chin up and studied her face. Then he made his
I-have-no-knife
gesture again, holding his arms out toward her, palms up. “You think I would not understand. But I have also lost …” He swallowed, and finished: “People.”

“Should we trade our dead, then?” snapped Kestrel. “Like dried meat?”

“No,” said Orca.

“Then I will go get the axe stone,” said Kestrel. “You pick a leg for me to break.”

“We are caught in a story,” said Orca, “and the story may save us. I need to know it, and so you need to tell it. For Otter’s sake, trust a storyteller and begin it here: Who is Cricket?”

For a moment there was only silence: starlight and wind.

“
Okishae
,” said Kestrel. “My
okishae
.”

Orca, for once, was utterly wrong-footed. “I don’t know —”

“As an eagle loves another eagle,” said Kestrel. “As a wolf loves a wolf.”

Orca made the palms-up gesture again. “As a hand,” he said, bringing his left hand on top of his right. “To another hand.” He wove his fingers together. “Separate, but —”

“Coupled,” said Kestrel. Anger was melting away from her like spring ice. “Coupled, always.”

Orca lowered his hands into his lap. There was another moon-long pause. “He is dead, then?”

“Yes,” said Kestrel. Anger had changed her as a storm changes the sky. She looked washed clean, emptied. She turned toward the open night. “He is dead.”

“Don’t —” Otter stood up and caught Kestrel’s arm as she slipped toward the doorway. Holding on to Kestrel made the red knots loosen, made language come back into her ears. She knew it was only for a moment, but still, when she spoke her voice was entirely her own. “Don’t go — it’s dark.”

“The moon’s coming up,” said Kestrel. She put her hand over Otter’s hand. “Let me go, Otter. I won’t walk into the lake.”

“Not after, either — after you’ve killed me, you won’t …” Otter did not want Orca to hear — but the holdfast was so small.

“With stones in my pockets — no, I won’t,” said Kestrel. That she had thought about the methods of drowning herself enough to deny the thought was an uneasy thing. Otter gripped her arm tightly. “Cricket would murder me,” said Kestrel. “He’d hate anyone who harmed me. I will do nothing that would earn such hate.”

Otter caught her other arm, and they leaned their heads together, mingling breath. “I love you,” said Otter. “I know it is nothing.”

Kestrel touched her face. “It’s not.” She pulled back, reached for her staff. “Tell Orca I know it’s not his fault.”

Orca could, of course, hear for himself. But Otter said: “I will.”

And Kestrel went out.

Otter watched her out of sight: the dark figure disappearing into the darkness. The world turning silver under the rising moon. It was a while before she sat down again, across the fire from the storyteller who was not Cricket.

“What is the word?” said Orca. “Kestrel’s eagle-hearted word?”

“Okishae,”
said Otter.

“Mullen.
I am sorry that I did not know it.”

“It’s a rare word,” said Otter.

And Orca, looking into the fire, answered: “It’s a rare thing.” He looked at her then, and his strangely angled, strangely sad face softened into a beautiful smile. No one had ever smiled at her quite like that, though what the difference was in his smile, she could not name. “Cedar knows: It is more than I deserve.”

He dropped his gaze.

Five days.

The fifth day after she was touched by the White Hand, Otter hurt someone for the first time.

That morning was the first morning when spring seemed something more than a fragile visitor. The sun was warm as a blessing, and high clouds blew fast across the blue sky. They walked along the lakeshore, looking for more of the deeply stupid geese that had fed Kestrel and Otter when they first tumbled, stunned by grief, into the deceptive safety of the caldera. The geese had grown more wily as they considered matings and nestings, and so the trio walked some way.

As the sun came high, Orca shrugged off his coat.

Otter stopped in her tracks.

His shirt — his shirt was woven.

The people of Westmost wore leathers and skins. What yarns they had, they hoarded. There was enough yarn, just barely, to make the bracelets everyone wore, to knot the rangers’ staffs and spears and arrows. No one would dream of using yarn to make cloth. Kestrel and Otter had never seen anything that was woven.

“What is that?” said Kestrel, touching the cloth gingerly. They had seen his shirt once before, but it had been in darkness. They had noticed only its dried-blood color, and its little hem of shells.

Without the coat Orca looked younger, well-muscled and long-limbed. “Cedar,” he said, and his hand went to his throat, where once he had worn a string of beads. He let it fall. “Cedar bark, again. My people say the cedar is our mother, and she is kind.”

“… Kind?” Otter was caught in fascinated horror, like a rabbit before a snake. “How is it kind, to wear a skin of knots … ?” Her voice came hollow and whistling, and she reached her white hand for him.

Orca stepped backward — putting one boot into the lake. He stopped.

Otter drifted to him. “Why are you not strangling?” She touched his shirt, above his heart. The cloth was both rough and soft. Under her fingers the yarns of it stirred. And deeper than that …

Orca stifled a gasp. He did not step back again, but he was shaking.

“Otter,” said Kestrel. “Otter!”

Otter blinked.

“Let him go,” said Kestrel. “You’re hurting him.”

Otter let go.

Orca staggered backward, splashing into the lake. There was a hole like a scorch in his shirt. Under it was a blossoming bruise: the rootlings and branch tips of blood vessels had come untangled under his skin. Otter’s fingerprints were there: bloody blisters.

“Come out of the water,” said Kestrel mildly.

Orca didn’t look at Otter. He came out of the water and jerked his coat on.

Otter spread her hands against her face and pressed her fingertips hard against her cheekbones. “I’m — I’m —” She curled her nails into her skin, trying to feel something. Sharpness. Something —

Orca darted forward, catching her wrists. “Don’t!” He pulled her hands away from her face.

She looked at him.

“You’re bleeding,” he said softly.

She could feel hot blood trickling from the moons her nails had dug. It was running down her face. It was good to feel something.

Kestrel wiped the blood away.

Something. Anything.

Orca was silent after that, silent even through the splash and comedy of catching a goose. They built a fire outside the holdfast — a big one — and dug a roasting pit. Orca hauled driftwood and was still silent, though he hauled so hard and so carelessly that his hands were bruised and cut.

They sat on stones by the fire, Kestrel plucking feathers, with her staff leaning ready against one knee, and her new knife nowhere in sight.

Orca sat thinking. And Otter sat looking at her shadow. It seemed thick to her, in the bright light, thick and slimy, like wet-rot leather.

Orca’s voice came to her as she looked, and it too seemed thickened, changed. “What’s going to happen to Otter?” the storyteller asked. “More, like that moment by the lake edge?”

Otter could not even lift her head to answer.

“More,” said Kestrel. “Worse.”

Otter looked up. Orca was staring at her. He had slipped his fingers into the hole she’d unknotted in his shirt. She looked back down.

“Maybe there is a tale to make of it,” said Kestrel. “But the stone truth is: more, and worse.”

Otter’s heart twisted and clenched. “Not yet,” she said — and it sounded like begging.

Kestrel was silent for a beat too long.

“Not quite,” she said.

Otter shivered and her shadow seemed to bubble like porridge.

“What does it look like?” said Orca. Otter couldn’t bear to look at him. “How — how will we know?”

Again, a silence. So long that Otter’s shadow moved of its own power, as if the sun had shifted. She lifted a hand and the shadow lifted its hand.

“I will tell you when —” began Kestrel.

And Otter said: “It looks like this.”

She folded downward and picked her shadow up off the ground.

Otter put her hands into the shadow hands. Into the moss, it should have been — but the moss rose and met her. Fingers wrapped her fingers. She looked. Her white hands were holding darkness. A darkness too thick to see through. It looked sticky, clotted. But it felt — warm. She knew it. It was soft, but with hard places, like the calluses a binder’s hands got from long winters braiding the rawhide. Palms fitted in her palms. Long fingers folded around the back of her hands; thumbs stroked the curls of her fingers. Large hands holding her small hands. Her mother’s hands.

“Otter.” Kestrel’s whisper was horrified.

Otter looked up. The hands she was holding were human. The face she was facing was not. It was made of holes.

Her shadow stood in the air as if it were a swarm of insects. It had a mouth and eyes and ears and they were all just holes.

Otter stood up slowly, face-to-face with the thing she was becoming.

Kestrel was standing too, the dead goose at her feet, her staff in her hands. She moved slowly, like a stalking cougar, and slid the staff into the shadow’s back.

Otter felt it. It slid through her spine and through her heart, and she jerked back screaming. The shadow thing jerked with her, slapped against her like a wet coat, went into her like … like … Otter went down, the world whirling and darkening.
Not yet, not yet, not yet,
she cried inside herself.
Come back. Please not yet.

And then she did come back. She was on her hands and knees in the moss. Black and gray feathers were blowing around her. The ground was damp. Kestrel’s fallen staff was under her hand and all its knots were writhing and popping open.

“Tveh,”
said Orca. His voice was almost in her ear. A string of words bounced off her, and none of them made sense: They hit her like hail. She felt his hands on her shoulders.

“Don’t touch me,” she warned, even as Orca jerked back as if burned. Otter sat up. “Don’t touch me. I can’t —” The bracelets on her wrists were twisting, moving on their own. They wanted to tighten against the thing inside her. The seam of her shirt was opening, stitch by stitch. That could be Orca’s skin, opening. Orca’s blood and muscle and nerve coming untangled under her fingers. “Don’t touch me,” she whispered.

Orca took a step backward.

Kestrel stood watching, her face green, the black knife in her hand. “Now?” she said. She was not shaking.

It was sunny, bright. A beautiful day.

And Otter, kneeling in the moss, knew she had to say
yes
. Had to say
now
. Her throat knotted. She swallowed. She said —

“— No,” said Orca. “By the Stone. If I had wanted to be a killer, I would have killed my
father
. I have come too far and I have left too much and I will not see the story end this way.”

“Oh,” said Otter: a word as hollow as a skull. She rose like smoke and twisted around. “A story.”

Whatever Orca saw in her face stunned him. His eyes went round. His face went blank as the drum face.

The White Hand spoke through Otter’s mouth, then a voice like a wind over a smokehole. “I thought you were emptied, storyteller. Tell me that story.”

Orca looked wildly at Kestrel, who said: “Ch’hhh. Tell it.”

He paused one more moment, his fingers fumbling at his drum bag as if they were very cold. Otter drifted toward him, and he raised his drum up like a shield — and spoke.

Orca, son of Three Oars, who spun his stories at the edge of the world.

It was cruel to wrench this story from him. But Otter, empty and wearing a shadow that was not hers, was past all cruelty. The drum played its too-fast heartbeat, and Orca’s voice flowed and caught.

Orca, son of Three Oars. A village by the edge of the Great Sea, whose walls were made of shells chosen for their shining — for the dead were shy of shining — whose walls were made of shells, and of stories. Any child in that place could tell a small tale that would make the dead stop and listen. A little riddle that might catch those lost hearts in puzzlement. Who knew why it worked? It worked. Orca had often wondered, and sometimes asked, but never been answered.

“I thought it was only the White Hands that listened,” said Kestrel.

“You thought there was only one magic in the world,” said Orca. “You thought nothing came from beyond the mountains. From the Great Sea. The world is bigger than you knew.”

Far away, on the true edge of the great world. By the bounty of the Great Sea. Under the cedar trees. A prosperous place. The oilfish running at the end of winter. The salmon, when they ran, thick enough to walk on. Seal meat; hunters in kayaks; the restless, dangerous peace of the sea. And the little dead, always the dead. Called the jellyfish kind, because they were nothing more than dark made substance, as jellyfish were a kind of congealing of the water. And because they stung — a burn of the nerves, a permanent numbness. The little dead that were everywhere and always, because the world is not perfect.

The storyteller kept them back, whispering his stories to the shells, so that they sounded not with the ocean but with drum echoes and whispering stories. Within the shining wall of stories and along the crash of the sea, Orca had been almost unafraid.

Almost.

Orca here struck the drum’s center, and it rang out with all its voices. His hands faltered, and resumed. A triple beat. Otter’s bracelets were spread across her white fingers — blue on the white, like the sky streaking through clouds. She cast the cradle-star, the tree, the scaffold. The sky.