Sorrow’s Knot (27 page)

“You have wings,” said Orca. His voice was awed and close. All at once his fingers brushed her bare shoulder — her body shivered — she should not be bare —

And then Orca’s coat enfolded her. He wrapped it around her, covering her, warming her, softly. He turned her around. “They look like wings.”

Kestrel looked at her, her face pale. “I thought you were saved.”

“Where would you tie the noose, Kestrel? What would you pull it through?”
My head and my heart,
she did not say.
My body itself.
“The White Hand is still inside me. The body is knots. It is caught in those knots. And they — there is only one moment at which such knots come undone.”

“Death,” said Orca. A word like a fist against the heart of a drum.

They stood there for a moment, the three of them, with the good goose smell all around them and the feathers at their feet.

Otter looked down at her single living hand. Without the brownness of her eyes, the light seemed dazzling, full of lances.

“I was dead,” she said. “For one moment. I was myself and not myself. I was inside out and the light went through me. The knots went through me.”

“I thought you were saved,” said Kestrel again — and went down. Her knees went out from under her, and she sat hard in the moss, feathers puffing up around her like milkweed seeds.

Otter stared, then knelt to her. Put hands — one human, one not — one on each of her shoulders. They stayed there a moment. Orca was silent.

“We need to save them, Kestrel,” whispered Otter. “The bound-up dead. We need to set them free.”

Another silence. Finally, Kestrel closed her eyes, crossed her arms, and put her hands on Otter’s hands, and nodded.

Only then did Orca speak. And he asked: “How?”

How?
Otter swallowed the word. It felt like swallowing an acorn with the cap still on. It stuck and scratched and made her shudder. “We must go to the scaffolds,” she said. And stopped.

The furrow between Orca’s eyes — it was quirked to one side, Otter noticed suddenly, and suddenly, absurdly, she loved that. The furrow between Orca’s eyes deepened. But he spoke very gently, like fingers barely brushing a drum. “How?”

He was coaxing her.
We must go to the scaffolds …

Orca the storyteller, who knew the next words were
and then
.

Otter could smell the goose, feel the heat of the roast pit come up through the earth like the potter’s fires.

“It was a potter who made the earth, and a weaver who made the sky,” she told him.

Orca nodded. “By the Cedar and the Stone, we say. By the Cedar and the Stone and the Great Sea.”

All the kind and dangerous things of the world.

“And then,” said Otter, because that was how the story went. “And then we must — When we come to the scaffolds, we must —” She swallowed again, hurt again, shook. But she said it: “You must tie me to a burial tree.”

It was as if she had thrust a spear into her friends.

Kestrel leapt to her feet, snatching Otter’s arms, dragging her up too. “No,” said Kestrel, “no,” even as Orca spoke over her, the word in his language — did it mean “yes” or “no”? Kestrel seized both of Otter’s hands. The yarn on Otter’s white wrist spun of its own accord, as if it would tangle the two girls together.

“Otter,” said Kestrel. “If you — if we cannot free you — if you need to die —”

“I need to die,” said Otter.

“There is …” stuttered the ranger. “I made a knife. There is a knife. But not — not like that.”

“Please,” said Otter. The scaffolds. It was something she’d seen in the translucent moment when the cord had passed through her like every light in the world. It was something she knew in her hands and her bones. But she did not have the courage to say it aloud. Not twice. “Please,” she said again. She broke free from Kestrel and pulled Orca’s coat tight around her.

“In my country,” said Orca slowly, “we say those who take death by the hand gain power in the dancing.”

“We’re not in your country!” Kestrel snapped.

“But she took death by the hand!” he flared back. Then he shook himself, like a wolf shaking off water, and his voice went back to calm. “Only: Think on it. The White Hands are caught, tied between death and life. What release is there for them, but to finish that journey?”

“You’re the one who said not to kill her.” Kestrel made no attempt to shake herself calm. “And now —” she sputtered. “Alive! Up a tree!”

“I saw a cord go through her hand. I think we need …” Orca swallowed. “I think we need more of those cords. I think we need to tie her … everywhere.”

“You’re a coward,” snarled Kestrel. A wild stab to a soft place. “You’re a runaway. You’re a fool.”

Orca rocked back. “Yes.” He dipped his head. “And yes. And yes.”

Kestrel suddenly dropped her hands to her sides and took three steps backward. “Oh, Otter,” she whispered, “are you sure?”

Otter tried to say yes, and failed. She took the three steps forward, to mingle breath with her friend.

“Otter …” Kestrel whispered. She reached up and touched Otter’s white temples. “Are you sure?”

Otter put her hands over Kestrel’s hands. Pressed her forehead to Kestrel’s forehead. Rested there. “I am sure.”

“You loved a storyteller,
okishae
, Kestrel,” said Orca. “Has this not the sound of a story?”

Otter turned to him. He stood face-to-face with her for a long moment, with the fire glowing through his hair. She thought he might kiss her, but he did not. “And look at her,” he said — to Kestrel, but his voice was soft, and his eyes were on Otter’s eyes. “Has she not the look of hope?”

Together, Otter and Kestrel and Orca left the holdfast and the lakeshore, and the island that had once been Eyrie, and climbed up to the rim of the caldera. The valley of the River Spearfish lay spread at their feet: black pine, thrusts of gray rock. The river itself was a dip and a thinning in the pines, a stitching of brilliant aspens, just budding out, and here and there a glimpse of water glittering like beads.

Far away, and yet surprisingly close, was the smudge of smoke that was Westmost. They were on the edge of the world. And yet they were nearly in sight of home.

They picked their way down the path of the waterfall. Otter had to lean on Orca and Kestrel. She was cold, dizzy, clumsy with fear.

Deciding to die is one thing. Walking to your death with your eyes open is another.

It was three days back to Westmost, two to the scaffolds. The first night, under the huge willow tree at the foot of the waterfall, Kestrel cast a small ward. It pushed at Otter; it clawed at her. She lost language; she could say nothing. She kept opening and closing her human hand.

Kestrel cooked, Orca fidgeted. And Otter tried to breathe.

She gulped air in and hiccupped it out. She held her breath until the world went dim. The new willow wands were a violent green. They hung like the cords of a ward, all around her. They seemed to stir inward. She thought she would die, right there.

And then Orca started to play his drum.

He had it braced against a boulder. One hand held the edge, the fingers keeping high loops of edge voices soaring. The other hand added a center voice. It was loud, louder than the waterfall, and strange, and very beautiful. Otter’s life had been full of music — bone flutes and turtle-shell tambourines, deer-hoof rattles sewn to dancing shirts. But no one had ever played a drum like this: like a dozen heartbeats, like a hundred footfalls, like breath and life itself; a moon balanced on the round back of a stone.

“Otter,” said Orca. “Stay with us. Otter. One more day.”

She stayed.

Dawn. They hurried down the river.

They passed a place where the raspberry canes were torn out of the ground. It would be nothing to notice. They noticed it.

Inside Otter, the White Hand opened like a hide in a dye pot. It had almost all of her. And yet, from some huge distance, she could still feel the skin of her human hand. The White Hand stirred into it. From within, it seemed, it took her hand and held tight.

They found the little creek and the path of bare stones. They went up toward the scaffolds.

No one played the burial drum. No one played the bone flutes. No one came with them. The waning curl of the Sap-Running Moon was drifting pale in the pale sky, like the dead, out of place in the world.

In the scaffolding grounds, Otter came back to herself. It was the knots that did it, the inward push of the red ward that was strung around the place. It pushed her into herself, pushed the spreading darkness back into her lungs, until she choked on it and came back gasping.

Otter blinked and shivered, looked around. Clear light. The trees black around her. Below, the black eye of the high lake. One dark eagle turning in the sky above. Cold. It had been earliest spring in the caldera, where the heat came up through the earth. But it was still winter here; the last turn of winter. There were scales of snow in the pine needles, icy rings around the drifted bones.

Kestrel had already lowered a burial frame. Otter stared at it.

“Can you hear me?” It was Orca’s voice. She realized that he had said it over and over, through half the day. She turned from the terrible square of the frame and looked at him. Faint as a blush, he smiled. “There you are.”

“Otter.” Kestrel, at her other hand. “I — Are you sure?”

“It’s … It’s …” The curdled darkness had filled her lungs. It was hard to speak.

But she was sure. She was a binder born. She knew knots. The way to undo a noose was not to unwind it. It was to empty it. And pull it shut.

She held up her two hands, one of them human, and one of them white. She unlooped her bracelets and showed Kestrel the cast: the cradle, the tree. The scaffold. The fingers of the white hand were longer, thinner, than her human fingers: She fumbled. She cast the sky.

She moved her two hands apart —

And the pattern exploded, all its crosses coming undone in an instant, until all that was left was the yarn, looped from hand to hand, hanging harmless and slack.

Kestrel stared.

“Sorrow’s knot,” said Otter. The voice made a hollow of all her bones. “Like this.” She made a small noose with the yarn. She showed it to Kestrel one, two, three times. “This. Tie it like this.”

And Kestrel — weeping and practical — Kestrel did.

Being lashed to the scaffold was every horror she’d ever known. Every knot. It was the thing in the corn that had struck Cricket and then crawled up into the yarns of her hands. It was the tangle of power that had killed Fawn. The White Hand on the island, hissing and striking. The dream of the cords growing into her mother’s wrist.

That dream.

Her wrists tied.

Her ankles.

Every bump against the frame made her shudder, but she couldn’t move. Her breath was gristly with fear.
May the wind take me …
The words shuddered up into her mind, but she couldn’t find breath to say them.

She closed her eyes, opened them. Orca.

His face was tipped and his hair fell into it, but in her eyes he shone like a raven. “Listen,” he whispered. His fingers were on his drum. She could see them move, but the sound they lifted was so soft it hardly reached her. He spoke with equal softness.

They were private words, a seashell to hold to her ear. Orca swallowed. “An old song …” He shuddered. Softly kissed her. Said: “Forgive us.”

And then they hauled her up.