Sorrow’s Knot (29 page)

To Otter, it was another kind of drum.

The warmth went into her. The cold went out. The breath came into her like warmth, like tears and milk, like love itself. And the cold went out.

“Otter. Otter.”

The warmth went in. The cold went out.

Her hands. Her feet. Pulse, numb. Pulse, numb.

Orca’s kiss. The warmth going in. His tears, the taste of the sea. Pulse, numb. Pulse, numb. The warmth went into her, and the cold went out.

The lamps of my people. The great light of day.

The light and the lamps — the light and the lamps …

And finally, Otter, wanting to see them, opened her eyes.

All around her, the world rocked. She was lost, like a kayak in the fog; things rose around her like the world being made new. It was nearing sunset. There were shouts and voices — later she learned it was the rangers. Kestrel, half expecting the freed dead to come climbing facefirst down the trees like bats, had lit a smudge fire, and rangers had come. The women were casting lines up to Otter’s scaffold, working to get what should have been her dead body lowered to the ground.

But Otter did not understand this. The first thing she saw that she understood was Orca, who had one arm wrapped tight around her. The other hand was clinging grimly to the point where once her wrist had been knotted.

“Otter!” he gasped, seeing her open eyes. “Hang on. Hang on. We’ll be down in a moment.” His body was hot against hers, and hers was awake and shivering. “Otter,” he said. “Otter, I have you. Stay.”

The platform lurched and dropped an arrow’s length. Orca’s hand dug into her back.

“It is beyond foolish,” he said, breathless, “after all this. But — I am afraid of heights.” The platform lurched again. Orca pressed Otter’s body closer to his.

“By the Cedar,” he said. “And the Stone. And the Great Sea.”

Rescued from her scaffold, Otter lay pinned under her body’s cold and pain.

Orca and Kestrel took turns holding her head, holding her hand. And the rangers warmed her. They built a fire right there in the scaffolding grounds. They warmed stones in it, then wrapped them in hides, tucking them against her.

All that night the company sat with her, murmuring and awake, with the firelight leaping over the new-fallen bones. There was something new in the scaffolding grounds: a deep, still peace.

Thistle, captain of the rangers, was not a woman of great imagination. But she had seen the skulls fall, and she had seen something rise, something more than ravens, something both darker and more shining.

She sat and listened. The rangers had questions and Orca had stories. Kestrel kept silent. Finally, at dawn — out of the pale, clear sky at dawn — a snow began to fall, small flakes wandering down, like a condensation of brightness.

Thistle stood up and — with her one good hand — gestured like a queen. “We must take her back to Westmost.”

So the rangers took the burial frame and piled it high with pine boughs, and laid a deer hide over that. And they carried Otter back.

They went to Thistle’s lodge, of course. Where else was there to go? In the slow, smoky days that followed, Otter wondered if the old lodge had ever held a jumbled, busy life, and if Thistle had ever wished for one. There had once been years, many years, when Thistle hardly came to Westmost, but haunted the forest, making her way in rangers’ holdfasts and Water Walkers’ islands. In the forest, she trained her rangers and kept down the dead and became almost a figure of legend, shut outside the ward she had not wanted her daughter to cast. She’d become so strange and so estranged that as a child Otter had glimpsed her only rarely, as if she were some rare kind of bird.

Now Otter wondered if small Willow had grown up inside these walls, in the days before the smoke turned the wattle black. The many years of blessing knots scattered around them — had any been tied by her mother?

But whether or not the lodge had ever seen a jumble, a family, it held one now. Thistle — fierce, hawk-wild Thistle — turned out to snore. She could also cook. From somewhere she begged a larger cookpot, and made for them stews of corn and dried squash and berries. She roasted walnuts and grouse. She fed Otter herself, in the early days before Otter’s hands could grip a gourd spoon.

“A privilege,” she said gravely. Her second hand — freed now of its splints and swelling, withered away to bones and skin — rested limply on the blanket beside Otter. “I missed your babyhood, granddaughter. You must let me catch up.”

Otter was too proud to admit she liked it. But Orca smiled.

Kestrel said nothing at all. Because Kestrel had seen — as Otter had not — the moment Thistle had met Orca. She’d seen Thistle take him in, piece by piece: His tattoos that exaggerated the strange planes of his face. His child-short hair. His coat of long-traveling. His voice whose shape suggested another language.

“Who are you?” Thistle had asked, tipping her staff at Orca as if it were a spear.

“Don’t touch him!” snarled Kestrel, swinging up her own staff, smashing Thistle’s out of line. As Thistle squinted at her, puzzled, Kestrel whispered: “Don’t touch him.”

Because Thistle had already killed one storyteller.

Cricket. Otter had not forgotten. But she didn’t feel the weight of it as Kestrel did — Kestrel, tying her knots around her staff, eating from the same stewpot as the woman who had killed her
okishae
.

As Otter came back to herself, the meaning of Kestrel’s tight silence was easy enough to unravel. With Thistle as captain of the rangers, how could Kestrel be a ranger again? But if she was not a ranger, what was she? What would she do?

Kestrel, not a ranger. And Otter, not a binder. What would they do?

Otter grew stronger slowly.

The Moon of Blossoms came, and winter broke like a fever. Suddenly the world was young and green and tender. Then the Water Walkers came with the spring trade, and turned the careful pinch into feast and festival.

Otter limped out to the fires, some nights, to hear new stories, to breathe the green air. Kestrel sat beside her, behind her, giving her an arm to lean on, giving the others short answers when Otter grew tired enough to tremble.

Everyone had questions.

Otter tried to explain, but it was too big to say. Who could accept it — that since the time of Mad Spider, the binders had used their powers backward? That in knotting out the dead they had in truth tied them to the living world? It was too big to say, though Otter tried to say it. She was not eloquent.

This time, it was Orca who had fallen silent.

It was, of all people, Newt the bonesetter who slowly turned the pinch around.

She came often, plying Otter with teas of blue flag and partridge berry, liniments of prairie-smoke root, bitter chews of black-birch gum. Otter liked having less pain. But no matter what else had happened, she would never like Newt.

Still, Newt had power that was sister to a binder’s power, a power over knots. And she had sat by many a deathbed. She understood how the living held the dying, sometimes, too tightly. Had seen how the dying needed to be let go. She had secrets in her cord: She knew that a bonesetter’s knots could be used wrongly, could trap a dying woman on the bitter edge of death.

Newt understood. And it was she who named Otter the Unbinder.

The girl who had risen alive among the dead, and died there. And come back.

Orca, through all the coming and going, through the feast of storytelling and fires, through all the times when he could have been a hero, sat quietly on the sleeping platform opposite. He was rebuilding his drum, which had been slashed in its fall from the burial trees. He had traded some of the beads from his coat hem to one of the Water Walkers for an elk skin. For most of a moon he sat cross-legged and speechless, working first to cure and stretch the hide, and then to stretch it over the frame.

Otter was baffled, hurt. Orca had saved her with the warmth of his own breath. He had not touched her since.

Finally his drum was finished. Smoke-cured, the drumhead was mottled gray. It had a different tone than his old drum: more somber, its center voice braver, but with an undertone of trembling — a drum that could weep. He sounded it softly with his fingertips, and the sound rose to the round roof like a deep breath.

He played it a little, experimenting: a rain-on-the-corn patter from the rim, the heartbeat of the edge and center, the rising triples that made Otter think of her strange dream: whales rising.

He played the whales. And, then, suddenly, he was in tears.

Kestrel stared. It was Otter who stood, who went to him. Who helped him to his feet, the drum like a shield between them. She had to nudge it aside to hold him. His body trembled like a tree.

“I let you die,” he whispered to her. “I — tied you.” He swallowed, his tattoos showing the twitch of the muscles in his jaws. “As I could not tie my father.”

He was weeping now, openly, the whales on his cheekbones rising.

“And then what happened … to him? To my people?” He bent his head and buried his face in her hair. “Otter, I have been such a coward.”

She wrapped a hand around the back of his neck — the vulnerable hollow place there, the feather sleekness of his hair.

“I will make a story of you,” he promised, a fierce whisper. “It will go over this country like a tidal wave. The girl who remade the world.”

“Oh, wait a bit,” she said, in Cricket’s voice. “You have not yet seen the ending.”

That night, Otter took out her red shirt — the one that had been her mother’s, the one with an embroidery of bones, the one binders wore for funerals — and waited.

It was not every binder who had the strength to tie the dead to the living world, Otter explained. Most did not. But among the free women of the forest, once or twice in every moon-count of years, there would be one who did.

Those strong binders made White Hands. Mad Spider had been the first with such strength. She had made a White Hand out of her mother, Hare, and more out of the other dead among her people, and finally had become a Hand herself, touched at last by the things she made. Willow had made a White Hand of Tamarack. Otter herself had made one of Willow, and another of Fawn, though those ropes had not been left long enough to rot.