Sorrow’s Knot (3 page)

But since that day in the corn, Willow’s gaze had turned sharp and the silence was first ice: thin and brittle. Otter felt uneasy under that gaze, that silence. Uneasy, and even ashamed. What had she done?

“I will be a binder,” she said, to the silence, to Cricket’s question, to the world. It felt like defiance. But she said it again: “I will be a binder.”

The words hung there. The air was warm and the sun came in long slants. Cricket reached out for her. His hand was empty now, and it seemed to hold light and time. “Otter, you will be a legend,” he said. “There will be stars for you.”

When Cricket said it, it sounded true. Otter looked down at him, for a moment caught in wonder. Then he grinned and pulled the arrowhead from her ear.

“Will you go this year?” she asked him. Another breach. She was sure they had each thought about the day Cricket would leave Westmost, but they had never spoken of it.

But Cricket surprised her. “I’m not going,” he said.

Otter saw Kestrel grow very still. She turned. The two girls looked at Cricket.

“Why should I go?” said Cricket. “Westmost is my home as much as yours. My mother was born here, my mother’s mother.”

“But you’re a boy,” said Otter.

Cricket faked a startle and reached up, fumbling for the telltale knob in his throat. “I am?” He widened his eyes and dropped his hands to his private parts, checking there too. “You’re right!”

Otter spluttered and threw the arrowhead at him.

He caught it, one handed, easy, and tossed it back to her.

“Some stay,” said Kestrel, quietly.

And that was true. Most boys left the Shadowed People when they came of age, going with Water Walkers, the traders who plied the narrow safety of the river, or joining the Sunlit People, following the buffalo herds on the prairies. Binding power ran in the female line, and few people untouched by that power cared to live in a place so dead-shadowed.

But some stayed. Even among the boys, a few stayed.

Otter looked at Kestrel looking at Cricket, and saw a reason he might want to be one of the boys who risked Westmost.

Cricket looked back toward the corn and sighed. “Oh, look: Here comes the joy of my life.” It was Newt, with red cords wrapped around her shoulders and a look as sour as willow bark on her face. “Tsha! If ever again I am blasted open, don’t save me.” Then he put on a smile like Red Fox’s smile and said: “Hail, Lady Boneset.”

“There you are,” said Newt. “You know I need to tighten your bindings.”

“Ah,” said Cricket. “I
thought
I could breathe.” But he stood up, shrugged off stiffness, and then shrugged off his shirt.

“Have you no modesty, boy? You’re not a child anymore.”

And he wasn’t. Otter found herself staring at the narrow chest crisscrossed with red cords. They were startling as wounds against his bare skin. He didn’t look like someone who had been hurt. His skin was the dark sweet color of old honey; his hair was glossy. And while the pain had cost him some weight, it seemed as if it had merely polished away his boyish softness. He looked lean and strong and not at all like a child. The white mark of the gast looked like a star above his heart.

“These are my friends,” said Cricket. “And I don’t want to go back into your lodge, today or tomorrow or in the next moon, Lady Boneset. I think I am well healed, and I’m tired of darkness.”

Newt harrumphed but didn’t press the point. And, after all, she’d brought new cords with her. She hadn’t, though, brought her second. She looked Kestrel and Otter up and down as if selecting a cut of meat. “Binder’s daughter,” she said, “I imagine you can hold the end of a bit of rope?”

Otter nodded. She was not keen to help Newt, but she was ready to help Cricket.

“Then take —”

And something burst from the ripe corn behind them.

Everyone whirled around. The corn in that season was thick, almost pine-black where the shadows hit it. It rustled and thrashed, and then opened, and something came out of it. A living person: a woman. Otter’s mother, the binder, Willow. She was running.

She was wild-eyed, almost stumbling as she ran. For a moment the three friends could only stare. Then Kestrel swung around, pressing her back to Otter’s and pulling her bracelets off. She cast a cradle — a bit lopsided — and held it up, into the dark face of the woods beyond the ward. Otter lifted her own cradle between herself and the running form of her mother. Cricket — though he was so powerless that he did not even bother with his bracelets — took the third point, making the three of them into an arrowhead. Now nothing would come on them unaware.

“Newt!” Willow shouted. “Newt!” Her breath was ragged, her voice wild: It raised the hairs on Otter’s scalp. But she hadn’t said what they’d dreaded she would. She hadn’t said
ware the dead
.

“It’s Tamarack,” said Willow, stumbling up to them. Behind them, the ward itself seemed to shiver to her voice, and a sudden wind moaned through it. “Newt: Her breath is failing.”

Newt paused, and then slowly lifted a hand to cover her eyes. She bowed to Willow before she spoke. “Tamarack our binder has long been halfway out of the world. A blessing if she should go the rest of the way, and peacefully.”

“I am not ready,” said Willow. “Newt, I am not ready.”

Otter felt Cricket shift beside her. She glanced and met the boy’s dark eyes:
Not ready? The greatest binder since Mad Spider, not ready? Not ready for what?

Newt had a similar bewildered look. Her mouth narrowed, then she gathered herself: “I must finish with Cricket. Then I’ll bring my medicines.”

“Quickly,” demanded Willow.

“Most likely she cannot be saved.” Newt nudged Cricket forward, beginning the long and fiddly work of undoing the healing knots. “If it’s her time, she’ll go, whether you’re ready or not.”

“I’m not,” said Willow. And she reached forward and put her hand, flat, in the middle of Cricket’s chest.

Cricket gasped and stumbled back. The red cords that bound him — the healing cords that had been intricately knotted, alive with power — had come loose in a heartbeat. They sagged around his waist, looped down his legs.

Newt lifted her braceleted wrists against Willow, as if Willow herself were one of the dead. “What did you do?”

This was not a binder’s power: It was the dead who undid knots. A binder’s power was to wrap and tie. To hold tight and to fix. One of the most difficult things a binder could do was undo her own work without being caught in it. It was of course possible — a spider does not get caught in her own web. But even a spider must know where to step. An unbinding was a slow and careful thing, like pulling out the lowest stick in a pile without letting the pile fall.

But what Willow had done had not been slow and careful. It had been instant, instinctive.

Terrifying.

On Otter’s fingers, the yarns were stirring, restless, as if in the presence of the dead.

“What did you do?” said Newt again, swallowing her way toward calm, lowering her hands.

“Come, Boneset,” said the binder. “Now.”

Tamarack died that night.

There is little a knot can do for someone coming loose from the world, and Newt could not hold her. In truth, she did not try. There was no reason to try. The old binder seemed at peace as she worked her way loose, one breath, one pause between breaths, one breath at a time.

So Tamarack was at peace and Newt was at (as usual) gruff indifference, and only Willow was frightened. She knelt beside the sleeping platform, her hand on Tamarack’s hand, and when the pause between breaths stretched, so did Willow’s fear. “Please,” she said, clutching at Tamarack’s hand, shaking it. “Please.”

The old binder’s eyes turned to hers. They’d gone filmed as a dead fish’s eyes. “Let me go, Willow,” she rasped.

Willow stopped begging but didn’t release the hand.

A death, like a birth, can take a while. In the binder’s lodge, through the warm night, Otter watched as Tamarack labored with her death. When Otter slipped into sleep, it was the silence that woke her, woke her with a jerk of fear: Willow holding her breath as Tamarack didn’t breathe.

And then Tamarack started breathing again.

Let me go,
she’d said.

But Willow didn’t. The night grew tighter and tighter, like leather shrinking as it dries.

Tamarack. She had braided Otter’s hair, embroidered her shirts with the quills of porcupines. When she claimed the lodge’s share of wood to burn she’d kept an eye open for cottonwood, and slipped Otter bits of the inner bark to chew, just for the sweetness. She was upright and mostly silent, but to Otter she was near to a grandmother. It was hard to watch her die.

Like most of the children of Westmost, Otter had seen a death or two. But her mother’s fear made her fearful, and the little space of the binder’s lodge became unbearable. She remembered the feeling she’d had when she’d held the dead thing in the corn: that her nerves had left her body and were held stretched as yarn between her hands. She felt that now, though she cast no patterns.

And finally Otter could not watch it anymore. She went through the two curtains of the earthlodge and out into the warm night. At the center of the pinch, inside the double ring of earthlodges, was the palm: a flat open space where the dancing and the games of hoop-and-lance kept the earth bare and packed. It was a friendly place, even in the darkness: well-known and safe as a mother’s hand. Otter walked along its edge, where the bird’s-foot flower made forays into the clay. It was a quiet night, smelling of smoke and cooking and human life. She could hear the murmur of the river, the sleepy rattle of the summer-stiff corn, the crickets singing about the coming fall.

A hoop — a bent wood hoop from the hoop-and-lance game — rolled across the open ground toward her. Otter caught it and flicked it rolling back into the darkness, and by the time it was halfway across the palm, its roller had strolled up to catch it, just at the edge of sight: Cricket. He spun the hoop up into the air, caught it, spun it a few times around his wrist, and walked over to Otter.

“Spider knows you need practice,” she said, “but I hope you left the lance at home. If you hurt yourself in the dark, there will be no one to save you.”

“I’m a storyteller,” he said. “I would holler at the top of my highly trained voice.” She could see the flash of his smile, white in the darkness. “But, yes, I just have the hoop.”

Otter leaned back on the flank of the nearest earthlodge and Cricket leaned with her. They were silent for a while, then Cricket said: “Is she dead?”

Otter shook her head, unable to put words to what she feared.

Cricket slipped his hand into hers. “It has been too long since I saw the moon.” He sighed and tilted back his head. His hand was dusty and warm.

The moon was a little past half, and waxing. It was riding like a boat up the river of the Milky Way. Otter considered that Cricket probably hadn’t seen it all summer. In her mind, she counted the moons off: Sap, Blossoms, New Grass, Ease, the Sunflower Moon, the Moon of Thunderstorms …

“She won’t let Tamarack go,” said Otter. The words seemed to burst from her, to come from nowhere.

“She should,” said Cricket.

I’m not ready,
Willow had said, and touched Cricket above his heart. The boy had looked gutted as he staggered back.

“Are you all right?” Otter asked. “My mother — did she hurt you?”

Cricket was silent a moment, as if turning the question over like a flintknapper. “It didn’t hurt.” He considered again. The moonlight seemed to bring his answers more slowly. “It didn’t … exactly hurt. I was frightened. I thought:
Perhaps it was a White Hand in the corn after all; perhaps this is the moment it eats its way out of me.
I felt as if a gast were touching me. But still it didn’t hurt.”

Otter tightened her hand around his. Wings flashed over them suddenly, silent and very close, golden in the moonlight. “Look!” called Cricket after the vanishing owl, and a heartbeat later came the death-cry of a rabbit. All their lives, rabbits made no sound, but in death …

“She won’t let Tamarack go.” Otter shuddered. “Why should that … Why is that so frightening? There’s no story like that.”

“I know one,” he said. “I know one a little like that. But it is not a happy story.”

The cheatgrass growing on the earthlodge was prickly against her back. She shifted, uncomfortable. “Something is wrong. Cricket, something is …”

The boy didn’t answer, but wrapped his arm around her shoulder. She folded against him. Even through their clothes, his body was warm. For just a moment, she wished they were small again, that they could tumble in the dust of the plaza and have it mean nothing. So small that she wouldn’t have glimpsed whatever dark thing was beginning to happen.

When Otter went back to the lodge, Newt was gone and Tamarack was dead. Willow was still holding her dead hand. The new binder of Westmost leaned her face into the body of the old binder and whispered: “Don’t go, Tamarack. Don’t go.”

The whisper, more than any howl, made Otter’s hair stir like a cast pattern. She was sure, for a moment, that something was listening.

Inside the binder’s lodge, which had been Tamarack’s and Willow’s and was now only Willow’s, Otter put on her finest shirt, and found that she had grown since the last time she’d had any need to be fine. The soft leather pulled taught across her shoulders; it made her arms feel half-pinned. When Otter turned, she found her mother watching her with eyes so fierce that she almost flinched. She swallowed down something like shame — what had she done? — and crossed her arms over her chest to hide the way the smock both crushed and showed her new breasts.

“The plain would be better, I think,” said Willow. “Tamarack will — Tamarack would understand.” She ran a finger down Otter’s sleeve, over the white suede. “Look at you, my fierce lovely one: You’re all grown.”

Otter was not quite sure when she had stopped being a child. That day in the corn? Or only yesterday, when Willow had touched Cricket, when Tamarack had died? She was certain that she was no sunflower now.

She turned away before she pulled off her smock and put on her plain one.

Willow, meanwhile, dressed herself in red: skins made pale with brain-tanning and dyed with bloodroot. Over her ribs were embroidered ribs, porcupine quills stark white against the vivid leather. A binder’s funeral gear. Willow fussed over her belt, newly threaded with three silver disks: a binder’s belt, echoing the three stars in the belt of the constellation Mad Spider. She hung the binder’s knife from the loop at her hip. Otter caught herself staring at the knife. It had a blade of white chert and its handle was a human jaw.

“Daughter,” said Willow. She raised her hand to touch Otter’s hair. “It would be all right to weep.”

Was that it?
Otter wondered. Was the fear and strangeness she felt only sorrow?

Or was her hair stirring, all by itself, where her mother’s hand had touched it?

So it was that the first thing Otter did as a woman was go out to bind the dead.

Tamarack had been the Binder of Westmost. There was not a woman in the pinch who did not honor her by walking with her this last time. When they gathered at the gap where the river went through the ward, Otter found she was not the only one who was newly being treated as an adult: Kestrel was there too, standing quietly. Otter went and stood next to her and was glad she was there.

And then the drums began to sound.

To walk the dead out, the Shadowed People played a deep drum that they played at no other time. It sounded like the heartbeat of the world.

Tum, thum
— Kestrel reached out and took Otter’s hand. And the procession gathered itself, and stepped into the river. To Otter, the water where she’d so often splashed seemed bitter cold that day. The ward, now that she was about to pass through it, seemed taller. It did not feel like something that was keeping them safe. It seemed like a thing with its own power, its own intentions. Going through its gap was like going through its mouth.

Otter was not sure if they were being spit out or swallowed.

She tightened her hand around Kestrel’s; Kestrel’s hand tightened around hers. They went out.

The Shadowed People had always bound their dead to rest high in trees. In the time of Mad Spider, they had learned not to do it too close to home. It was some way, therefore, to the scaffolding grounds — the distance gave the pinch safety, warning, if the dead did not stay bound. Outside the ward the scrub meadow went on a little farther, and they passed between birch saplings and digger pine. Then, sudden as passing through a curtain, the procession was in the forest itself.

The forest. Bare and straight, darker than skin, the trunks of the pine trees stood in ranks. They went back and back, until they made a blur, like dark mist. The ground under them was mostly bare, cloaked in needles. Gray stone broke from it here and there. It was more than quiet: It ate sound. It was more than shadowy: The shadows watched.

At the back of the procession, the drum beat. The splash of many feet made a constant living sound against it. Someone began to play a bone flute.
We are here,
the drum said, the flute said,
We are alive.

Soon the bitter water had soaked through even the best-greased of boots. The round stones of the river were difficult underfoot. The women carrying the bier staggered. One of the oldest women — Flea, the storyteller — fell, and from there had to be helped along. But no one left the river. The water could only kill you. The forest could do worse.