Sorrow’s Knot (5 page)

“It was the first ward, and it was a great ward. All that spring she worked, while the sap rose and the grass unfurled. And the people of Eyrie said: ‘Little Spider, what are you weaving?’

“And she said: ‘I am weaving a web to keep back the dead.’

“And they said: ‘But the dead are everywhere: They are both in and out.’

“And she said: ‘There is one who is out.’

“All that summer she worked, while the corn grew tall and the pumpkins fattened. All that fall she worked, while the deer grew plump and the geese grew restless. And by the time the snow came they called her Mad Spider, and they always would, but the ward was ready.

“And then the White Hand came.”

Cricket fell silent. Otter had to blink three times before she could see him — she had been caught in his story, and seeing only that. In front of her now, Cricket was trembling and sweating as if he was holding up a great weight, putting forth the whole effort of his body. “And that,” he said, in a voice that was more like his, and less like a whispering drum, “that is another story.”

Otter swallowed what felt like a mouthful of spider silk, dry and sticky. She saw Cricket’s throat work too. How Mad Spider, greatest of the binders, had learned to make a ward, had held back the White Hand when no one else knew what to do — that story, that story she had heard before. But this story was new. This story was strange and secret. It seemed to turn her upside down.

The three of them sat there for a long time, silent, wide-eyed, shaking.

“This world is a door tunnel,” said Cricket. “There is a world behind and a world ahead. What the storytellers say is that White Hands are those that should pass through the curtain — but are bound halfway. Those caught in the door.”

Otter looked at Kestrel. She knew they were both thinking the same thing: of Willow saying,
When she comes back, may she tell me why.

“So the storytellers say,” said Kestrel. “What do the binders say? Do they know this tale?”

“My mother …” said Otter. “My mother hasn’t taught me anything.”

Otter could do the simplest pieces of a binder’s work: the weaving of rawhide cords, the casting of patterns between the fingers. No more than any dyer or rope worker could do. No more than any child. Of the great work of binder’s knots — the lore of them, the power of them — her mother had never said the least word.

Kestrel blinked at that, surprised. Otter could see from Kestrel’s face that she knew a thing or two about the work of a ranger that she should not know. And Cricket knew a storyteller’s secrets. All her life she had wanted to be a binder. She had a binder’s power, she claimed a binder’s work in her heart. But here she was with her friends, and she alone was still wholly a child, wholly untrained.

“Will you be her second?” said Kestrel.

“I —” said Otter. “We have not spoken of it.”

She had always just known.

And now — her mother’s look made her fear something that she could not put a name to. Made her flush at something she had done, and did not understand.

The binder is mad.

The old binder is dead. The new binder is mad.

“What shall I do?” Otter asked — but it felt useless to ask. She had nothing to do but go back to her lodge. Back to her home. Back into the darkness, where her mother was waiting.

She looked in that direction. A summer wind was picking up puffs of dust. It made the curtain of the binder’s earthlodge — adorned in disks of silver — shimmer like water.

Kestrel was watching Otter. She must have seen how the shivering curtain held Otter transfixed, like a rabbit entranced by the weaving of a snake. “I will go with you,” she said.

And Cricket said: “We will both go.”

Otter looked back at her friends. No: It was no fairness to them. Cricket had already risked his status, his body, his very life that day, giving away secrets and lending his voice to a dangerous story. Kestrel had walked her down a cold river as if she were a woman in labor. “Stay where I can find you,” Otter said, and got up. She brushed her palms — they were clammy — down the suede of her leggings. And she went home.

Otter went through the first curtain and into the darkness of the door tunnel. She could feel the open air behind her, and smell the smoldering fire ahead. She paused long enough to breathe hard for courage. Then she went through the second curtain.

She stopped.

Tamarack’s grass pillow was burning in the fire pit. The lodge was full of a thick and clotting smoke. Through the smokehole the sunbeam came down like a solid thing. In the brightness and dimness, Otter could just barely see that her mother had strung cords — from sleeping platform to sleeping platform, from fire bench to pot hook, from the rough bits of wattle that made the walls themselves — there was a web of cords, everywhere. Her mother stood at the center of it, her hair moving with no air to move it.

“I want you to know,” said Willow, “that I will never hurt you.”

“I will protect you, Otter,” said Willow. The binder’s hair moved around her — as if little fingers of breeze touched her here, there. But the air in the lodge was thick and still.

“Protect me from what?” said Otter.

“From this,” said Willow, and spread her hands. The web of cords around her jerked. Otter flinched back toward the door tunnel. Even there she could feel the curtain stirring at her back. “From binding.”

“From binding?” Binding was itself a protection.

“From —” said Willow. Then suddenly her voice changed, became something small and lost: “Something is wrong, Otter. The knots are wrong.”

Otter did not know what to say. The smoke was scorching her lungs, making her lightheaded, as if with fear. “Come —” she stuttered, reaching out. “Come out into the air, Mother. The smoke is …”

Willow cut her off. “Therefore I will not take you.”

Otter froze. “What?”

“I will not have you as my second. You will not join the binding cord. You will not be a binder.”

Otter felt as if something heavy had struck her without warning. All her life — she’d wanted nothing else, and she’d always assumed …
Here is a binder born,
they said of her. At her mother’s words, the very fact of her birth seemed to spin away. She was not who she had thought she was: She had not been born. She was no one.

“You will not be a binder,” said Willow. “You are my daughter and I will save you:
You will not be a binder.
Now. Get out.”

Otter turned and ran.

She went blindly through the ring of earthlodges, dashed across the palm without meeting any of the eyes that turned to her. She went past the gardens, back into the meadow. She almost wanted to scream, but a scream would bring people running — she would have to explain — have to tell, to say the words and make them real and give up everything she’d ever wanted:
You will not be a binder. Not a binder.

The grass grew thick before her, and grasshoppers whirled up on all sides, on hissing wings of yellow and brown. The thickness of the grass slowed her headlong bolt. She stumbled, she stopped. Without thinking, she’d come back toward the last place she’d been: the hidden nest Cricket had made in the grass. She did not see Kestrel and Cricket now — did not want to see them. Did not want to have to speak. She didn’t think she could stop herself from sobbing if she had to speak.

She went to the nest in the grass, and she sat down.

She huddled there, hidden. She was so still that a yellow-throat flew in, perched sideways on a grass stem, and twittered around her. She watched the gnats, fine as dust, rise in spirals over the river as the sun went slant.

The shadows had thickened and swung to the east by the time Willow came rustling through the meadow. The aster and goldenrod parted and closed behind her. She was dressed plainly again, her hair braided down her back, her face soft, as if she’d been weeping. “Otter,” she said.

Otter said nothing.

The birds were beginning to stake their evening territories —
My tree, my tree, I’m a blue jay!
The
thk thk thk
of a woodpecker rang out of the forest.

“Otter,” said Willow, and sat down. There was a bundle in her arms, tied with an extravagance of yarn: blue-dyed, binder-blessed yarn, the most valuable thing in the world. Willow set the bundle down and put her finger on the knot. It snaked itself open.

The outer wrapping was a buffalo robe, new, the leather side soft. Willow lifted it aside. Inside the bundle was everything Otter owned.

“You cannot come back,” said Willow. “I am so sorry.”

Otter gaped at her.

“I love you,” said Willow softly. She had been weeping. She was beginning to weep again, slowly, as slowly as evening was falling. “Oh, my daughter.”

“Where will I go?” whispered Otter.

“You should go down the river,” said Willow. She tried to catch Otter’s hands. Otter yanked them away. “You should go with the Water Walkers: Go into sunlight; go as far as you can….”

To leave the free women of the forest and become one of the Sunlit People. To leave her mother and her friends and everyone she knew. To leave the work her heart still claimed. To leave Westmost, as if she were no one, as if she were a boy …

No.

Unbidden, Cricket’s words came back to her:
There are not enough of us. We must hold on.
He’d looked toward the earthlodges from which no smoke rose.

Well, then. Let one of them have smoke again.

Otter picked up the awkward, opened bundle with both hands and walked away, leaving her mother bent double in the grass. Overhead, the swallows swerved from shadow to shadow as the evening rose. Their pipping cries went over them all.

The earthlodge Otter claimed was a small one, left abandoned in an outbreak of blistering fever, four years before. It was near empty: Every basket and blanket, everything that could burn, had been burned. The sleeping platforms looked as bare as scaffolds. The stones around the fire pit were smoke-black and cold. Dust and silence had been sitting together on the fire bench. Together they rose and watched her come in.

Home.

The earthlodge was so empty. The wattle of the walls was almost bare of blessing knots. The ones that were left had become like the egg cases of spiders: shapeless, dry, brown. Otter had nothing beautiful to hang on those sad walls. She had three shirts, one of which — the fine one, made from the skin of a white deer — no longer fit. She had a small box of feathers and beaded thongs for her hair. A corncob that had once been a doll that she was far too old for. A rattle made of a turtle shell that had been hers since she was a baby. Why had her mother not kept that? Surely she must want something of her daughter’s? Had she thrown everything away?

Willow had sent three baskets. They were the best of the baskets Tamarack had made. Tamarack had been good at baskets, had had a deep patience for plaiting them, a sharp mind for seeing what patterns could be made from the tuck and weave of the light and dark rushes. The baskets — one little, one big as a pumpkin, and one bigger even than that — were each different, each beautiful, each tight enough to carry water.

Tamarack,
thought Otter.
Don’t go.

Then:
Don’t come back.

She lay down on the dusty platform alone, too bewildered to cry. Evening came, then twilight, then night, and then emptiness. It became bad, that emptiness. She wanted to get up and pace around the fire pit, but it was too dark, and she was too proud. She wanted to bang her head against the bare wood of the sleeping platform and let daze and pain pass for sleep.

It was nearly dawn, the smokehole becoming a ring of gray, before fatigue was strong enough to take her.

Sleep. No dreams.

Otter woke exhausted, with a leap of fear: She was not alone.

She sat up gasping. Kestrel was sitting across from her, building a fire. “I am coming to live here,” Kestrel said.

Otter gaped at her.

“Don’t argue with me,” said Kestrel.

“And anyway,” said Cricket, lifting the curtain and easing in, “you appear to have plenty of room.” He was cradling a big clay cookpot in his arms. He set it down beside Otter. “Why did you not find us?”

She had been too afraid. Afraid to say out loud what her mother had said to her.
You will not be a binder. Get out.

She didn’t say it, even now.

Cricket gave her a smile that made his mouth narrow. It looked like sorrow. He dropped a hand on Otter’s head. She felt the warmth of his long fingers brush through her hair. A motherly gesture.

“There’s more to fetch,” said Cricket. No one said anything to that. He shrugged. “And so I’ll fetch it.”

Kestrel watched him go. Otter watched Kestrel.

“We have talked,” said Kestrel, coaxing up the fire. “Cricket and I have talked of
okishae
— at the great fire, next moon.”

Okishae
— an odd word, an old word. It meant mate, it meant pair, it meant knot — but it was a pairing and a knotting that was meant to last a lifetime. It was a startling idea, to Otter: that humans should pair like wolves or swans. Most human couplings in Westmost were not like that at all. Otter’s own father was presumably one of the Water Walkers: the men who brought trade up from the Sunlit Places. She didn’t know, and no one cared.
Okishae
were rare, and thought rather strange.

But on the other hand, perhaps it was not so strange. It was Cricket, after all.

“
Okishae
,” said Otter, trying out the word.

Kestrel gave the fire a last poke and rocked back on her heels. “We’d need a home,” she said. “We thought: here.”

“Here,” said Otter. Her voice sounded rough. All the tears she hadn’t let out were making her throat ache.

“With you,” said Kestrel. She flashed Otter the wicked smile that few in the pinch had ever seen. “Not that I propose a three-rope tying. That boy — he’s all mine.”

That jolted a laugh out of Otter — and the laugh turned suddenly into a spring of tears. They startled her, and she was helpless against them: They just broke out of her, bubbling. Kestrel came and wrapped her arms around her as she shook. For a moment, Otter didn’t even know why she was crying. That Kestrel was making a pairing — why would that make her sad? Then she heard herself say: “She will not have me as her second. She threw me from our lodge.” Kestrel was still and strong and warm: Against that stillness, Otter could feel herself shaking. “She will not … I cannot be a binder.”

Otter pulled back and swallowed down the tears, trying to breathe, trying to speak, to make sense. “Something is —”

“You do not need to say it,” said Kestrel softly. She leaned her forehead against Otter’s forehead a moment, and put her fingers in her friend’s hair. “The whole pinch is saying it.”

“That she rejects me?”

“No,” said Kestrel. “That something is wrong.” She paused. “When they hear she will not have a second …”

Otter had not looked at it that way. It would come to the pinch as disastrous news. Only one binder — not even a girl in learning. Only one binder, and something wrong with her.

“I think I will not be the one to spread this story,” said Kestrel.

Otter nodded.

Cricket came back, staggering under the weight of three buffalo robes, and they set about making a home.