Sorrow’s Knot (6 page)

Through the wax and wane of the Corn-Cut Moon, the three of them reclaimed the earthlodge from its dusts and silences.

Kestrel, as it turned out, could have joined the cord of people who cleaned. She knew how to make a broom of birch twigs to sweep down the cobwebs, a smudge of kinnikinnick to case out the staleness, a garland of sagewort to bless the door. She had them split new pine for the sleeping platforms. Lay new stones in the fire pit. Cut new rushes to line the cache pits. Pick scouring rush to rub on — absolutely everything. After two days of this, Cricket flopped down on the sleeping platform. “Mercy,” he gasped. “You two are going to kill me.”

“It’s mostly her,” said Otter, putting down her hyssop broom, and glad to have the excuse. “But, you know, together we outnumber her.”

“There’s a thought,” said Cricket. “Tsha, Kestrel! Together we outnumber you.”

“I think —” began Otter,

“— that it’s clean enough,” finished Cricket.

The three of them looked at one another. And slowly, between them, bloomed a ward of smiles.

So opened the last moons of their sunflower years. Already things were shifting. Nearly every day Cricket would walk with Flea up and down the river. He had a new rattle, made of a turtle shell painted red and black and collared with black curling feathers. He practiced with it until Kestrel swiped it and hit him over the head.

Kestrel, meanwhile, slipped away often with the rangers. The cord of the rangers were the warriors and hunters and foragers of Westmost, women of sharp eyes and steady nerves. Rangers, alone among the free women of the forest, went into the forest itself. They brought back the dyes and herbs, the game, the wood for the fires. They worked with arrows, with staffs wrapped in knotted yarn, and with their own bracelets, under the constant, shifting threat of the dead.

Kestrel’s mother had been a ranger — lost, and no one knew how or where — lost as many rangers were, some years before. Kestrel, then, had the bloodline, had the power. Her calm made her seem fearless — though Otter knew she was not. Often when Otter looked for her she was nowhere to be found. One day, she came home with two fingers blistered from learning to use a bow. On another, with sweet smell all around her.

Cricket slipped his hand into hers and found it sticky — her skin caught and stretched his as he tried to pull away in surprise.

“Oh dear,” he said. “I think we are stuck together.”

“Yes,” said Kestrel. “You are mine forever.” But she lifted their joined hands and blew between them, as if trying to nurse a little fire. When their hands were both warm she jerked free. The separation of their two palms made a
squelch-pop
.

“What is that?” said Otter. And then backed off — for surely whatever it was must be a secret of the ranger cord. “I mean …”

Kestrel hesitated a moment, then took something from the pouch at her hip. “It’s this,” she said. “Look at this.”

It was a lump of something golden-brown, like honey crossed with clay. Kestrel set it in the bowl of an empty stone lamp and handed it to Otter. Cricket pulled a splint from the fire. In Otter’s hand, the little glim sputtered and smoked and then began to burn with a clear orange flame.

“See,” said Kestrel. “Today I learned where the light comes from.”

“Where the light comes from,” said Cricket, bending close in wonder.

“It’s sap,” said Kestrel. “It seeps out in knots, from white pine trees. It’s pine sap. It’s not a secret: You cut it free with a knife.”

The stone bowl in Otter’s hand was starting to become warm. She set it on the bench. “Your mother would have been proud,” she said, and had to swallow hard.

Only Otter, then, had no cord at all. As if she were the one who was motherless.

Though she wasn’t.

The pinch was not big: Otter saw Willow often. Sometimes she had her face scrubbed and her hair braided tight, so tight it pulled at her temples, making her look like a child. Sometimes she had her hair unbound and a knife in her hand.

She and Otter did not speak.

Otter worked — far more than her share, merely to be busy — in the great gardens of Westmost, plucking the rattlesnake beans that grew twining up the cornstalks, gathering the first of the thickening ears of corn. She received glances but not questions.

Often, Cricket worked beside her and told her stories — not great dark tales, but silly things, stories anyone might tell, though no one could tell them so well as Cricket: “The Goose Who Got Lost Going South,” “How Moon Forgot Her Name,” “How Red Fox Was Double-Crossed.” They worked with one basket between them.

Kestrel and Cricket were each making, secretly, new shirts to give to each other at the fall fires, when they would stand together with all eyes on them, and do this strange thing:
okishae
.

Only Otter knew they were both making shirts. Only Otter — and the dyers — knew they had both chosen yellow leather dyed with prickly poppies.

Only Otter knew that neither of them could sew.

It ended with both Cricket and Kestrel secretly requesting help. It ended with Otter sewing both shirts. She tucked one or the other away whenever one of them came into the lodge. It was good to have her own secret work to smile over. It was good to have knots in her hands. They came to her easily, and they made her feel as if she had been singing.

There was, in short, a little while in which she was warmly happy. She was happy one day lounging on top of their earthlodge with Kestrel, watching Cricket and nearly all the children of Westmost play hoop-and-lance. He stuck up from them like a sapling from a meadow, and yet they ran circles around him. He was good enough at rolling the hoop, but when he threw the lance the first time it went wide, and somehow swerved, hit a windpole, and went tumbling end over end.

“Behold, your future mate,” said Otter to Kestrel as the players pounded past. “Behold his aim. Were you hoping for children?”

“Oh,” said Kestrel, spinning a bit of grass between her fingers. “In that game the hoop can help the lance along.”

Otter laughed and was happy.

And she was happy at the great fire that opened the Pumpkin Moon. Happy to give the yellow shirts and see both her friends laugh helplessly. Happy to help Cricket fuss over his crown of sweetgrass. Happy to put ocher into the part of Kestrel’s hair. Happy to see them — they had each been in seclusion — see each other at last, and grow suddenly shy, as if they were pledging to strangers. Their eyes were very wide as the cords wrapped around their hands.

As a wolf loves another wolf. As an eagle loves an eagle. You only, mine only. Through our whole walk through this world. Okishae.

Soon the corn was cut and the beans were harvested. The days grew shorter. It was the season in which the Water Walkers came.

The Walkers came up from the prairies, and across the snake lands where no one lived, and into the spreading skirts of the black-shouldered hills. There, where the thin shadows of birch and aspen began to thicken with the dead, they sought and struck the River Spearfish, thirsty for the protection of running water. They went to Bluehold, the great pinch famous for its lupine dyes. They went to Little Rushes, where the silver was panned. And in the end they went to Westmost, the last human place in the world.

On their backs, and on the travois of their great, wolfish dogs, they brought the bounty of the prairies: Bales of buffalo hides, and skin bags of buffalo hair gathered after the spring molts. Cured meats and certain prairie herbs — coneflower against toothache, snakeweed against coughs. These they traded for the things only the forest could give: Silver hammered to look like running water, and said to repel the slip. Arrows by the bundle, for the prairie had neither wood nor flint. Herbs of taste and medicine. Ornaments of mica and quartz and porcupine. And above all, above everything, the dyed yarns, binder-blessed, to hold back the dead.

The coming of the Walkers transformed Westmost. For half a moon, the pinch was filled with new folk and new food and new stories. There was shouting and splashing as the travois were unloaded, there were new songs, there were dogs everywhere. From the poles of their travois, the Walkers pitched conical tents, and the ring of the earthlodges was circled by another ring: lighter and taller, and more full of music. The rolling hoops of hoop-and-lance and the shouts of players filled the palm. Fires burned in the open, extravagant of wood, and in the careful, modest pinch, no one was careful or modest.

Through it all strode Willow. Her unbound hair was full of silver disks, she had silver on her belt. She flashed like fast water. Her stride ate the ground, her laugh was hawk-wild. The people of Westmost watched her with an unease that looked like awe. To the Walkers, she was the forest made flesh: She was beauty and darkness and power.

Otter watched her from the roof of her earthlodge. She did not go to the palm to hear the stories, to try the new dances. She watched Willow and she waited. The fall fires were only days away. Kestrel would take her woman’s belt. And Cricket too: He would become the pinch’s second storyteller. Otter’s unbelted shirt felt loose around her waist. What would she do?

And what would the pinch do? How could the binder be without a second?

There was no one else.

And then, suddenly, there was.

Through the first half of the Pumpkin Moon, the people of Westmost and the Water Walkers gathered together. They traded news, goods, glances. But as the moon came full, they built the fall’s great fire, and there they traded their children.

The folk of Westmost were mostly women, of course. The Walkers were mostly men: young men, breaking free from the hunting or the wool gathering, looking for adventure. There were always a few Westmost boys, proud as young stags, who would walk away down the river. There were always a few half-grown girls from the Sunlit Places, seeking a place among the free women of the forest.

That year, the people of the prairies had sent only one new child, a small and quiet girl, narrow-wristed and large-eyed. She was dressed in the fashion of the Sunlit People, in a shirt that fell impractically to her calves, and her legs bare. There was a stripe of red painted down the center of her nose, dots of yellow around her eyes. To Otter, she looked as strange as a new kind of bird.

It should have been the binder who welcomed such a child. Tamarack had always done it with great seriousness — to come into such a shadowed place as Westmost was no small thing — but also with great grace, and a secret smile slipped to the girls like a sweet. Willow, though, stood by the edge of the fire, staring at the new girl like a wolf at a rabbit. She stayed silent so long that people began to shift from foot to foot, as if the binder’s silence were a weight they were trying to hold.

It was, in the end, Thistle, captain of the rangers, who spoke, looking the small stranger up and down: “How old are you, child?”

“My name is Fawn,” the child said. “This will be my sixteenth winter.”

“Hmmpf,” said Newt. “You don’t look it.”

Fawn said: “I don’t lie.”

Otter felt Cricket, beside her, turn a laugh into a cough, and that made her smile too. She was prepared to like this strange girl.

Newt, though, looked as sour as one of her medicines. “And what can you do?”

Fawn paused, then lifted her chin and said: “I am a binder.”

Otter’s heart lurched.

A huge silence opened like a pit in front of Fawn. No one could have stood on that edge without teetering a little. Fawn looked down, flushing in the firelight.

“Well,” said Newt. “In sureness, we need —”

“Show me,” said Willow.

Fawn looked up, startled.

Willow took a step forward. The light caught on the silver disks of her belt, and the disks in her hair shone as if she had a dozen eyes. “Show me,” she said.

Fawn was done teetering. Looking at Willow, she unwrapped her bracelets. She cast a cradle, then flipped her fingers and made the pattern change: the fourth star, the woman running. Then the pattern that drew up the dead: the tree. When Fawn made the tree into the scaffold, Willow stepped closer still. She slipped her fingers into the yarns beside Fawn’s fingers. She spread the scaffold open so that it became the sky. The two of them stood there, both trembling a little, with the wildest and widest of patterns cast between them.

“You know that this will kill you,” said Willow.

Otter could just see Fawn’s eyes, so wide they showed white all around.

Willow seemed to let the pattern loosen a little, and her voice came more gently: “It is very dangerous, to be a binder. There are other things a girl of knots might do.”

Thistle spoke: “The binder must have a second.” Otter saw the ranger’s gaze flick toward her.
My grandmother,
she thought, as she rarely did.
My mother’s mother.
There was something … soft … in the look Thistle gave her. Grim but sweet, like a mother brushing back the hair of a dying child. “Willow: You must have a second.”

Standing there, shining with silver, her hands in the knots, Willow seemed to consider. “Your name is Fawn?”

“It is.”

“Fawn. Do you want this?” It was almost a whisper. The strings shivered between them.

“I want this.” Fawn’s voice had come out as a whisper in turn. She shook herself, pulled the sky taut again, and proclaimed: “I want this.”

Willow yanked her hands out of the pattern, leaving Fawn gasping as the power surged and changed. The girl fumbled to pull the sky back to the scaffold before the slack made the yarns drop free.

“Well, then,” said Willow, and watched her for a moment: a small girl struggling with a great power.

Otter thought her mother’s face looked both sane and sad.

“Welcome, Fawn: daughter of my power, bound to my cord. Fawn, binder of Westmost.”