Sorrow’s Knot (7 page)

So. The time of ceremonies passed: the fall fires where cords were joined and pledges made. Otter’s shirt stayed unbelted. It had always been unbelted, but now it felt strange, as if she had lost something. A dream of something.

What was she going to do?

Her mother made no announcement, no proclamation that she had rejected her own daughter, but when the time came to tie the new cords, the fact that Otter joined none of them could not be missed. There was whispering. There was outright talk, and some of it to Otter herself. Pokeberry, the midwife, said ridiculously: “She’s just forgotten.” Hart, the silver-worker, said, with black comfort: “That other one won’t last long.” And Newt, the bonesetter, Newt of all people, said gruffly: “In my cord, Otter, you would be welcome.” A kindness.

The kindness was the hardest thing to take.

The kindness and the fear.

Because now that the fall fires had passed, it was time to renew the ward.

That year, for the first time, it struck Otter how thin the ward was. She had grown up knowing only its power, its knots and its silver disks, a binder’s strength and pride made visible. Now she saw the rest of the truth: The ward was made of rawhide cords, each no thicker than a finger. They had held the snow all winter; they had borne the summer wind. Now they drooped, and here and there ripped or slipped or simply gave way. The ward was only skin, and it sagged.

Therefore, beginning on the day when the Store-Up Moon was full, it was renewed.

The morning of the renewal, Willow was among the last to emerge. When she did come out, the women sitting together on the sunny bare clay of the palm, braiding corn, fell silent to watch her. Willow stretched, blinking, in the egg-yolk yellow light, then set off toward the ward without a word, little Fawn trailing her, looking pale and small. When she came across the palm, the women watched her as if she might suddenly spin away from her shadow and become a thing of twigs and teeth.

But she did not.

Willow did what she was supposed to do: She walked up to the place where the river came through the ward, and she stood there, waiting. And softly the word went around, and the women of Westmost got up from their baskets and put down their tools and came together at the river’s edge. They looked at Willow. They looked at the ward.

The tired and rotting ward.

What should have happened was this: Willow would take out her binder’s knife, the one whose blade was white chert and whose handle was a human jawbone, inlaid with silver. The people would gather, she would give a blessing, ladders would be raised, and the long work of renewal would begin. Taking the one piece of the ward between the first two trees and recasting the barest threads of a new one would take all day. To do the whole ring would take the moon and more. It was a vulnerable time, full of openings and known for its bad dreams.

Anyone who could walk was meant to witness the first blessing, and so Otter went, and Cricket went with her. Kestrel was among the rangers that day: They would join nearly shoulder to shoulder in the weak section of the ward, lest the shadows pour into Westmost like water through a crack in a pot. It was not unknown for a ranger to be lost in the Store-Up Moon, when the ward was weak.

That morning, Otter and Cricket had both watched Kestrel get ready. She sat with her ranger’s staff in her lap, her hands going slowly over the knots that wrapped it. There were cords of rawhide and tendon and yarn itself, richly dyed in reds and yellows and greens and blues. There were binding knots. There were silver charms that made the staff shiver like spring rain. Knots and silver: A strike from such a weapon should drive back any but the most powerful of the dead — at least for a moment.

Cricket watched Kestrel, sometimes silent and sometimes more quick-tongued than he should have been — as if the words were birds that rose from him, frightened into flight. Otter wanted to tell him to be calm, but how could she? She had only held the dead in her knots. Cricket had held them in the heart of his body, and barely lived. What did she have to tell him, really?

Nothing. And so they went out in silence.

They hung to the back of the gathered people and watched as Willow climbed onto a round-backed boulder by the tree’s roots. The stone was big as a buffalo, and so the binder stood high above the crowd, her blue shirt like a thickening of sky, her fringe of white weasel tails shivering in the wind. The Shadowed People looked at her, and slowly their silence went from solemn to uneasy.

She reached down and pulled Fawn up beside her. The young binder had her hair done in a strange style: braids coiled around her head, with the two little tips sticking out above her eyes like quail feathers. They were trembling. Everything else was still.

Willow did not say the words she was meant to say. She looked from face to face, black eyes wide. She did not look like a binder about to give a blessing. She looked like a woman waiting to be run through with a spear.

Finally, she lifted her hands. Sunlight glared off the clear stone blade, and for a moment she seemed to be holding a star. “So,” she said softly. It carried only because of the drum-tight silence. “So. Let the ward be renewed.”

She reached out and touched the birch tree.

The tree shivered as if its skin prickled. A faint gust of whispers swept the watching women: Did they imagine that little movement? Then all at once, the birch shuddered and shook, groaned like a laboring animal. And the cords of the ward …

The cords of the ward unbound themselves and dropped free.

Otter felt raw power lash through her — she took a step back and Cricket caught her, hugging her from behind. Stunned but steadied, Otter looked up.

For just a moment, the section of the ward hung unsupported in the air, the cords drifting through one another as if they were watersnakes, dancing. It was startling, lovely —

And then it fell. Not the whole ward, but the piece between the birch Willow had touched and the next. She had been about to take it down anyway, but this …

The cords were rotted like frost-blasted pumpkin vines. They lay in a tangle on the cleared earth. The heap seemed to shift and sigh like a wounded thing. And then it was still.

Everything was still.

Someone — just one person, for the free women of the forest were brave — screamed. Once. And then again it was still.

Otter felt Cricket’s breath catch. “What are you weaving, Little Spider?” the storyteller murmured.

Willow stood on the rock staring at the ruin she’d made. Fawn lifted her head. Her voice was small and tight and strange, but she said: “The ward … The ward will be renewed.” And she put the first of the blue cords into Willow’s hand, the way a mother might work a rattle into a baby’s fist.

Willow lifted it, stared at it. And then wrapped it around the birch tree.

And very slowly, as the rangers of Westmost gathered to stand against the seeping, reaching shadow that spilled from the forest, the two binders, the young and the mad, restrung the ward.

The breaking and remaking of the ward went on all through the wane of Store-Up Moon, the moon of fine weather and bad dreams. The weather was fine that year, and the dreams were bad.

Over and over, Otter dreamed of Tamarack bound in the scaffolds. Sometimes she saw the body high above, and saw its hands. In her dreams, she stood waiting to see the hand move. Always it was about to move.

It never did.

Kestrel came in from her days at the ward, some days blank-eyed and some days shaking. The rangers had it hard that moon. The ward came down when Willow touched it, undoing itself as should only happen in nightmares. And when each ward piece came down, the dead came sniffing around.

Shadows oozed out the edge of the forest like lymph from under a scab. As evening lengthened, the gast pressed close, then closer. They shied back from the rangers’ staffs like kicked dogs, and then again came forward.

Kestrel returned to the lodge with her staff frazzled and frayed, its cords hanging loose in great loops. She worked at those knots into the night until her fingers grew so dry they bled.

Cricket sat beside her and rubbed yarrow paste into her roughened skin. He told her stories. And Otter, who had no belt and no cord, had nothing to do but watch.

Until one day, Kestrel said softly: “Your knots are better than mine.” And she handed Otter her staff.

At first Otter could only stare at it. A ranger’s staff should not be held by anyone except a ranger. It was as strange as holding a rainbow. And she could feel the stirring of the knots on it, almost as if it were alive. Rangers’ knots. Secrets of the rangers’ cord. “I should not take this,” she said.

“I should not ask you to,” said Kestrel.

A weight hung from those two
should nots
.

What would happen if someone came through the curtain in that moment? Kestrel could lose her status. Otter could lose a finger, if not a hand. But no one came. No one ever did. Kestrel leaned her head against Cricket’s chest. He wrapped an arm around her, then met Otter’s eyes.

The day they’d bound Tamarack, Cricket had tucked his chin and risked his life for Otter, to tell her the story of Hare the White Hand, and Mad Spider before she went mad. He’d blushed as if shamed; he’d panted as if terrified, but he’d done it.

And now: “Show me these knots,” Otter said.

And Kestrel did.

From that night on, Otter did the forbidden work, and if Kestrel’s staff was stronger than it should have been — if it had so much power that it was more like a sky full of stars than a spring rain — no one noticed. The rangers were hard-pressed, and for all their stoic silences, they were frightened.

Still, they kept Otter’s work secret. It was a serious business, a deep wrong, that she should know the secrets of another cord — of any cord. It was so wrong and so strange that they did not know exactly what would happen to them. There were tales — the storyteller with her tongue ripped out, the fletcher who lost three fingers. Punishments for giving away the secrets of the cord. If they were found out … But how might they be found out? Their lodge was quiet, and the curtain never lifted unexpectedly.

Until, one night, it did.