“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.