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.