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.”