Then: Don’t come back.
She lay down on the dusty platform alone, too bewildered to cry. Evening came, then twilight, then night, and then emptiness. It became bad, that emptiness. She wanted to get up and pace around the fire pit, but it was too dark, and she was too proud. She wanted to bang her head against the bare wood of the sleeping platform and let daze and pain pass for sleep.
It was nearly dawn, the smokehole becoming a ring of gray, before fatigue was strong enough to take her.
Sleep. No dreams.
Otter woke exhausted, with a leap of fear: She was not alone.
She sat up gasping. Kestrel was sitting across from her, building a fire. “I am coming to live here,” Kestrel said.
Otter gaped at her.
“Don’t argue with me,” said Kestrel.
“And anyway,” said Cricket, lifting the curtain and easing in, “you appear to have plenty of room.” He was cradling a big clay cookpot in his arms. He set it down beside Otter. “Why did you not find us?”
She had been too afraid. Afraid to say out loud what her mother had said to her. You will not be a binder. Get out.
She didn’t say it, even now.
Cricket gave her a smile that made his mouth narrow. It looked like sorrow. He dropped a hand on Otter’s head. She felt the warmth of his long fingers brush through her hair. A motherly gesture.
“There’s more to fetch,” said Cricket. No one said anything to that. He shrugged. “And so I’ll fetch it.”
Kestrel watched him go. Otter watched Kestrel.
“We have talked,” said Kestrel, coaxing up the fire. “Cricket and I have talked of okishae — at the great fire, next moon.”
Okishae — an odd word, an old word. It meant mate, it meant pair, it meant knot — but it was a pairing and a knotting that was meant to last a lifetime. It was a startling idea, to Otter: that humans should pair like wolves or swans. Most human couplings in Westmost were not like that at all. Otter’s own father was presumably one of the Water Walkers: the men who brought trade up from the Sunlit Places. She didn’t know, and no one cared. Okishae were rare, and thought rather strange.
But on the other hand, perhaps it was not so strange. It was Cricket, after all.
“Okishae,” said Otter, trying out the word.
Kestrel gave the fire a last poke and rocked back on her heels. “We’d need a home,” she said. “We thought: here.”
“Here,” said Otter. Her voice sounded rough. All the tears she hadn’t let out were making her throat ache.
“With you,” said Kestrel. She flashed Otter the wicked smile that few in the pinch had ever seen. “Not that I propose a three-rope tying. That boy — he’s all mine.”
That jolted a laugh out of Otter — and the laugh turned suddenly into a spring of tears. They startled her, and she was helpless against them: They just broke out of her, bubbling. Kestrel came and wrapped her arms around her as she shook. For a moment, Otter didn’t even know why she was crying. That Kestrel was making a pairing — why would that make her sad? Then she heard herself say: “She will not have me as her second. She threw me from our lodge.” Kestrel was still and strong and warm: Against that stillness, Otter could feel herself shaking. “She will not … I cannot be a binder.”
Otter pulled back and swallowed down the tears, trying to breathe, trying to speak, to make sense. “Something is —”
“You do not need to say it,” said Kestrel softly. She leaned her forehead against Otter’s forehead a moment, and put her fingers in her friend’s hair. “The whole pinch is saying it.”
“That she rejects me?”
“No,” said Kestrel. “That something is wrong.” She paused. “When they hear she will not have a second …”
Otter had not looked at it that way. It would come to the pinch as disastrous news. Only one binder — not even a girl in learning. Only one binder, and something wrong with her.
“I think I will not be the one to spread this story,” said Kestrel.
Otter nodded.
Cricket came back, staggering under the weight of three buffalo robes, and they set about making a home.
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.”