“There’s a thought,” said Cricket. “Tsha, Kestrel! Together we outnumber you.”
“I think —” began Otter,
“— that it’s clean enough,” finished Cricket.
The three of them looked at one another. And slowly, between them, bloomed a ward of smiles.
So opened the last moons of their sunflower years. Already things were shifting. Nearly every day Cricket would walk with Flea up and down the river. He had a new rattle, made of a turtle shell painted red and black and collared with black curling feathers. He practiced with it until Kestrel swiped it and hit him over the head.
Kestrel, meanwhile, slipped away often with the rangers. The cord of the rangers were the warriors and hunters and foragers of Westmost, women of sharp eyes and steady nerves. Rangers, alone among the free women of the forest, went into the forest itself. They brought back the dyes and herbs, the game, the wood for the fires. They worked with arrows, with staffs wrapped in knotted yarn, and with their own bracelets, under the constant, shifting threat of the dead.
Kestrel’s mother had been a ranger — lost, and no one knew how or where — lost as many rangers were, some years before. Kestrel, then, had the bloodline, had the power. Her calm made her seem fearless — though Otter knew she was not. Often when Otter looked for her she was nowhere to be found. One day, she came home with two fingers blistered from learning to use a bow. On another, with sweet smell all around her.
Cricket slipped his hand into hers and found it sticky — her skin caught and stretched his as he tried to pull away in surprise.
“Oh dear,” he said. “I think we are stuck together.”
“Yes,” said Kestrel. “You are mine forever.” But she lifted their joined hands and blew between them, as if trying to nurse a little fire. When their hands were both warm she jerked free. The separation of their two palms made a squelch-pop.
“What is that?” said Otter. And then backed off — for surely whatever it was must be a secret of the ranger cord. “I mean …”
Kestrel hesitated a moment, then took something from the pouch at her hip. “It’s this,” she said. “Look at this.”
It was a lump of something golden-brown, like honey crossed with clay. Kestrel set it in the bowl of an empty stone lamp and handed it to Otter. Cricket pulled a splint from the fire. In Otter’s hand, the little glim sputtered and smoked and then began to burn with a clear orange flame.
“See,” said Kestrel. “Today I learned where the light comes from.”
“Where the light comes from,” said Cricket, bending close in wonder.
“It’s sap,” said Kestrel. “It seeps out in knots, from white pine trees. It’s pine sap. It’s not a secret: You cut it free with a knife.”
The stone bowl in Otter’s hand was starting to become warm. She set it on the bench. “Your mother would have been proud,” she said, and had to swallow hard.
Only Otter, then, had no cord at all. As if she were the one who was motherless.
Though she wasn’t.
The pinch was not big: Otter saw Willow often. Sometimes she had her face scrubbed and her hair braided tight, so tight it pulled at her temples, making her look like a child. Sometimes she had her hair unbound and a knife in her hand.
She and Otter did not speak.
Otter worked — far more than her share, merely to be busy — in the great gardens of Westmost, plucking the rattlesnake beans that grew twining up the cornstalks, gathering the first of the thickening ears of corn. She received glances but not questions.
Often, Cricket worked beside her and told her stories — not great dark tales, but silly things, stories anyone might tell, though no one could tell them so well as Cricket: “The Goose Who Got Lost Going South,” “How Moon Forgot Her Name,” “How Red Fox Was Double-Crossed.” They worked with one basket between them.
Kestrel and Cricket were each making, secretly, new shirts to give to each other at the fall fires, when they would stand together with all eyes on them, and do this strange thing: okishae.
Only Otter knew they were both making shirts. Only Otter — and the dyers — knew they had both chosen yellow leather dyed with prickly poppies.
Only Otter knew that neither of them could sew.
It ended with both Cricket and Kestrel secretly requesting help. It ended with Otter sewing both shirts. She tucked one or the other away whenever one of them came into the lodge. It was good to have her own secret work to smile over. It was good to have knots in her hands. They came to her easily, and they made her feel as if she had been singing.