That year, for the first time, it struck Otter how thin the ward was. She had grown up knowing only its power, its knots and its silver disks, a binder’s strength and pride made visible. Now she saw the rest of the truth: The ward was made of rawhide cords, each no thicker than a finger. They had held the snow all winter; they had borne the summer wind. Now they drooped, and here and there ripped or slipped or simply gave way. The ward was only skin, and it sagged.
Therefore, beginning on the day when the Store-Up Moon was full, it was renewed.
The morning of the renewal, Willow was among the last to emerge. When she did come out, the women sitting together on the sunny bare clay of the palm, braiding corn, fell silent to watch her. Willow stretched, blinking, in the egg-yolk yellow light, then set off toward the ward without a word, little Fawn trailing her, looking pale and small. When she came across the palm, the women watched her as if she might suddenly spin away from her shadow and become a thing of twigs and teeth.
But she did not.
Willow did what she was supposed to do: She walked up to the place where the river came through the ward, and she stood there, waiting. And softly the word went around, and the women of Westmost got up from their baskets and put down their tools and came together at the river’s edge. They looked at Willow. They looked at the ward.
The tired and rotting ward.
What should have happened was this: Willow would take out her binder’s knife, the one whose blade was white chert and whose handle was a human jawbone, inlaid with silver. The people would gather, she would give a blessing, ladders would be raised, and the long work of renewal would begin. Taking the one piece of the ward between the first two trees and recasting the barest threads of a new one would take all day. To do the whole ring would take the moon and more. It was a vulnerable time, full of openings and known for its bad dreams.
Anyone who could walk was meant to witness the first blessing, and so Otter went, and Cricket went with her. Kestrel was among the rangers that day: They would join nearly shoulder to shoulder in the weak section of the ward, lest the shadows pour into Westmost like water through a crack in a pot. It was not unknown for a ranger to be lost in the Store-Up Moon, when the ward was weak.
That morning, Otter and Cricket had both watched Kestrel get ready. She sat with her ranger’s staff in her lap, her hands going slowly over the knots that wrapped it. There were cords of rawhide and tendon and yarn itself, richly dyed in reds and yellows and greens and blues. There were binding knots. There were silver charms that made the staff shiver like spring rain. Knots and silver: A strike from such a weapon should drive back any but the most powerful of the dead — at least for a moment.
Cricket watched Kestrel, sometimes silent and sometimes more quick-tongued than he should have been — as if the words were birds that rose from him, frightened into flight. Otter wanted to tell him to be calm, but how could she? She had only held the dead in her knots. Cricket had held them in the heart of his body, and barely lived. What did she have to tell him, really?
Nothing. And so they went out in silence.
They hung to the back of the gathered people and watched as Willow climbed onto a round-backed boulder by the tree’s roots. The stone was big as a buffalo, and so the binder stood high above the crowd, her blue shirt like a thickening of sky, her fringe of white weasel tails shivering in the wind. The Shadowed People looked at her, and slowly their silence went from solemn to uneasy.
She reached down and pulled Fawn up beside her. The young binder had her hair done in a strange style: braids coiled around her head, with the two little tips sticking out above her eyes like quail feathers. They were trembling. Everything else was still.
Willow did not say the words she was meant to say. She looked from face to face, black eyes wide. She did not look like a binder about to give a blessing. She looked like a woman waiting to be run through with a spear.
Finally, she lifted her hands. Sunlight glared off the clear stone blade, and for a moment she seemed to be holding a star. “So,” she said softly. It carried only because of the drum-tight silence. “So. Let the ward be renewed.”
She reached out and touched the birch tree.
The tree shivered as if its skin prickled. A faint gust of whispers swept the watching women: Did they imagine that little movement? Then all at once, the birch shuddered and shook, groaned like a laboring animal. And the cords of the ward …
The cords of the ward unbound themselves and dropped free.
Otter felt raw power lash through her — she took a step back and Cricket caught her, hugging her from behind. Stunned but steadied, Otter looked up.
For just a moment, the section of the ward hung unsupported in the air, the cords drifting through one another as if they were watersnakes, dancing. It was startling, lovely —
And then it fell. Not the whole ward, but the piece between the birch Willow had touched and the next. She had been about to take it down anyway, but this …
The cords were rotted like frost-blasted pumpkin vines. They lay in a tangle on the cleared earth. The heap seemed to shift and sigh like a wounded thing. And then it was still.