Everything was still.
Someone — just one person, for the free women of the forest were brave — screamed. Once. And then again it was still.
Otter felt Cricket’s breath catch. “What are you weaving, Little Spider?” the storyteller murmured.
Willow stood on the rock staring at the ruin she’d made. Fawn lifted her head. Her voice was small and tight and strange, but she said: “The ward … The ward will be renewed.” And she put the first of the blue cords into Willow’s hand, the way a mother might work a rattle into a baby’s fist.
Willow lifted it, stared at it. And then wrapped it around the birch tree.
And very slowly, as the rangers of Westmost gathered to stand against the seeping, reaching shadow that spilled from the forest, the two binders, the young and the mad, restrung the ward.
The breaking and remaking of the ward went on all through the wane of Store-Up Moon, the moon of fine weather and bad dreams. The weather was fine that year, and the dreams were bad.
Over and over, Otter dreamed of Tamarack bound in the scaffolds. Sometimes she saw the body high above, and saw its hands. In her dreams, she stood waiting to see the hand move. Always it was about to move.
It never did.
Kestrel came in from her days at the ward, some days blank-eyed and some days shaking. The rangers had it hard that moon. The ward came down when Willow touched it, undoing itself as should only happen in nightmares. And when each ward piece came down, the dead came sniffing around.
Shadows oozed out the edge of the forest like lymph from under a scab. As evening lengthened, the gast pressed close, then closer. They shied back from the rangers’ staffs like kicked dogs, and then again came forward.
Kestrel returned to the lodge with her staff frazzled and frayed, its cords hanging loose in great loops. She worked at those knots into the night until her fingers grew so dry they bled.
Cricket sat beside her and rubbed yarrow paste into her roughened skin. He told her stories. And Otter, who had no belt and no cord, had nothing to do but watch.
Until one day, Kestrel said softly: “Your knots are better than mine.” And she handed Otter her staff.
At first Otter could only stare at it. A ranger’s staff should not be held by anyone except a ranger. It was as strange as holding a rainbow. And she could feel the stirring of the knots on it, almost as if it were alive. Rangers’ knots. Secrets of the rangers’ cord. “I should not take this,” she said.
“I should not ask you to,” said Kestrel.
A weight hung from those two should nots.
What would happen if someone came through the curtain in that moment? Kestrel could lose her status. Otter could lose a finger, if not a hand. But no one came. No one ever did. Kestrel leaned her head against Cricket’s chest. He wrapped an arm around her, then met Otter’s eyes.
The day they’d bound Tamarack, Cricket had tucked his chin and risked his life for Otter, to tell her the story of Hare the White Hand, and Mad Spider before she went mad. He’d blushed as if shamed; he’d panted as if terrified, but he’d done it.
And now: “Show me these knots,” Otter said.
And Kestrel did.
From that night on, Otter did the forbidden work, and if Kestrel’s staff was stronger than it should have been — if it had so much power that it was more like a sky full of stars than a spring rain — no one noticed. The rangers were hard-pressed, and for all their stoic silences, they were frightened.
Still, they kept Otter’s work secret. It was a serious business, a deep wrong, that she should know the secrets of another cord — of any cord. It was so wrong and so strange that they did not know exactly what would happen to them. There were tales — the storyteller with her tongue ripped out, the fletcher who lost three fingers. Punishments for giving away the secrets of the cord. If they were found out … But how might they be found out? Their lodge was quiet, and the curtain never lifted unexpectedly.
Until, one night, it did.
Cricket was making a porridge and Kestrel was drowsing. Otter had Kestrel’s staff planted between her feet, and yarns wrapped around both hands. The curtain moved.
Otter jerked, power running down her fingers and up her arms — and there was no way to lay such power down quickly.
The curtain stirred aside, and in came Fawn.
She stopped with her back to the curtain and looked at them. Kestrel sat up. Otter had managed to wrap the yarns around her wrists like bracelets, though one cord still tangled the staff, even as she tried to set it aside.
Fawn shook her head. “Don’t. I have seen already.”
Around Otter’s wrists the yarns itched as if they were crawling with insects.
They all stared at one another. It was Cricket who spoke: “What now, then?”