“It does not matter to me,” Fawn said. “Let those who can knot tie knots. That is the way of the prairie.”
It should have been a fear lifting — and yet Otter flashed with anger. “We’re not on the prairie,” she said. “You came here. We are the Shadowed People, and you came here.”
Fawn paused. She was dressed in the manner of the Shadowed People now — a shirt and leggings, not a dress; her face unpainted. But her hair was still coiled around her head, almost as if it were short as a child’s. The ends of the braids quivered like wolf ears above her eyes. She still looked strange. Her voice was soft and child-high: “Need we be enemies, Otter?”
They had never given each other their names — but, of course, in a place so small, they knew them. As Otter knew Fawn, the binder’s apprentice, so Fawn would know Otter, the binder’s rejected daughter.
There were three drumbeats of silence.
“We need not,” said Cricket firmly. “Come to the fire, Fawn, binder of Westmost. We welcome you.”
So Fawn came in. She perched daintily on the bench by the fire. Otter, defiant, pulled Kestrel’s staff into her lap. The little binder watched the cornmeal bubble for a few moments, and then said: “I come to seek your help.”
“With what?” said Otter.
“The binder,” said Fawn, as if the word were difficult. “Your mother, my master. Our binder. Something is wrong.”
“So they say …” said Cricket.
“But they haven’t seen,” said Fawn. “Her power is …”
She fell silent, and they were silent with her. Cricket leaned forward to stir the cornmeal. He sat back and said: “Here is what you’ve seen: Her power turns backward. It pulls too hard, and breaks its travois. It turns too fast, and it entangles her.”
Fawn blinked at him.
Cricket tilted his head. “It does not take a binder to see it.”
“No one else sees it,” said Fawn.
“The day the last binder died, I was still wrapped in healing cords,” he said.
Fawn looked blank, and so he pulled his shirt up a moment. The firelight showed the slickness of the scar between his ribs. “A gast,” he said.
“In the corn,” said Fawn. “I heard.”
“The day Tamarack died, Willow came to us,” said Cricket. “She was frightened. She touched the healing cords — she touched me.” He tugged his shirt straight. “It is not a binder’s power, is it, to make knots undo themselves like snake-balls in the spring? That is something gone too far. Something backward.”
A pause.
“She cannot dress herself,” said Fawn, very softly. “The brown shirt — the one that laces … ?”
“With the shells on the collar,” said Otter.
“It laces across the top of the arms,” said Fawn. “And she cannot lace it. When it touches her, it — the cords — come loose. They move by themselves. Her — her shirt fell off.”
Otter stared at her.
“Is she marked?” said Kestrel.
“Marked?” said Fawn.
“A handprint — a white handprint. Anywhere on her?”
Otter felt the knots of Kestrel’s staff pulse in her hand.
“No,” said Fawn. “I … do not think so.” It was clear she had not looked.
“She wasn’t,” said Otter. “When she touched Cricket, when she bound Tamarack. She wasn’t then.”
“It is not a White Hand,” said Fawn.
“You are from the sunlight,” said Otter. “You have never seen one.”
“Neither have you,” said Cricket gently. The White Hands, the horror at the heart of all horrors. They were that rare.
“It is not that,” said Fawn. “It is … an unbinding. It takes all my power to lace that shirt,” said Fawn, spreading her little hands. “And I do have power. I know I do not look it. But I do. To lace her shirt is the barest edge of what I can do, Otter. I cannot go further — and yet Willow goes further, every day. I need your help.”
Otter looked down at the staff in her hands. “What can I do?”
“You are a binder,” said Fawn. “I know you are.”
Otter laughed bitterly. “I’m nothing. Haven’t you heard?”
The cornmeal had thickened now. They could smell it coming to sweetness, hear it glub. Cricket leaned forward, branch in his hand, and nudged the pot to a cooler part of the fire. Fawn looked at the yellow, stirring stuff.
“Do you know a story,” said Fawn, “about a rope that rots?”
All three of them looked up, sharp and silent, like deer when they hear a twig snap. They looked at one another, and then Cricket said: “Will you tell it?”
“I don’t know it,” said Fawn. “Maybe it is secret? We do not speak much, my master and I. But she begins sometimes to tell this story — or perhaps it is the end of the story. She says that Mad Spider bound her mother too tightly. She says everything is too tight but the rope is rotting.”
The cornmeal gave a last great glub, like someone drowning.
A silence tightened, and Fawn said: “She says it will be soon.”