“Oh,” said Cricket, his voice too light. “Come help me, instead.” He lifted the outer curtain of the binder’s lodge. The silver disks on it fluttered red in the setting light.
Otter had not been in the binder’s lodge since the day her mother had cast her out. It seemed different. The deer-hoof rattles on the door curtains — so often they had clattered a welcome — now seemed to jangle in her ears. The door tunnel seemed small and tight. Inside it was …
She remembered how it had been to go into the empty lodge, the first night of her life alone. Silence had been like a thing that watched her enter.
Fear was the thing here. Thick, choking fear. Something winding through the air.
Her mother wasn’t there. And Otter was glad.
The children of Westmost — a moon-count or so, from babies to girls in their sunflower years — were already gathered. Otter knew them all, at least to call by name, though she did not really have friends among them. They looked up at her and Cricket in the dimness of the lodge, their eyes shining dark and big like rabbits’ eyes.
Cricket paused at Otter’s side, then moved with quick kindness over to the children. She watched as he threw a few planks of sweet-smelling larch onto the sleepy evening fire. The new wood smoked and then flared, and with words and nudges he herded the children close to the leap of light and the fragrant smoke. Soon he had them all seated near the fire and was telling them something small and silly.
Otter should have gone too: should have helped the children, cast figures with them, led them in string games and singing. She didn’t. She stood with the curtain against her back.
The lodge was warm with the fire, and with the breath-heat and heart-heat of the many who sheltered there. But Otter stood at the curtain, and the air that came under it was bone-cold.
Westmost’s handful of grown men sat together on one of the sleeping benches, talking quietly. One of them had an infant in a sling, another bounced a babe on his knee, little fingers wrapped around one of his big fingers.
Helpless: They were all helpless. The firelight picked out the inner wattling of the lodge, and all the blessing knots tied there: a small ward, almost, it must have looked. It must have made the others feel safe. But Otter could feel something restless and rotten coiling around Westmost. She had seen sparrows huddle under the eyes of kestrels. Kestrels can take a bird from the air, but not from a tree. And yet, always, always the sparrows broke first — flying into cold fear, into their own deaths.
Something was coming. Something was about to strike. The men sat talking, and Cricket told “Mad Spider and the Stuck Sheep,” while all around them the blessing knots undid themselves, one by one.
All at once the deerskin curtain behind her jerked and its rattles glattered. Probably it was only the wind, but for a moment Otter felt a fear as if something dead had a hand on her throat. She gasped —
The feeling was gone.
This time, she hadn’t been the only one to feel it. Cricket was looking at her, his eyes wide, his story stumbling. In fact, everyone was looking at her, and past her at the door.
The door that could, in a last chance, be defended.
And it was a binder’s lodge, after all. There were cords.
Otter took loops of blue yarn and rawhide from a hook on the wall. She went out.
Otter went into the door tunnel and let the inner curtain drop. For a moment she was in darkness, and she was alone. She paused there a moment, and then slipped a hand between the great smooth log of the doorframe and the edge of the deerskin curtain, making a cold little eye that looked out into the night.
This is what she saw: The white birches of the ward. The river gap, like a hole where teeth had been knocked out. Her mother, standing there, her shoulders tight as if she had been carrying something heavy for a long time. It seemed to Otter that her mother was looking back — not to the forest, not to the danger, but back. To Westmost. To the binder’s lodge. To her.
Then Willow turned, her form dark against the silver ice of the river that gleamed in the rising moonlight.
Willow turned and faced — nothing.
Something.
Otter only glimpsed it: a lightning flash, a nightmare flicker. Against the moonlit ice it twisted: a human shape, but pulled into lumps and long places, like a shadow cast on rough ground. It looked as if it were made of shadow: a hole in the air, a hole in the light, a place of refusal and rot.
Willow lifted her hands, with the cradle-star strung across them. The thing lifted its hands, which were not like the rest of it, but white.
Cold hands touched Otter’s neck. She spun, thrusting up her bracelets as she turned: But it was only Cricket. He flinched back from the lifted yarn. “Sorry,” he said, soft. And then, softer still: “What did you see?”