Otter swallowed and stared at him: He held a lit pine glim in a stone cup in one hand, as if he were turning into a constellation, as her people said happened to the most honored of the dead. His face was golden by its light, but hard, pinched with fear. She didn’t know how to tell him. It was real. It was here.
“A White Hand,” he said.
And she said: “I saw it.”
For a moment, he looked foolish with fear.
Something outside made a sound, a howl or a moan that might have been human.
Cricket’s breath caught high; he took Otter’s arm. “Come away from there,” he said. “Come away from the door.” He lifted the inner curtain. But Otter didn’t move.
“We should ward it,” she said. “I should — a White Hand. If it breaks through —”
“Ch’hhh …” Cricket whispered. Otter turned and saw, beyond the open curtain, many wide eyes catching the light, many small faces.
“The binder will stop it,” said Cricket, his voice pitched strong. “This is so: Willow is the greatest binder in many generations, the greatest among the Shadowed People, the greatest since Mad Spider, who once stood on a rock in the river and made a ward of no more than raspberry canes, and in that place held back the dead for three days. The binder will stop it. Willow will stop it.”
Willow had called it. Willow had made it.
But the sureness and steadiness of Cricket’s words made it hard to doubt him. It was as if he knew the story already. He was holding thirty people together with the barest skein of words.
Otter was amazed that she had ever thought him powerless.
Outside, there came a moaning like the sound of wind across a smokehole, and a distant shuddering sound that might have been a wolf. They both looked at the black stirring curtain. They might lift it, to see if Willow had fallen, to see if Kestrel had fallen. To see if, right outside, the One with White Hands stood reaching.
They did not.
“Master Story,” said Otter, trying to match his certainty, “go back to the fire. Take care of us. I will ward this door.”
He covered his eyes, formal and strong. Then he bent and kissed her, just at the hairline. “Lady Binder,” he whispered, his breath warm and stirring. “Be careful.”
He handed her the light. He went.
The inner curtain shivered closed.
So. Between curtain and curtain, between firelight and fear, between childhood and womanhood, Otter cast her first ward.
She did not know how, not properly. She had no belt, no status. She had learned things from Kestrel, and from Fawn, both in haste, both in secret. She knew nothing well.
But though she didn’t have knowledge, she had power.
Power had grown inside her that year, the year in which she should have become a woman. She had not taken a belt, but it had grown all the same. It had grown restless. Like a stomach with no food, it might have made her sour, made her frightened. It hadn’t — she’d fought that. But it had grown, and it was ready now. It leapt into her hands, into her heart.
The tunnel was low, and the peeling logs had plenty of rough bits where a twine could be attached. She drew the cords through her hands and felt as if she were drawing them from inside her own body, as spiders do. She made the line cross itself one, two, three times: the cradle. She added new strands to bend and transform it, to hold the power of the knots suspended like a wall in the air.
A ward. By fear and by pride, by instinct, in near darkness, between the children of Westmost and the outer door, Otter cast a first ward.
And her power carved its channel into her, straight and deep, from the heart to the hand, like a streambed. Like a scar.
When Otter lifted the inner curtain again she saw the faces of the men watching. She knew they saw her silhouetted against her own ward like a spider on a web, but they said nothing.
What the women would do, when they found someone with no status had cast a ward, Otter did not know. It would not be nothing. She staggered at the thought. She staggered, the power draining out of her. Cricket stood up, wrapping her against his body. One of the children started to cry. “Easy,” said the storyteller. “Rest and easy.”
He settled Otter on the bench by the fire.
She was startled that the others had kept the bench open for her. As if she had status. As if she had power.
She did have power.
Cricket sat beside her.
Some of the smaller children were asleep, all piled on one platform, tangled up like puppies. The older ones were playing string games, in tight and wary silence. “Once,” said Cricket, as if to begin a story — and then broke off as Otter leaned on him. Power was still draining out of her. She wasn’t sure how much she could lose, and live. “Oh,” he whispered to her, his hand slipping around her back as she put her head in the soft hollow under his shoulder. “Oh, Otter.”
What would the pinch do when they saw her ward?
They might kill her, send her walking down the frozen river into the West, under the eyes of all the dead. But she hoped they would see her ward. She wanted them to see it. She wanted them to know her. And she wanted them to live.