The three of them stood for a moment in silence, with the ward between them.
In the lodge behind her, Otter could hear the shifting of people trying to be quiet, and the small voices — sharp as fox kits — of the ones who were too young to try. There was a fox-ish smell too: The night pots were full, and someone had dug a hole in the floor for a latrine, but there were thirty people in the lodge. No water anymore, little enough food. They would not last long.
Her mother was dying or transforming into one of the dead. Otter kept picturing the rangers holding her arm straight, the axe coming down. But what she said was: “We need to bring down this ward.”
And Fawn said: “Yes.”
One of the babies went huh-a-huh-a-huh and then started to cry.
“I don’t know how,” said Otter. She reached toward the ward and again saw its pulse, felt its pull. “I should not have cast it.”
“We came very near to needing it,” whispered Fawn.
And Otter realized she did not know what had happened after the binder fell. Had the White Hand … Had the slip, the gast …
But the pinch was standing. The dead must have been unmade, or at least driven back. She looked again at Fawn, whose face was tight and smudged with fatigue, and decided not to ask for the story.
The little binder lifted her hands again, reaching and stooping as she followed the central lines of the ward with her fingers — not quite touching it. The cords twitched and trembled.
The lodge behind then was breath-warm, breath-damp, and it seemed to breathe out of the open doorway: A little wind came from inside and turned to cold, glittering mist around Fawn’s fur boot tops and careful fingers.
Otter watched the slow tracing. She felt it, almost, as if the sweeping hands were moving through the fine hairs of her skin, not quite touching her, leaving her shivering.
“There is no weak place in this,” said Fawn. “And no navel, either: no knot through which all the power must come.”
She did not say quite what she meant, but Cricket guessed at it: “You mean there is no way to bring it down.”
“We must bring it down.” Fawn met Otter’s eyes. “I mean it will not be easy.”
She lifted her hand to within a tremble of one of the knots. “We will start here,” she said. “Will you help me?”
“I’m not a binder,” said Otter. For once, she felt no bitterness, no loss as she said it. It was a warning.
Fawn took it in that spirit: “I know. But it is your ward, and I will not be able to control it.”
Control it. From nowhere Otter again saw her mother’s arm held down, and the axe swinging. And in another flash she remembered her mother leaning forward at the welcoming fire, entangling Fawn’s fingers in knots, her hiss: You know that this will kill you.
“I will help you,” said Otter. She could say nothing else.
“Good,” said Fawn, and she slipped her fingers into the ward.
Fawn spread her fingers inside the crossed cords and they lifted and separated. Otter saw where her fingers should go and she slipped them into place, then slid them down into the tighter spots of the ward. She turned her wrist, making the cords shift and open: between her hand and Fawn’s hand, a small string figure danced.
The figure danced, and power with it, sliding back and forth down the cords.
Otter felt as if the ward were her heart, and her heart had left her body. She knew they were trying to undo it, and she thought that if she did, her heart would slowly come undone.
She looked through the strings and caught Fawn’s eye. The other binder’s eyes were round, showing white all around like a rabbit’s.
They untwisted the figure between them into three sets of crossed lines — into two — and then it was gone. Fawn gasped aloud.
And they went on.
What else, Otter asked herself later, could they have done?
They went on, while the children cried and the icy mist swirled around their knees. The day at Fawn’s back grew stark and blank, a cold day where the very brightness made it hard to see. Fawn would choose a place to put her fingers, opening the ward a chink, and Otter would slip in her hand. Over and over, the wild fear that Otter had built into the ward made their fingers lock and their arms tremble. It poured down their bodies like lightning into the ground. Otter was shaking, Cricket’s steady hand on her back. Fawn was alone.
Fawn chose slowly, then more slowly. The ward was down to its most powerful snarls now, and they didn’t seem to pulse — they seemed to lunge. Fawn looked at them. She looked at Otter. She was breathing with her mouth open. She picked a snarl, and put in her hand.
She tried to open her fingers.
The cords snapped closed.
And all at once, Fawn was swaying on her feet, sweat springing out on her face.