Willow stood up and reached down to help Otter up — reached down with her white hand. Otter froze.
Cricket, behind her, took her under the armpits and lifted her to her feet.
Willow pretended not to notice. “Let us go,” said the binder. “Let us get out of this place.”
“Out of … Westmost?” said Cricket.
Willow looked up at the blank bright sky, her eyes watering. “Would that we could. Away from this lodge.” She rubbed at the skin between her eyes. “If it would burn, I would burn it.” She turned to them. “You have a home, do you not? Let us go — get away from the arrows of everyone’s eyes.”
Otter looked up. Yes. No one was approaching, but people stood here, there, in little knots. And all of them were watching. The arrows of their eyes. Movement caught her eye and she turned. It was Kestrel, coming toward them, leaning on her staff, weary as winter. Silent, she linked her arm with Otter’s. Cricket took her other elbow. The three of them went back to their home, and Willow, white-handed, followed them.
Willow sat on the fire bench, in the circle of light cast from the smokehole. No one came too near her.
“You are not mad,” said Cricket, cautious.
“Have been and will be,” said Willow. She steepled her hands in front of her face. Bone-white fingers laced with human fingers. “Tell me, Lord Story. How long does it take?”
Otter put her back to the wall and tried to breathe. The yarns around her wrists itched and tugged as if they were twisting in the presence of something strong and dead — but when she looked down, they were not moving.
“Lady Binder?” said Cricket.
“The thing that will eat its way out of me,” said Willow, her words coming faster. “How long does it take?”
“There are different tales,” said Cricket softly.
Willow’s look was pure irritation.
“If I had sureness, I would share it,” said the storyteller. “I do not.” He sighed. “Mad Spider — that is the strongest of the tales. Mad Spider was touched by the Hands on the stone in the middle of the stream. Do you know that story?”
Everyone knew that story.
“It is three times three days in that story,” said Cricket.
And Willow said: “Tell it.”
Cricket took a slow breath. Then he came and sat beside Willow. “Lady Binder, I will tell you anything you need. But first tell me what is happening to you. Because I think you are going to die. And I think there is a story that should not die with you.”
Otter looked at her mother. At her mother, who was alive. It would not last. Could not last. Otter stumbled forward and went to her knees at her mother’s feet. She took Willow’s unmarked hand.
There was a silence that went on longer than it would take an owl to cross the whole sky. Then Willow said: “I do not know how to start.”
Unexpectedly, it was Kestrel who answered her. The young ranger sitting on the sleeping platform, the cords of her staff loose and tattered, her hands shaking. “Tell us about Thistle,” she said.
“When I was a child,” said Willow. Then she opened her eyes. “Yes. Does it not always start so? When I was a child … When I was a child, my mother loved me. I was not alone, Otter — not like you. I had brothers, twins: Moon and Owl. They were trickster children, Red Fox’s children: mischief-makers, far-rangers. Older than me, three winters older. Our mother Thistle was a ranger. And I — I was a girl with knots.
“Once in the winter, I tied a line from wattle to wattle inside our lodge — just a drying line, it was to be, just something from which we might hang our coats, because the snow was thick that year. But it was — too strong. It pulled the lodge in.”
“The walls fell in?” said Otter.
That was what Mad Spider had done, when touched by the White Hands: She had turned her binding power backward, let it run wild. She’d pulled down the great poles that held up her lodge. She’d buried herself alive.
Willow put her hand on the upright pole beside her. Overhead, something creaked.
“Only in pieces,” said Willow, telling the story. “Where the ties were. One bit of wall fell onto my brothers’ pillow and they woke up sneezing and filthy with the dust. They were so dusty they looked half-made, like … like …”
“Like one of the dead,” said Cricket. “White Hands.”
“So I thought,” said Willow. “I had never seen one. For a drumbeat I was so frightened — and then I laughed. May their names forgive me.”
Something fell, soft as snow, soft as dust, around Otter’s face. She looked up. Above her, a wrist-thick grass rope held the canopy poles in the fork of the upright pole. From that rope bits of grass chaff drifted down, glittering.
May their names forgive me. It was something that was said of the dead.
“Thistle told the pinch it was the weight of the hanging coats that pulled the walls in.”