“But there were no coats,” said Cricket.
“No. She knew then. My mother knew then. She didn’t speak of it, but there were other things: a string game, a lashing on a shirt. I was a girl of knots. Tamarack saw it. I was too young for the cords — only thirteen winters. But Tamarack came to Thistle in quiet, and said she would offer my belt at the great fire. And Thistle — my mother — she said no. ‘I am going to lose my boys this year,’ she said. ‘Let me keep my daughter.’”
“And Tamarack did,” said Cricket.
“She did.”
“Lady Binder,” said Cricket, without looking up, “what is happening to the knots above our head?”
There were bits of chaff falling all around them now, from all four corners of the canopy around which the lodge was built. It drifted down like snow into their hair. It fell into the fire and whirled up again, as brief red feathers of flame, as slow black feathers of ash.
Willow pulled her hand away from the pole, drifted to her feet. She turned her marked palm up, and let chaff fall into it. “It has always been too strong,” she said. “Before the Hand touched me, long before. Since I was a child. It has always been too strong.”
“What has?” said Otter.
“The binding. The knots.” She looked down at Otter with those mad desperate eyes, the ones that had said: I will never hurt you. “There’s something wrong with the knots. Oh, Otter — I wanted to save you from them. I wanted …” She swallowed, her eyes becoming softer. “I wanted you to be safe. I wanted you to be happy.”
She reached upward.
Willow was not a tall woman; she could not quite reach the point where the crossed canopy beams were bound in the fork of the upright, could not quite reach the golden, unraveling grass rope. But she had blue yarn wound around her arms: the yarn Otter had used to cast her first ward; the yarn that had killed Fawn. Willow reached up, and the yarn unwound and reached farther, winding upward as if toward the sun. It climbed into the canopy. It wrapped. It tied. It was impossible that yarn no thicker than an earthworm should hold a pole as thick as a thigh. But it held.
The groaning of the lodge stopped, and the last shards of grass fell glittering into the new silence.
“Tell me how long I have to live, Cricket,” said Willow.
“Nine days, then,” said Cricket, soft as a blessing. Soft as a killing snow. “Nine days by the story.”
Otter felt those words fall on her, and fall on her, and fall on her, until she was cold and buried.
For years, Otter had dreamed of the first day her mother would let her tie a binding knot.
She had thought of the summer in which her mother would make a woman’s belt for her. She had thought of the fall fires, where her mother would rub red ocher into the part of her hair and say to the folk of Westmost: “My daughter is a daughter of my cord. Otter, a binder for Westmost.”
She had dreamed of the winter that would follow: They would sit together in the amber-rich silence of the binder’s lodge, Otter and Willow and Tamarack, binders all three. The resinous smell of the glims would wrap them. Otter would learn the knots, and Tamarack would cook a string of dried squashes spiced with meadow garlic and the berries of red cedar. Otter would wear the silver herself someday; she would have a child, a daughter….
“We must dye you a shirt,” said Willow, sudden and stark. “Bloodroot for the dye and saxifrage to fix the red. If someone has the fine leather — brain-tanned — I do not — nine days, it’s too short to make a shirt.”
“Red,” said Otter. Red was used only for the binders’ funeral wear, and for the shrouds of corpses, and the cords that bound them. Otter suddenly wanted nothing to do with the color. “I don’t need a red shirt.”
“True enough,” said Willow softly. “When the time comes, you can wear mine.”
They were alone together in Otter’s lodge, just sitting. Fawn, Westmost’s little binder, was dead. Kestrel and Cricket had gone to carry messages to Thistle, to arrange the bier and the shroud, the escort and the drum.
It surprised Otter: the bustle that followed the great stillness of death.
So Otter and Willow were alone: Otter could see the heartbeat moving under her mother’s skin — it made the white handprint stir and pulse. A White Hand.
Otter just wanted someone to cook them squash.
Nine days, by the story.
Otter had killed someone. And her mother was going to die. “I don’t want your shirt,” she said.
“Oh, Otter,” said Willow, and dropped her head against her hand. “So hard, I tried to keep you from this. But I think we are bound to it. I am going to be bound in a tree and you are going to do it. My daughter, daughter of my cord.”
Otter tipped her head down and was silent.
Willow touched her then, cupped both hands around her face and thumbed the tears off her cheekbones. Ran her bone-white hand through the black shine of her daughter’s hair. “Otter,” she said. “A binder for Westmost.”