I’m a murderer, she thought.
“Raise her,” barked Willow. And the rangers began the hard work of casting ropes into the trees, raising the new dead to rest among the old. Fawn’s red shroud shone harsh against the black trees, the bare winter sky.
“May the wind take them into the wind,” said Willow, when they were done. “May the rain take them into the water. May the wood hold them away from this world. May the ravens fly them far.”
I’m sorry, said Otter, in her heart. I should not have done that to you, Fawn. I’m so, so sorry. I am sorry we bound you here, but please do not come back.
“Ah,” gasped Cricket, falling onto the bench beside the fire. “So, that is the greater world.”
“It is,” said Kestrel softly.
The hasty winter sun had been lowering as they came back to Westmost. Shadows had fallen across the frozen river, turning it the color of sage blossoms. The rangers had walked around the other three in an arrowhead, using their staffs to nudge back the boldest of the little dead.
They hurried like the hurrying sun. The round stones at the edges of the stream were wearing little hoods of snow, and their gray bases seemed to spill grayness like a stain onto the ice. Shadows, thicker than shadows should have been: slip.
And then they caught a flash of white, like the flare of a junco’s wing. A glimpse, in the dim forest, of something that might have been a lifted hand.
So they had gone quickly.
Back in Westmost, back inside the lodge, Cricket pulled the great funeral drum up into his lap and wiped his hand in circles across the surface, cleaning it of the little flecks of mud and ice. His hand was trembling slightly, just enough to graze stray voices up from the big drum. “The greater world,” he said. “You might have told me it was nothing but fear and strangeness. All this time I have been jealous, okishae: to go among the trees. New skies. New birds.” He fingered the thong that tied his braid. It was strung with beads and a present Kestrel had given him: the feathers of a woodpecker. It was the finest thing he owned, and he had worn it, Otter knew, for Fawn. There were streaks of tears on his face.
Had Otter herself wept? She could not remember. It had been so wrong. Even weeping seemed the wrong thing.
“It is beautiful too,” said Kestrel. “The world beyond the ward.”
“Is it?” said Cricket. “I missed that part.”
“Me too,” said Otter. Her mother was pacing — throwing herself from side to side of the tiny space like a fish in a box trap. That’s what Otter felt like: something trapped. Beautiful? No.
“Once we lived without a ward,” said Willow.
Cricket stopped his work — he had begun braiding a sweetgrass smudge, to smoke and bless the drum — and looked at her.
“We did,” she insisted. Her voice was like someone stepping on a dry branch: a crack, a breaking.
“Mad Spider made the first ward,” said Cricket, carefully.
“That story,” she said. “Tell it.”
“Lady Binder,” said Cricket, covering his eyes, “have mercy and let me find my breath. All day I have been the heartbeat of the world.”
“Lord Story,” she snapped. “I have eight days left. Tell it.”
So Cricket did. His head bent over the drum, he swallowed once, twice, three times. Then he began, softly, to speak. “In Eyrie, then. Warm and gentle Eyrie, where the lake lies dreaming; Eyrie the sunlit; Eyrie the high city. In Eyrie, in the days before the moons were named, in the days of the binder Hare, Eyrie had no ward.
“Gentle work, it must have been, to be a binder in the days of Hare. To bless the knots of okishae and tie the rangers’ staffs and hunters’ arrows. To lay to rest the restful dead. Gentle work; a soft place.
“But the blistering fever can come even into a soft place, and so it came to Eyrie. And so Hare died, and her daughter, Mad Spider, became binder in her turn.”
Cricket did not strike the drum. It was the funeral drum of Westmost, and it was not to be played except to walk out the dead. But he leaned close to it, and his breath played it. It echoed him; it thrummed and whispered.
Otter found herself growing very quiet, to hear what the drum might say.
“It was Mad Spider,” said Cricket, said the drum, “who made the first ward. She strung it through the birch trees. She strung it through the stones. It was made of rawhide, because there was not enough yarn, but it was blue as the cords of the weaver, blue as the cords of the sky. She wove it through six moons, from shoots to snow. Her hands grew hard and her hands turned blue.
“‘Little Spider,’ said the people, ‘what are you weaving?’
“‘Little Spider,’ said the people, ‘what do you want to catch in your great big web?’
“‘I am weaving a web to catch the dead,’ she said.