“And the people said: ‘The shadow ones are a trouble to us, but so are the wolves. Would you weave a web to catch them too?’
“And the people said: ‘Come now, Spider, you trap us too. You will make us into fish in a net, if you keep at this.’
“But Spider did not listen, and they called her Mad. Mad Spider, then: She tied and she cast until all of Eyrie was encircled.
“And the people said: ‘Take down your web, Mad Spider. We can live with the little dead.’
“And she said: ‘There is one who is not little.’
“And the people said: ‘It is of no use to keep out the dead. They are both in and out.’
“And she said: ‘There is one who is out.’
“And that night, in the dark of the moon, came the White Hand. First of its kind, and cloaked in horror.
“The people fell silent. And they left the ward standing. And if it has not fallen, then it stands there still, through the moons that no story counted, in the hot-spring steam of the lake, in the sunshine and snow, in the silence of Eyrie.”
He spoke the last word across the face of the drum, and it stirred and whispered through the lodge. Eyrie, the lost city. Mad Spider’s place. The first ward. Otter shivered.
“And does it?” Willow’s voice was sharp as a new knife.
The three young people looked at one another.
“Does … what?” said Otter.
“The ward. Mad Spider’s ward. Does it stand?”
Cricket looked at Kestrel, who said nothing, and then back at Willow. His voice was careful again, the certainty of his story gone. “That is the end of the tale.”
“Boy,” said Willow, “that is the beginning.”
And she snapped around and went out into the snow.
That became the pattern of it. Willow: restless, breathless, angry. She fell on stories as if she were starved for them.
Cricket told stories until his voice began to rasp, until a dry cough came to him even in his sleep. Mad Spider — that was what Willow wanted.
Cricket told her the smallest things, the silliest things. “Mad Spider and the Stuck Sheep,” about the bighorn caught by that first ward. “Mad Spider and the Men,” on how the Water Walkers had found a White Hand for the first time and tried to kill it with sticks. Willow ate the tales of the great binder as if they were things that could drip from her jaws.
And when she was full of them, she would turn and walk away.
Otter let her go, even if it was deep dark. What could touch her that had not touched her already? If she slipped in the snow, if the gast had her …
She had eight days. What did it matter?
But it did matter, because sometimes she was tender. With seven days to live she spent an hour brushing Otter’s hair.
And it did matter, because Otter was to be Westmost’s only binder. And Willow was the only one who could teach her.
So: It was six days before the Hand would hatch. Cricket was telling a story. Willow and Otter sat side by side on the sleeping platform, mother and child, warm together, a cold winter day. The knots in Otter’s hands, Willow’s murmuring voice, her slipping fingers. The secrets of the binder’s cord, whispering between them. It was everything Otter had dreamed of.
It was a nightmare. The whiteness spread in streaks up Willow’s arms like the streaks of blood infection. It spread from her heart, up her neck, like reaching branches.
And the way the cords moved under their own power, twitching against the soft places between Otter’s fingers: nightmare, purely. She knew what they could do. She knew they could pull the life out of the living. The deadness out of things that should be dead. They could do it — they wanted to do it. They had killed Fawn. The knots were powerful. They were willful.
They were mad.
And Otter could feel them, as if they were part of her. As if she held her own skin stretched and twisted into rawhide while still living, between her hands.
I’ve always wanted this, she thought.
And now she was trapped. Willow was dying. The binder dying.
Her mother, dying.
And Fawn, dead.
And she was trapped.
I’ve always wanted this, she thought. And I was wrong.
Five days left. Cricket was running out of safe, soft tales. His voice was rough and low.
Otter was hardly listening to him, but suddenly she heard him say: “… and so she became full binder, while her hair was still fully black.”
Mad Spider, she thought. It was the secret story, the story of the first White Hand.
Too young and too frightened, she thought. Mad Spider. My mother. Me.
Cricket coughed, then: a dry cough that shook him from teeth to hands. Kestrel was already sitting beside him on the sleeping platform, her hand rubbing circles between his shoulders. Now she braced him as he began to fold up. The turtle-shell rattle in his hand shook and clattered. Kestrel pounded on his back, as if to knock the air into him.
As the story stopped, Willow froze.
She and Otter had a cast spread between them: the scaffold, caught halfway to becoming the sky. Willow jerked to a stop halfway through a twist and the yarns moved so fast they burned against Otter’s fingers.