Softly, Cricket shifted, slid a hand around Willow’s shoulders, lowered her onto the bed. His voice shifted, singing a lullaby. “Mad Spider bound her mother too tightly. She was caught there, neither living nor dead.” He freed his hand, carefully. “And that was the beginning of them,” he said, beckoning to Otter. “The Ones with White Hands.”
Otter went to the bed. The thing lying there was white as birch bark, strange-eyed. But it looked at her as a mother looks at a child. “I have to show you,” said the thing, “how to let them go. The Ones with White Hands.”
“Show me,” said Otter, her voice shaking.
She knew it was the last thing she had to learn.
She put a cord into her mother’s hands.
“This,” said Willow. She lifted the cord. Doubled it back on itself, wrapped it. Her mismatched hands fumbled over the knot-making. Twiggy fingers snagged the yarn. But as Otter watched, the knot took shape. It was a knot she’d seen before: It was sorrow’s knot, which began the wards and bound the dead. It was a noose.
“This.” Willow had made it big — big enough to go around a whole body. “Tie them like this. Then pull —” Her voice became hollow again. “Closed.”
A noose with nothing in it pulls open. Willow had said that when Otter had first tied this knot, the day they’d bound Fawn. It was meant to be a release. A noose with nothing in it …
Willow drew the noose slowly closed. But not all the way. She stopped when it was still large enough to slip around the neck.
Her drifting eyes sought Otter’s. They had changed, but there was still something in them that hooked right into Otter’s eyes, into her heart.
And in that moment, Otter knew exactly what that noose was for.
“Mother.” She choked on the word.
“Let me go …” said the hollowed voice.
It was what Tamarack had said, dying.
“I love you,” said Otter.
“Always,” answered Willow — answered the last of Willow. “Now. Go.”
Otter hugged her mother — what was left of her mother. Felt the heat of her and the coldness, the movement of her ribs. The fierceness of her returned hug. And Otter did the bravest thing she’d ever done. She let her mother go.
Otter burst from the earthlodge, where her mother was dying, and bolted into the cold. She spun away from the clutch of lodges and ran across the top of the snow — a handful of heartbeats, another handful — then the snow crust broke under her and she staggered, tumbled.
Ice bit her hands. She was panting, gulping. Not yet crying. The light shot rainbows into her eyes. A cold wind whipped her hair everywhere. It howled in her ears like a lost thing.
She knew exactly what the noose was for.
It wasn’t something she could run from, but as she knelt in the snow her body jerked and jerked as if it needed to run. “Belt of the Spider.” The words seemed to come through her from somewhere else. “Belt of the Spider. By the potter and the weaver — by … Mother.”
She felt a hand on her shoulder. Kestrel, crouching by her, balanced on top of the wind-sculpted drifts of the snow. Cricket was there too, though the snow wouldn’t hold him. He kept breaking through it, stumbling, loud as a buffalo.
“Better she choose her time,” said Kestrel. “Better her own noose than a spear to the heart.”
“There’s something wrong with the knots —” said Otter. She knew, even as she said it, that she was not making sense.
“Otter?” said Cricket.
She pushed herself up. “Where’s Thistle?”
Kestrel stepped forward and caught Otter in a hug. She held on ferociously.
Otter struggled loose. “Where’s Thistle?”
For five drumbeats no one answered her. “She’s … helping,” said Kestrel. “Willow … would need help.”
“I hate her,” said Otter. “I hate her.”
A howling silence. Then Cricket said: “Thistle does this so that you don’t have to.”
“I hate her,” said Otter again, shivering — and started, at last, to cry.
“She loved you,” said Cricket, not meaning Thistle.
The three of them held on to one another, shivering and crying, shin-deep in the broken snow.
Thistle, as rangers do, took care of things.
Took care, perhaps, of too much.
When Otter and the bonesetter, Newt, went back inside the lodge, they found Willow’s body already cut down from its noose, already wrapped up — as Fawn had been — in a buffalo robe. Otter was left to imagine her mother’s hands — one white, one human — curled up on the chest. She was left to imagine the scorch of the noose on her mother’s throat. She could see a bit of hair escaping from the top of the shroud. She could see toes.
It did not seem real.
Willow. Her mother. Dead. Right in front of her.
Surely, it could not be real.
Thistle sat, as still as a hunting heron, one hand cradled against her breastbone. Her eyes looked blank and she wasn’t crying. Otter could just see her shoulders twitch as she breathed.
Newt was brought up short by the figure in the shroud, but she blinked and turned. “Lady Thistle,” she said briskly, “let me see your hand.”
“The body is knots,” said Thistle. “Willow used to say that.”