Then she held out her hand.
It was not marked white, as it would have been if the dead had taken it. But otherwise it was a dead-thing touch-wound: The hand was slack were it should not be slack, swollen like spider bites. Unmade. The sudden strike of Willow’s white hand had unmade it.
Otter swallowed down bile.
She looked at her mother’s hair again. It was still now, no longer moving as if made of snakes. A little wind lifted three strands. Otter turned and saw the curtains were still hooked open. She went back into the cold, back to her friends.
Newt came out sometime later and spoke to the women clustered in the open space of the palm. “This has happened,” she would be telling them. “The binder has killed herself so that the White Hand will not hatch from her. You do not need to be afraid.”
Newt always did like to be first with the news.
“Willow has killed herself. Don’t be afraid.”
Or would she blame Thistle? Give Thistle the credit? “The woman so strong she could kill her own daughter. Thistle, she has defended us.”
Thistle, she is broken.
Otter didn’t even know which story was true. Which one she wanted to be true.
There was no story in which her mother wasn’t dead.
No story in which Otter would not have to put on a red shirt and walk into the forest. Bind her mother as Fawn had been bound. As the mother of Mad Spider had been bound. There were eyes on her, glances coming from the palm.
She would have to wear red.
The sun had rolled halfway along the rim of the world before Otter saw Thistle again.
She and Cricket and Kestrel had gone to the only place they could think of, though it was the last place they wanted to be: the binder’s lodge. The place where Otter had grown up. Where Tamarack had died. Where the children had huddled in fear of the White Hand. Where Otter had cast her first ward — her only ward. The ward that had killed Fawn.
“It smells like Red Fox’s den in here,” said Kestrel. And then she said: “Sorry.”
The lodge stank with urine and fear and worse. It had only been five days.
Hanging on the wall hooks were blue cords for casting a ward. Red cords for binding the dead.
Sitting at the foot of Otter’s old sleeping platform, folded neatly, was a red shirt. A white belt with silver disks. And a knife with a handle of human bone.
A binder’s funeral gear.
Otter stood and stared at it and shivered, shivered. “Can you sleep?” said Kestrel, her hand on Otter’s shoulder.
Otter shook her head. Not there. Never. She would never sleep again.
“It may yet be a long day,” said Kestrel.
Cricket snorted. “I think the sun might be lost, this day has been so long already. And of course she can’t sleep here.” He looked at Otter. “Could you drink something? A broth? A tea?”
She didn’t answer him. The shivering was bad.
“Something hot,” he murmured. She could hear the damage in his voice, the price of four days telling stories. The fire pit was gray and cold. Cricket frowned over it.
“Never mind,” said Kestrel.
Cricket said: “No, I’ll go,” and went to borrow an ember from someone else’s fire. Otter wondered if he’d go back to their home — their had-been sweet, cheerful home — that held the body of Willow and the silence of Thistle. She didn’t ask him. She sat down beside the red shirt.
Cricket didn’t come back, and didn’t come back.
Otter raised her fist up to measure the movement of the sun — but her eyes hit only earth and darkness. Of course they were inside.
But surely, it had been two fists of sun. Maybe three. Strange. Too long.
But Cricket didn’t come.
Thistle did.
For a heartbeat, Otter didn’t recognize her. She’d aged a moon-count of years. She leaned on her staff — the spear-point gone, the ranger’s knots burned away by the strike of Willow’s white hand — and came to them almost shuffling.
But her voice was strong. “We must bind Willow,” she said. “Kestrel: Will you go to guard?”
Kestrel shook herself as if trying to wake up. Then she tipped her head and covered her eyes to the master of her cord. “Of course.”
“Good,” said Thistle. “I will ask Cress and Feather to bear the body. And send for Flea, to be the drum.”
“Flea?” said Kestrel. Flea, not Cricket?
“Flea is first storyteller,” said Thistle.
Otter’s gaze snagged on Thistle’s hand — not the one that gripped the staff, knuckles yellow, but the one that hung, half-hidden, in the folds of Thistle’s long shirt. It was elaborately splinted, bound in many small red cords. She could barely imagine how much that must hurt.
“That will do, then,” said Thistle. “The fewer, the better. Otter: Put on your shirt.”
“The fewer …” said Otter. It sounded in her ears like I hate her. “No. No. She was the binder of Westmost. We should all go.”