“She was a White Hand,” said Thistle. “And we will not.”
The whole pinch had walked out for Tamarack. And Willow — she’d been better than Tamarack. She’d been stronger. She’d been — Otter thought — she’d been everything.
“She wasn’t,” said Otter. “She wasn’t a White Hand. Not yet, and now she won’t ever be.”
Thistle’s ruined hand stirred. “You don’t know that. And it is dangerous to leave the pinch. The White Hand that touched her — it was never undone.”
The shivering came back to Otter.
“Otter.” Thistle lowered her voice. Otter thought she might be trying to be kind. I hate her, she thought. I hate her.
“Otter: I must keep us safe. Sometimes it is hard. Willow — Willow knew that. You know that.”
It was not kindness, it was pleading. Forgive me, that was what Thistle was saying.
Otter didn’t.
“We must keep to our ways, and we must be strong,” said Thistle. “You must be strong, Otter, Granddaughter, Lady Binder. Put on your shirt.”
So Otter put on her red shirt.
She went with Kestrel.
And for the third time in her life, she went out to the scaffolds, to bind a binder. Tamarack. Fawn. Willow.
And now me, Otter thought. Me in a red shirt.
Cricket’s voice came back to her: She was too young. She was too frightened. She did not want to let her mother go.
They went beside the river because the ice would not hold them. They hurried because the sun was sinking and because somewhere in the forest was the White Hand that had killed Willow.
Otter went silently, stumbling. Her body was so numb she felt as if she were drifting. As if her feet were frozen. But the embroidered rib cage on her red shirt prickled her own rib cage, as if she were wearing needles. She didn’t cry.
Later she would remember how Kestrel looked hard at Flea, looked long back into the pinch. Cricket never had turned up with the tea. But at the time, Otter went drifting, silent. Her head and her heart were full of knots. She followed the bearers, and the body of her mother, and thought about nothing at all.
They reached the scaffolding grounds later than they should have, long after the shadows swung east. In the ordinary way of things, they would not have set out at all. But things were not ordinary. They were not quite sure that Willow’s body — white-bleached, changed, strange — wasn’t dangerous. It needed to be bound. It needed to be bound right away.
We must keep to our ways, and we must be strong, Thistle had said.
Thistle had stood beside the ward, in the river gap, and watched them go. She was leaning on her staff. Her face was almost green. Pain, Otter thought. Something hurts.
Then she remembered that her mother was dead.
We must keep to our ways, and we must be strong. Sometimes it is hard.
It was very hard. Very hard. The knots on her mother’s wrists. Her one remaining human hand. Her bare and dusty toes.
She did not want to let her mother go.
It was very hard. The knots were hard. Her hands shook. The cord burned them. The knots fought her, as if the noose did not want to be made, as if her hands did not want to make it. They writhed and snapped as she tried to pull them closed on her mother’s wrists, as if they wanted to take her too.
So. High above Westmost, in a grove of pines overlooking a black lake, on a cold day late in the winter, there stood a binder named Otter. And she had a mother, a binder named Willow. Who was dead. And that was as far as Otter could go.
She bound her mother to the frame and then she just stood there.
There was a blessing to say, but Otter was past all blessing. She stood and she stood. The trees creaked around her. There was — faintly, for it was cold — the smell of death. Fawn, surely.
It was cold. It would take a while for that rope to rot.
I’m sorry, Fawn, thought Otter.
I’m sorry.
I’m so sorry.
Finally, Kestrel came and embraced her, whispered to her. “The words, Otter …”
Otter only shook her head.
“We need to go,” Kestrel coaxed. “We will lose the light.”
Cress, one of the rangers Thistle had picked to carry the body, held out her hand at arm’s length and measured the distance of the sun above the horizon. “We’ve already lost it. Six fingers till sunset, or I’m no ranger.” She was a gray-shot woman, Thistle’s second, powerful, blunt as an old knife. The black paint on her face was just a streak across the cheekbones. They’d been that hasty. Even as Otter looked at her, she smeared it away with the back of one hand.
Flea said: “You think, Cress, the shadows will trap us?”
“They have trapped us already. The riverbed will be shadowed now. Full darkness will catch us if we go back. There is a ward here, a strong one. Better to stay.”
That suited Otter. To stay there, to stay lost, to stay with the dead. But Kestrel was shifting foot to foot, looking back toward Westmost.
Flea caught the look: “Is it better to stay, Kestrel?”