“We will stay here,” said Cress.
Flea was still looking at Kestrel. But Kestrel did not contradict, and Flea lowered the drum slowly, and covered her eyes. “As you say, then. Though if it were a story, ‘Five Women and the Dead’” — the old storyteller eased herself down on a fallen log, stretching out her stiff ankle — “that does not have a happy sound.”
And the other ranger, the young one whose name Otter couldn’t remember — the other ranger said: “We do this — rangers do this: Live outside the pinch. We have here a ward; we have here a binder. We have wood and ember. We can live here, one night.”
“Come here, little Otter,” said Flea. Something in her voice made Otter remember that Flea was Cricket’s friend and teacher, master of his cord. She wished it were Cricket: wished it desperately. That’s strange, she thought. She went over and Flea put out her arms, pulled her in. That’s strange. I think I love him too.
“Should I say the words, then, little binder?” said Flea, touching Otter’s face.
Otter could not speak. She nodded.
Flea paused and gathered herself, and when she spoke, her voice was not loud, but her words were right as spring coming, right as anything in the world. “Willow,” she said, “your name is done with the world….”
When Flea said it, it sounded true. As if Willow were not tied like a knot in living bone. As if she would not be coming back.
“Now, child,” said Flea, warm, like a mother, like a grandmother, like a memory, “I think you should cry.”
And Otter crumpled as if an axe had hit her. She wept, and wept, and wept.
Five women and the dead. Otter and Kestrel, Flea the storyteller, the two rangers — one old and one young, and the bones all around them. High above Westmost they stayed, with a fire burning, inside the red ward with the dead creaking overhead.
Night fell. They waited, watched. Only Otter slept — wept herself into sleep and drowsed with her head on Flea’s knee.
Otter expected — she had not really thought about it, but numbly and distantly she expected to die, in the darkness, among the restless dead. She expected the slip to boil up over them like ants. Expected the White Hand that had touched Willow to walk through the ward as if it were a spiderweb.
But none of these things happened. The five women spent the night among the dead, and they did not die.
The dawn woke Otter.
Wood smoke. Cold. Too bright. She had not slept outside in winter before, and for a moment she was dazzled, not sure where she was. What was the square thing above her, caught in the trees, dark against the sky? Too square and too big to belong in a tree. A human thing, a — She saw the red-wrapped bundle. She remembered.
Otter felt Flea put a hand in her hair, motherly. “We lived,” said the old woman. “The storyteller in me is almost disappointed.”
Ah, yes, this would be Cricket’s teacher.
Otter stood up, and refused to look at the square blots against the lightening sky.
The others gathered themselves. The rangers tightened ties and brushed snow from mittens. The light grew stronger and stronger and stronger as they went down from the scaffolds to the river path, and finally, finally, stumbled back into Westmost.
Cricket was not there to greet them.
Cricket did not come to the river gate to see Otter and Kestrel safely in.
He was not in their lodge.
But then, he was the pinch’s second storyteller. He did have work and learning. He did have secrets.
Still, the two girls stopped inside the curtain of their lodge. Looked at its emptiness. Caught at each other’s hands. “Okishae?” called Kestrel. Her voice trembled.
Otter’s heart trembled too. A complicated kind of tremble.
The lodge looked different. The platform where Willow had slept was bare. Someone had taken the grass pillow to burn: a small and practical kindness. Cricket? The buffalo robes were rolled up and tucked at the platform’s foot. Willow’s spare shirt, the one that laced across the top of the arms, the one she could not wear, still hung on the wall. Willow’s body had worn the blue one. Otter was wearing the red.
She broke away from Kestrel, suddenly desperate to take off the red shirt. She dropped the belt and the binder’s knife onto the bare wood of the platform — her mother’s platform, her mother’s things. She was yanking the shirt over her head, caught inside its darkness, when Kestrel said: “Otter.”
The frozen voice stopped Otter. She pulled the shirt back down.
“His things,” said Kestrel. “Some of his things —”
Otter did not instantly see what Kestrel saw. They had made of their home a cheerful jumble. And Cricket was not tidy as Kestrel was — a matter over which they sometimes fought. There were no bare hooks that made Otter think: This is gone, and this.