“His coat,” said Kestrel. “His second shirt. His carry bag and mittens.” She ran her hands over the walls, touching the things still there, seeking the missing ones. “Some food.”
“Food?” said Otter.
The pinch was small enough for an owl to cross in one glide. It was impossible for someone to go far enough from home to need to take food.
Kestrel bolted for the door. Otter grabbed up her coat and ran after.
Cress, the blunt-knife ranger who had carried Willow’s body, met them at their door.
“Thistle’s in the palm,” she said. “She would speak to you.”
Otter’s heart skipped a beat.
They hurried to the edge of the open space at the heart of the pinch. Otter almost stopped: There was a single figure in that empty snow. Lonely as the dead. Her hand bound in red cords. Her face gray. Waiting for them.
“Where is he?” said Kestrel. “What did you do?”
Thistle was her cord master and the most powerful woman in Westmost. But Kestrel did not cover her eyes. “Daughter of my cord,” began Thistle.
And Kestrel shouted: “Where is he?!”
Thistle stood up straight as a lodgepole pine. “He is gone into the West, under the eyes of all the dead.”
Kestrel screamed. Wordlessly screamed, like a hawk, and struck out. Cress stopped her. The ranger second-in-command caught the wild swing easily, and in a blink had Kestrel’s arm pinned and twisted behind her back. “Do not,” she said into the girl’s ear. She pushed Kestrel free.
Kestrel staggered. Fell to her knees in the blank snow.
“Why?” said Otter. “Why did you do this? Have we not lost enough?”
“It is because we have lost that we must hold fast to what we have,” said Thistle, and not unkindly. “We must keep to our ways. You know what he did.”
Cricket had betrayed the secrets of his cord. First for Otter, on the day Tamarack was bound. And then for Willow. Otter remembered how Thistle’s gaze had fastened on the storyteller. How Cricket had lifted his chin to meet her eyes.
“He was kind,” said Otter. “To your daughter — he was kind!”
But it was more than that. He’d done something important. That story …
“Yesterday you did this? Or today?” Kestrel’s broken voice came up from the snow. “Just today?”
Thistle nodded, spoke softly. “He walked out well. He was brave.”
“Always,” said Otter, her voice cracking.
Kestrel stood up. “Then he is alive. I am going after him.”
She did not look back even once as she stalked away.
In the silence of the pinch, a sound rose: a single wail. Flea, getting the news.
Thistle flinched from the noise. She followed Kestrel with her eyes as the young ranger went back to her lodge. “Lady Binder,” she said softly, and for a moment Otter did not realize that Thistle was talking to her. “Can you stop her?”
“Stop her?” said Otter. “I am going with her.”
Kestrel was stiff and fast as she pulled food from hooks and put bundles in bags. Otter watched her for a moment, trying to catch her eye, to ask one question. But Kestrel did not turn around. She worked, her shoulder blades jerking.
“He would stay to the river, at first,” she said. “But it is midwinter. One cannot walk that water for long. After that” — she stopped in the middle of rolling cords into a pouch — “he will not know where to go, Otter. He did not even take yarns —”
“Ch’hhh,” said Otter. “I will take them, then. I am better with them anyway.”
Kestrel turned around.
“I am coming with you,” said Otter. And as Kestrel gaped at her, she added: “Don’t argue with me.”
Looking in Kestrel’s face, Otter found she did not need to ask her question after all. Kestrel knew: They likely would not find him. At least not alive. And Otter knew: They had to try.
At the river gap, the rangers had gathered: the sisters of Kestrel’s cord, steady women dressed in green and gray. Otter looked at them and wondered: Will they try to stop Kestrel and me? Will we have to fight? We cannot win such a fight.
And she looked at them and wondered: Did they gather for Cricket? Or did they send him out alone?
Kestrel’s gaze was fixed on the frozen path of the river. She did not meet her sisters’ eyes.
“Kestrel,” said Thistle.
Kestrel said nothing.
They were almost to the ward. The high sun cast the shadows of the blue cords: blue gashes on the snow.
“Lady Binder,” said Thistle.
Otter swallowed hard on the title, like swallowing fury. She spun on Thistle. “Would you stop us?” she said. “We are not slave-takers. We are the free women of the forest, and we are leaving this pinch.” The word came like spit from her lips.
Thistle did not even lift a hand. But she said: “Lady Binder, there are children here. A moon-count of children.”
The children she’d tried to save, the night Fawn had died. The smell came back to her: the fox-ish stink of trapped fear.