“There are five moons of people, all counted,” said Thistle softly, “but you are the only binder. You leave us defenseless.”
None of the others said anything. No one ordered. No one begged. They should, Otter thought fiercely. They put my mother between them and death and they never even asked. They should beg.
“We are going to fetch my okishae,” said Kestrel. “He will not have gone far. We will not be long.”
Thistle said: “And if you are?”
Rangers, even rangers, were lost in the forest. Kestrel’s own mother had gone out and never come back.
Kestrel said: “In Little Rushes, the binder has two sisters and three daughters: a cord of six. Send to them.” She looked hard at Thistle. “Will you stop us?”
“If I could, daughter of my cord.” Thistle closed her hand around her own wrist — a gesture children made, seeking the comfort of their bracelets. “Granddaughter,” she said. Then she stepped aside, and opened her arm toward the gap in the ward. “Go safely, and come back soon.”
So they went out.
As the forest closed around them, a drum began to play. Lum dum, lum dum: the heartbeat of the world, the drum that was played only when the dead were walked out.
Otter’s breath caught — and the drum caught too, and began again, its beat backward: dum lum, dum lum. Come back, said that drumbeat. Children of Westmost. Come back safely. Come back soon.
The funeral drum was a secret of the storyteller’s cord. Flea. Cricket’s cord mother and master, his teacher and friend.
Find him, said the drumbeat. Come back.
“Flea,” said Kestrel, who knew this too. Otter nodded. And then they went on without speaking, and the drum went with them, softening slowly, staying a long time. Otter listened to it even as it became faint, and sometimes lost, like the sound of someone breathing on the other side of a lodge.
The day was windy. The trees were shaking off their coats of snow, shaking themselves clean like dogs. Still, the snow had — as snow often does — made it warmer. The still and shattering cold that had frozen the Spearfish and laid the pinch open to the White Hand was gone. The river was thawing, from the bottom up. The ice that had been blinding white on the day of the White Hand was dark now, blue. They could see the water push bubbles of air across its thinning underside. In places it was thin as a sheet of mica. In places it was gone.
It would not hold their weight.
They went beside the river, down its fringe of grasses, down the path in the snow they had broken earlier, coming home from the scaffolds. Kestrel had her staff lifted in her hand. Otter had her bracelets loose. They were not defenseless.
Cricket had been defenseless.
They could see his footprints, sometimes on the path, sometimes dodging onto the ice of the river. There, sometimes, breaking through: dark holes in the ice, water bubbling in them and freezing white around the sharp edges.
What had he been dodging?
On the riverside path, their own footprints, returning to Westmost, overlaid his, going out. They had walked past this. Walked past him. They had not known.
Otter watched Kestrel’s face grow tight.
Otter shifted the pack on her back: the unfamiliar weight. Kestrel had, with haste, shown her how to pack a ranger’s travel bag: cornmeal and sunflower meal, pemmican and dried saskatoons. She’d shown her how to strap an axe to her hip. How to wrap a live ember in birch bark and a bit of tube cut from the horn of a mountain ram. Some of those things were probably secrets of the rangers’ cord. Otter did not care.
The drum was gone now. Either Flea had stopped beating it or it had vanished into the slough and rush of the wind in the trees.
They went past the path up to the scaffolds, beyond the edge of the world that Otter knew. And following them, it seemed to her, came patches of shadow, shifting from branch to branch in the black pines like crows.
She began to be afraid.
They had ranger’s gear — wolf-fur hoods and mittens, boot coverings made from the sacs that hold the hearts of buffalo, which could hold out water. As they slipped past the path up to the scaffolds, Kestrel pulled her hood down, to track better. Otter pulled her mittens off, to free her fingers for the yarns. There were still footprints in front of them: only one set now. Deepest at the toes. Cricket. Running.
Running, with nowhere to go.
The footprints were always on the fringe now, not the ice. His feet must have been wet, cold — the kind of cold that blazes. It was like the touch of a gast, that cold. Even without the dead, it could kill him quickly enough.