Kestrel’s breath went climbing, as Cricket’s had done. Then she whispered: “No. I don’t want to die. But I cannot go back to Westmost. And I would go — I would see what Cricket wanted to see. The beginning and the ending. Mad Spider.”
“The start of the story,” said Otter. The tale the storytellers knew and the binders did not. The story that Cricket had died to share: Mad Spider bound her mother too tightly. It meant something that a binder knew that story now. “Kestrel, I am going with you.”
“It is a secret place,” said the ranger seriously.
“It was a secret story,” said Otter. “And I would see it too.”
“Come with me, then,” said Kestrel. “Enough of secrets.”
“Tsha,” swore Otter. “Enough.”
And so they went into the West, along the river, over the untracked snow.
They went slowly.
There was no reason to go quickly. Cricket was dead. They were exhausted, hungry, heavy with grief. So they went slowly.
Kestrel’s face was drawn; she was nearly silent. But her eyes were open: She stopped and pointed out the haw apples, stooped and brushed the snow from a crack in a fallen tree trunk to reveal a line of fawn-colored mushrooms, leathery with winter. They picked the haws and cut the fragrant drifts of mushrooms, and Otter began to feel they might not starve.
They stopped early and chopped off a few aspen poles to thrust into the soft ground near the river. Otter strung a ward. Kestrel built a fire bowl of stone and gathered tinder. They had a thin meal of corn porridge and wild mushroom, and spread their one robe on the cold ground. They huddled together on the robe where Cricket had died, with the ice of the river creaking and snapping like a wolf at their ears. They were so tired they were nearly sick with it. They did not keep watch, and they did not dream.
By the morning, the slip had found them.
Otter woke to them: a pair of dark things the size of crows, moving with stiff slowness, pushing close against the loose ward. Otter blinked twice and yawned before she realized that they were not crows, not the shadows of crows, not the shadows of anything at all — simply shadows. Stirring, hungry shadows. She rolled up with a shout, reaching for her bracelets — and Kestrel dropped a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t,” said the ranger. “You’ll only draw more.”
Otter felt as if she were still dreaming, an old nightmare — caught in a small space with the dead pressing in. And as in a dream, she was the only one frightened, and could not speak her fear: Kestrel was still blank-faced, silently feeding branches into the sleepy fire.
“Have you ever watched them?” Kestrel asked. “Sometimes I think they are as much longing as hungry. Cricket had a story — do you know it? — about the lost woman who was starving, and wished that everything she touched would turn to meat? And then she found her children….”
Otter shuddered. “How do we unmake them?”
“The rangers’ way.” Kestrel picked up her staff. “Quietly.” She edged the staff through the woven cords some distance from the slip and made its end flutter and brush in the pine needles, like a mother quail drawing off a fox. The slip nearest bulged and twisted, until its swinging nose faced the quivering knots. Slow as a leech it flowed in that direction. When it was close enough, Kestrel lifted the staff, raised her elbow, and struck the thing through from above. For a moment the shadow stuff clotted and squeezed around the staff, then one of the knots there gave way — and the slip was gone. Kestrel turned to the other slip and did the whole thing again.
When she was finished, she passed the staff to Otter and gave her attention, still blankly, to making a tinder bundle — dampening a bit of grass and tough wood-ear fungus, setting it to smolder, wrapping it tightly in birch paper. She was dry-eyed that morning, though her face had aged by winters and winters.
Otter sat watching by the fire with the staff across her knees, as she had done in Westmost. This — this was how the rangers’ knots came to be unraveled. This simple, quiet unmaking of little spirits, the rangers’ way of dealing with the dead. All the time she had worked in secret on Kestrel’s staff, risking her status, risking Kestrel’s … risking their very lives, for they, like Cricket, could have been sent west. All that time she had thought there would be more to the unmaking of those knots: more of a story.
A story. Cricket.
Otter retied the knots. She undid the ward and reclaimed its cords, wrapping a few up her arms and putting the rest in a pouch outside her coat. By then it was full morning, and time to move on.
It was warmer that day. The last snow was melting away. The river ate at its fringe of ice.
They went without trouble, though there was the creeping sense of eyes on them, of rustle in the forest, though the day was very still and nothing was rustling.