Otter had never walked in darkness, not away from Westmost. Not in a place where she could see no firelight, smell no cooking, hear no laughter or song or babies crying. The darkness seemed to make them more alone. It made the wind louder, it made a heart-stopping noise of a rabbit bolting out from under their feet. Otter’s heart beat faster. She slipped her fingers under her bracelets, making sure they were loose. She saw that Kestrel — though limping — was not leaning on her staff. She had it lifted in her single uninjured hand. She too was ready.
And yet, as they walked and walked, in thicker and thicker darkness, nothing happened. The slope bottomed out, changing from grasses and yucca to a low meadow of cushion moss and frost-black speedwell, wires of spiderwort curling upward, the red stems of saxifrage spilling from the cracks of the rocks. The soil had a give underfoot. It was not wet, but Otter thought there might be wetness, not far down — the moss underfoot felt like a deer hide over a mud puddle. The strange smell was heavier. It stirred around them.
When something loomed up, shaped like a bear in the darkness, Otter was afraid. But Kestrel said “At last,” and strode toward it.
“What is that?” said Otter, hurrying after. In the starlight she could just see it. A structure: birch poles thrust into the earth in a ring and bent together at the top. It was wound around with blue cords.
“The holdfast.” Kestrel lowered her staff and leaned on it. “A place where the rangers may stand a day or two, and sleep safely.”
“They come this far?” Otter was awed.
“This far and no farther,” Kestrel said. “Late in the summer, this whole bowl is filled with blue lupines. The rangers come here and pick them by the basketful, and pack them into bags for the dyers. This is where blue comes from. This is the true edge of the world.”
Otter walked around the holdfast, touching the cords. There were many: The lowest part of the holdfast was thickly wound as a bird’s nest. And there were many knots. It was not a ward — no one but a binder could have tied a ward, and no binder’s hand had made this. It was … The rangers had wrapped their holdfast as if it were one of their staffs. They’d used many cords, tied many rangers’ knots, small and sure. The knots stirred as Otter touched them, but nothing made to pounce. The power of the place was as faded and fuzzed as old yarn.
It was comfortable. Old. It had protected the blue-gatherers for years, perhaps generations. It would keep back the slip, she was sure.
But somewhere, still in the world, was a White Hand. Drawn to the human, or to power, or to fear. Otter could not shake the sense that it might have followed them.
Even if it had, they could do little about it. Still alive, and at the very edge of the world, they went inside.
It was darker inside the holdfast, though not much: The white-barked poles were open as a rib cage against the sky; light and wind came through them with barely a waver. But for all that, the darkness was a sheltering one. There was a floor of woven willow that held them above the damp of the earth. There were piles of dried ferns to make sleeping places; there was wood stacked high; there was tinder already laid in the fire bowl. The holdfast wrapped its soft power around them.
“The ember is gone,” said Kestrel. There was something broken in her voice. She was bent over the nest of grass and dried tinder, and Otter could not see her face. The ranger was holding a contraption of stick and sinew, a fire drill that spun a bit of flint against dry wood. Otter recognized it but only vaguely: The fires of Westmost never went out. Still, she saw at once that it could not be used one-handed.
“Here,” she said, and took the drill. She set the tip in the tinder and fumbled with the cord and bow that made the fire bit spin.
Kestrel turned aside and took off her coat. Beneath it, her shirt was still damp: The leather was dark under the pale quills. She opened her pack and pulled out a new shirt. As the shirt caught starlight, Otter saw that it was yellow. New yellow leather, dyed with prickly poppies, the shirt Otter herself had stitched and Cricket and Kestrel had laughed and laughed over. The pair of them, each surprising the other with yellow. Cricket’s okishae-pledge shirt. He had taken it with him when he went out of Westmost, and Kestrel had taken it from his travel bag, after he died. Otter kept the drill spinning — she had to — and Kestrel turned aside and folded the leather shirt around her face.
A moaning wind began: constant, and longing as a voice.
Kestrel was shivering. Otter realized she could probably not take off her damp shirt, not with her arm tied up in binder’s knots. “I will help you with that,” she said. “A moment. I think the fire —”
It was smoldering now, a single eye of orange looking out of the knot of grass and smoke.
“Did we do right?” asked Kestrel. “We did not bind him. What if …”
What if. Otter knew that what if. She had not been able to stop thinking about that what if. The dead were bound to keep them away from the world. To keep their bodies from moving while their names were leaving.
What if Cricket’s body moved, though his name was gone?
What kind of creature would he become?