He continued not to go mad until even Newt seemed to give up hope that he would. She tightened her bindings around him — which made him wheeze — but she also began to let him out into the air.
The first day, he went leaning between Kestrel and Otter. Because winters in Westmost could be bitter, earthlodges were built with small tunnels for entrances, with a curtain at one end, and a curtain at the other. They were not built for three to go abreast. Otter’s shoulder hit one of the supporting poles in the half-darkness. A moment later, there was an oophf from Kestrel, and she stopped too.
“We’re stuck,” said Cricket. “Like a baby too big to be born. We’re doomed.”
“The rangers got you in here somehow,” said Kestrel reasonably.
But none of them wanted to think about that moment. Just the mention of it made Cricket shiver. “I’ve gotten fat since then,” he said, though the lightness in his voice cracked a little. “Newt slips me sweets.”
They shifted and went sideways, and they got out. That first day they only leaned on the southward flank of the earthlodge, and Cricket breathed in the sun, closed his eyes, and smiled.
Soon enough he was walking under his own power. Nearly every day that summer, Otter or Kestrel or both would help him go walking, or sit with him on the grassy roof of the earthlodge while he tried out one of his new stories — he’d been much visited by the ancient woman Flea, the pinch’s storyteller, for whom Cricket had long been a favorite.
The beginning of the Moon of Ease saw him drowsing in a patch of crown vetch — his black braids tangled in the dense lavender flowers, while Otter sat guarding him and Kestrel picked the feathery leaves of mayweed and the first fist-and-feather flowers of bee balm, to tuck into his straw pillow. The mere scent on her hands in his hair was enough to wake him. He caught her by the wrist, turned his head, and breathed deep.
The Moon of Ease closed and the Sunflower Moon opened. Strength came back to Cricket’s body; he and Kestrel would walk the whole rim of the pinch, inside the ward. At first they went hand in hand because he was breathless from the knots around his ribs. But later they went hand in hand without that cause.
Otter watched them and wondered. It would probably be the last summer of the sunflower years, as the Shadowed People called the space between childhood and adulthood, after girls shot into their height, but before they were given their women’s belts. When the sunflower time passed, the girls would join a cord — becoming a ranger or a binder or a dyer or some other thing. The secret learnings and solemn duties of each work would claim them — separate them from one another. And Cricket … Well. That was harder still.
By the time the Corn-Cut Moon began to wax, marking the beginning of harvest, Cricket moved almost as well as if he’d never been injured — but still Newt kept him confined.
Every day Otter and Kestrel worked hard in the garden for the morning — in the harvest, everyone worked hard. They took rest, and then one or both of them would rescue Cricket.
One day, all three of them went. It was a fine day, warm. They wandered along the little river, kicking round stones into the bright, shallow water, climbing boulders for no better reason than that they were young and they could. They drew out the wander, Otter and Kestrel batting a ball back and forth, Cricket practicing sleight of hand with a chipped arrowhead he’d found.
They went down the river as far as they could — which was not far. Between the pinch and the shadows of the forest was the ward.
The ward was like a fence whose fence posts were full-grown trees: a ring of slender birches that circled the pinch. From tree to tree went blue cords of braided rawhide, knotted and knitted together, tied here and there with that most precious of things: yarn. The cords dove into the earth to knot unseen roots. They reached three times a woman’s height. The ward thrummed in the wind and cast strange shadows in the sun.
The ward was the crown of a binder’s work. It was a glory. It was the only thing that kept the whole pinch from filling with hungry shadows. But just then, it was also a fence that was keeping them in.
Kestrel, Cricket, and Otter did not really consider themselves trapped: That they had never left their village, that the dead could be anywhere — it was simply the way things were. Still they pushed a little: They followed the river to the gap it made in the ward. No dead would come through there — the dead could not cross running water. There was not even, that day, a ranger at guard.
“We could go right out the gate,” said Cricket, looking at the open space in wonder.
“Yes,” said Kestrel. “If we were seeking horrible death, we could find it, right over there!”