“Just a drying line,” Otter said. “Just something from which to hang our coats.”
Otter did not know who she was, and so it felt like a memory. Not something she had heard. Someone she had been. Her brothers waking up covered in dust and sneezing….
Orca and Kestrel both stared at her. Orca in pure bafflement. But the lights of thought were moving in Kestrel’s eyes.
Otter’s heart — her heart was slowing. Its four-fold knot drawing tighter and tighter. Too tight to pulse.
Too strong. There was something wrong.
“Too strong,” said Otter, and her tongue moved thickly, like the tongue of the dead.
“Too strong,” repeated Orca, bewildered. But Kestrel — very slowly, Kestrel nodded.
“The binders,” she said. “With Mad Spider, since Mad Spider, they became too powerful. They made our scaffolds into snares.”
“We bind the dead too tightly,” said Otter. Her white hand twitched. Her voice seemed to come from the hollows of her bones. “We need to let them go.”
It took a binder to see it, a binder who traveled like a ranger, a binder who knew a storyteller’s secrets. Moons of moons it had been, years of years, since such a woman had walked in the world. “We need to let them go,” Otter said again.
And her heart stopped.
Kestrel said: “How?”
And from beyond death, Otter answered: “This.”
She pulled the cord around her wrist.
The noose closed onto her skin.
And then it closed through her skin.
And then the knot — as nooses do, when closed on nothing — pulled through itself, undid itself. And was gone.
Otter dropped the unknotted cord and folded inward, clutching her hand to her chest. It had been so numb, as if it were made of twigs and fingernails, and now it blazed as if on fire. She could not even feel the other hand against it — only pure instinct made her push it, protect it, hide it. Her shoulders were pulling in, her knees were buckling —
Kestrel and Orca dove to catch her.
Otter breathed heavily through her nose. She shook. It was sickening, impossible — the cord had gone right through her skin.
Kestrel stuck a hand under Otter’s armpit and took a firm hold. Otter leaned, and felt safe leaning: Kestrel could hold up a tree.
Seeing Otter steadied, Orca crouched down to examine the squiggle of yarn that lay in the goose feathers and the moss. It looked as if it had lain there, dropped like a snakeskin, for a moon-count of years. The blue dye had faded. The strands had frayed.
The storyteller looked up at Otter, his head tilted, his eyes dark. Then he touched the yarn with one finger. It did not grab at him. The fibers were loosening, as if no drop spindle had ever whirled them. Orca poked the yarn and it fell apart — smaller than speedwell blossoms, tufts of faint blue among the black flight feathers and the drifting down.
Orca looked up. “What does this mean?”
Kestrel, meanwhile, had caught hold of Otter’s forearm, just above her blazing hand. She coaxed it away from Otter’s body. “Look.”
Otter’s hand was brown.
Human.
Young.
The binder’s calluses that she herself had earned. Her own constellations of freckles and scars.
It hurt — Otter finally recognized the feeling — it hurt as if she’d slept with it pinned, with not enough blood in it. It hurt worse than that, hurt as if no blood had been in it for days. She shook it. Made a fist and then flared the fingers open. The roar of the nerves began to fade.
“Look.” Kestrel stepped away but kept her grip on the transformed wrist. She raised Otter’s newly human hand and lowered her own face into it. Otter felt her tears. “Oh,” said Kestrel, her eyes closed. “Look.”
But Otter stretched out her other hand. It was still made of twigs and fingernails; it was still white as teeth. And it was holding, by the hand, another hand — a hand made of shadow. The White Hand was beside Otter, a shadow standing free in the air. Sisters, Otter thought. For a moment, they stood hand in hand, like sisters.
Orca looked up at the shadow. His eyes went round, his body tight. The White Hand, the monster that had already almost killed him. It had him — it had all of them — in easy reach. “It —” he stuttered.
“Cricket was right,” said Kestrel, exultant, eyes closed, heedless of the danger. “Cricket was right.”
“Otter …” whispered Orca, his face rigid with fear.
Otter shuddered — and then breathed in, letting the shadow thing, the White Hand, move back into her body. Suddenly her heart was pounding, beating in her ears, louder than a funeral drum. Dead — she’d been dead.
“I tied my mother in a tree,” she said, the Hand inside her said. “She tightened like drying leather. She rotted like a rope. We must go and save her.”
Willow, mother of Otter.
Hare, mother of Mad Spider.
Fawn, no one’s mother.
All the bound-up dead.
Kestrel opened her eyes and said: “Yes. We must go.”