He had it braced against a boulder. One hand held the edge, the fingers keeping high loops of edge voices soaring. The other hand added a center voice. It was loud, louder than the waterfall, and strange, and very beautiful. Otter’s life had been full of music — bone flutes and turtle-shell tambourines, deer-hoof rattles sewn to dancing shirts. But no one had ever played a drum like this: like a dozen heartbeats, like a hundred footfalls, like breath and life itself; a moon balanced on the round back of a stone.
“Otter,” said Orca. “Stay with us. Otter. One more day.”
She stayed.
Dawn. They hurried down the river.
They passed a place where the raspberry canes were torn out of the ground. It would be nothing to notice. They noticed it.
Inside Otter, the White Hand opened like a hide in a dye pot. It had almost all of her. And yet, from some huge distance, she could still feel the skin of her human hand. The White Hand stirred into it. From within, it seemed, it took her hand and held tight.
They found the little creek and the path of bare stones. They went up toward the scaffolds.
No one played the burial drum. No one played the bone flutes. No one came with them. The waning curl of the Sap-Running Moon was drifting pale in the pale sky, like the dead, out of place in the world.
In the scaffolding grounds, Otter came back to herself. It was the knots that did it, the inward push of the red ward that was strung around the place. It pushed her into herself, pushed the spreading darkness back into her lungs, until she choked on it and came back gasping.
Otter blinked and shivered, looked around. Clear light. The trees black around her. Below, the black eye of the high lake. One dark eagle turning in the sky above. Cold. It had been earliest spring in the caldera, where the heat came up through the earth. But it was still winter here; the last turn of winter. There were scales of snow in the pine needles, icy rings around the drifted bones.
Kestrel had already lowered a burial frame. Otter stared at it.
“Can you hear me?” It was Orca’s voice. She realized that he had said it over and over, through half the day. She turned from the terrible square of the frame and looked at him. Faint as a blush, he smiled. “There you are.”
“Otter.” Kestrel, at her other hand. “I — Are you sure?”
“It’s … It’s …” The curdled darkness had filled her lungs. It was hard to speak.
But she was sure. She was a binder born. She knew knots. The way to undo a noose was not to unwind it. It was to empty it. And pull it shut.
She held up her two hands, one of them human, and one of them white. She unlooped her bracelets and showed Kestrel the cast: the cradle, the tree. The scaffold. The fingers of the white hand were longer, thinner, than her human fingers: She fumbled. She cast the sky.
She moved her two hands apart —
And the pattern exploded, all its crosses coming undone in an instant, until all that was left was the yarn, looped from hand to hand, hanging harmless and slack.
Kestrel stared.
“Sorrow’s knot,” said Otter. The voice made a hollow of all her bones. “Like this.” She made a small noose with the yarn. She showed it to Kestrel one, two, three times. “This. Tie it like this.”
And Kestrel — weeping and practical — Kestrel did.
Being lashed to the scaffold was every horror she’d ever known. Every knot. It was the thing in the corn that had struck Cricket and then crawled up into the yarns of her hands. It was the tangle of power that had killed Fawn. The White Hand on the island, hissing and striking. The dream of the cords growing into her mother’s wrist.
That dream.
Her wrists tied.
Her ankles.
Every bump against the frame made her shudder, but she couldn’t move. Her breath was gristly with fear. May the wind take me … The words shuddered up into her mind, but she couldn’t find breath to say them.
She closed her eyes, opened them. Orca.
His face was tipped and his hair fell into it, but in her eyes he shone like a raven. “Listen,” he whispered. His fingers were on his drum. She could see them move, but the sound they lifted was so soft it hardly reached her. He spoke with equal softness.
Once on a riptide
I was swept out to sea
Once with no oar
I was swept out far
The fog came
And the dark came
And the fear came
Thickly
All night I breathed it
And I was so afraid
Water smacked all around me And the waves seemed to seek me
I thought it was sharks
But it was the oar of my father I thought it was seal
But it was the boat of my mother I thought I was lost
But there was love all around me
First the lamps of my people Then the great light of day
They were private words, a seashell to hold to her ear. Orca swallowed. “An old song …” He shuddered. Softly kissed her. Said: “Forgive us.”
And then they hauled her up.
Cold and empty, the sky.