They went to Thistle’s lodge, of course. Where else was there to go? In the slow, smoky days that followed, Otter wondered if the old lodge had ever held a jumbled, busy life, and if Thistle had ever wished for one. There had once been years, many years, when Thistle hardly came to Westmost, but haunted the forest, making her way in rangers’ holdfasts and Water Walkers’ islands. In the forest, she trained her rangers and kept down the dead and became almost a figure of legend, shut outside the ward she had not wanted her daughter to cast. She’d become so strange and so estranged that as a child Otter had glimpsed her only rarely, as if she were some rare kind of bird.
Now Otter wondered if small Willow had grown up inside these walls, in the days before the smoke turned the wattle black. The many years of blessing knots scattered around them — had any been tied by her mother?
But whether or not the lodge had ever seen a jumble, a family, it held one now. Thistle — fierce, hawk-wild Thistle — turned out to snore. She could also cook. From somewhere she begged a larger cookpot, and made for them stews of corn and dried squash and berries. She roasted walnuts and grouse. She fed Otter herself, in the early days before Otter’s hands could grip a gourd spoon.
“A privilege,” she said gravely. Her second hand — freed now of its splints and swelling, withered away to bones and skin — rested limply on the blanket beside Otter. “I missed your babyhood, granddaughter. You must let me catch up.”
Otter was too proud to admit she liked it. But Orca smiled.
Kestrel said nothing at all. Because Kestrel had seen — as Otter had not — the moment Thistle had met Orca. She’d seen Thistle take him in, piece by piece: His tattoos that exaggerated the strange planes of his face. His child-short hair. His coat of long-traveling. His voice whose shape suggested another language.
“Who are you?” Thistle had asked, tipping her staff at Orca as if it were a spear.
“Don’t touch him!” snarled Kestrel, swinging up her own staff, smashing Thistle’s out of line. As Thistle squinted at her, puzzled, Kestrel whispered: “Don’t touch him.”
Because Thistle had already killed one storyteller.
Cricket. Otter had not forgotten. But she didn’t feel the weight of it as Kestrel did — Kestrel, tying her knots around her staff, eating from the same stewpot as the woman who had killed her okishae.
As Otter came back to herself, the meaning of Kestrel’s tight silence was easy enough to unravel. With Thistle as captain of the rangers, how could Kestrel be a ranger again? But if she was not a ranger, what was she? What would she do?
Kestrel, not a ranger. And Otter, not a binder. What would they do?
Otter grew stronger slowly.
The Moon of Blossoms came, and winter broke like a fever. Suddenly the world was young and green and tender. Then the Water Walkers came with the spring trade, and turned the careful pinch into feast and festival.
Otter limped out to the fires, some nights, to hear new stories, to breathe the green air. Kestrel sat beside her, behind her, giving her an arm to lean on, giving the others short answers when Otter grew tired enough to tremble.
Everyone had questions.
Otter tried to explain, but it was too big to say. Who could accept it — that since the time of Mad Spider, the binders had used their powers backward? That in knotting out the dead they had in truth tied them to the living world? It was too big to say, though Otter tried to say it. She was not eloquent.
This time, it was Orca who had fallen silent.
It was, of all people, Newt the bonesetter who slowly turned the pinch around.
She came often, plying Otter with teas of blue flag and partridge berry, liniments of prairie-smoke root, bitter chews of black-birch gum. Otter liked having less pain. But no matter what else had happened, she would never like Newt.
Still, Newt had power that was sister to a binder’s power, a power over knots. And she had sat by many a deathbed. She understood how the living held the dying, sometimes, too tightly. Had seen how the dying needed to be let go. She had secrets in her cord: She knew that a bonesetter’s knots could be used wrongly, could trap a dying woman on the bitter edge of death.
Newt understood. And it was she who named Otter the Unbinder.
The girl who had risen alive among the dead, and died there. And come back.
Orca, through all the coming and going, through the feast of storytelling and fires, through all the times when he could have been a hero, sat quietly on the sleeping platform opposite. He was rebuilding his drum, which had been slashed in its fall from the burial trees. He had traded some of the beads from his coat hem to one of the Water Walkers for an elk skin. For most of a moon he sat cross-legged and speechless, working first to cure and stretch the hide, and then to stretch it over the frame.
Otter was baffled, hurt. Orca had saved her with the warmth of his own breath. He had not touched her since.
Finally his drum was finished. Smoke-cured, the drumhead was mottled gray. It had a different tone than his old drum: more somber, its center voice braver, but with an undertone of trembling — a drum that could weep. He sounded it softly with his fingertips, and the sound rose to the round roof like a deep breath.
He played it a little, experimenting: a rain-on-the-corn patter from the rim, the heartbeat of the edge and center, the rising triples that made Otter think of her strange dream: whales rising.