He played the whales. And, then, suddenly, he was in tears.
Kestrel stared. It was Otter who stood, who went to him. Who helped him to his feet, the drum like a shield between them. She had to nudge it aside to hold him. His body trembled like a tree.
“I let you die,” he whispered to her. “I — tied you.” He swallowed, his tattoos showing the twitch of the muscles in his jaws. “As I could not tie my father.”
He was weeping now, openly, the whales on his cheekbones rising.
“And then what happened … to him? To my people?” He bent his head and buried his face in her hair. “Otter, I have been such a coward.”
She wrapped a hand around the back of his neck — the vulnerable hollow place there, the feather sleekness of his hair.
“I will make a story of you,” he promised, a fierce whisper. “It will go over this country like a tidal wave. The girl who remade the world.”
“Oh, wait a bit,” she said, in Cricket’s voice. “You have not yet seen the ending.”
That night, Otter took out her red shirt — the one that had been her mother’s, the one with an embroidery of bones, the one binders wore for funerals — and waited.
It was not every binder who had the strength to tie the dead to the living world, Otter explained. Most did not. But among the free women of the forest, once or twice in every moon-count of years, there would be one who did.
Those strong binders made White Hands. Mad Spider had been the first with such strength. She had made a White Hand out of her mother, Hare, and more out of the other dead among her people, and finally had become a Hand herself, touched at last by the things she made. Willow had made a White Hand of Tamarack. Otter herself had made one of Willow, and another of Fawn, though those ropes had not been left long enough to rot.
Mad Spider, who had been wrong, but who had been powerful and clever and brave, had freed the Hands of her time. Other binders had made and freed other Hands. Otter had freed Mad Spider. In her death on the scaffold, she had freed the Hand that was caught inside herself, freed Willow, freed Fawn, freed all of Westmost’s restless, twitching dead.
There was one left. Solitary as a daytime moon.
Trapped as Otter had been, on the scaffold, with her hands pulsing.
Otter knew she would be coming.
And she came.
In the dark pause between the Moon of Blossoms and the Moon of New Grass, as the spring fires burned their highest and the Water Walkers rolled their tents to travel and told their last tales, the White Hand came.
The pinch came running for Otter, of course. She might have strange ideas, she might be at the center of a strange story, she might be young, she might even be mad — but she was the binder of Westmost.
So Otter put on her funeral red and walked out into the evening. She went to the water gate, the gap in the ward where her mother had stood on the day the river had frozen. Here, Willow had slipped. Here, Willow had fallen into the hands of a White Hand. This White Hand.
“Don’t go,” she called to the women who were running, to the rangers who were herding the children of Westmost to the binder’s lodge, where they could — if they had to — make a desperate stand. “Stay,” said Otter. “This needs witnessing.”
Some of them went anyway. But most stayed, rangers holding their staffs, Water Walkers with wide eyes, the ordinary women of Westmost waiting in the safety of the running water. It was nearly full night: The sky beyond the birches of the ward was like water saturated with blue dye, dark but full of shining. The ward itself was just a shiver in the twilight.
Outside the ward was something darker than the darkness, hanging at the edge of the black pines. They could see its hands.
Otter took off her spring slippers, eased into the water, and walked out toward it. At the forest edge she climbed onto the bank. She stood in a patch of marsh marigold, bright and soft under her feet. She held out her hands toward the White Hand — a foreign gesture, but one that read I am unarmed — and let her voice ring.
“Welcome home, Tamarack. Binder of Westmost.”
Otter stepped closer to the Hand in the darkness. It drifted toward her out of the pine shadows, into the scrub meadow. Almost to the ward. She could barely see it: only the hands. The hunch of what might be shoulders, carrying something heavy. “I am sorry,” she said. Her hands were still out. “I am sorry that we kept you here. I am sorry that we bound you up. To all of your kind. My kind is sorry.”
She stepped forward one more time. The yellow flowers cast petals at her feet, like a dapple of moonlight, though there was no moon. The ward was at her elbow. The gathered rangers behind the strings. The women of Westmost. The silent men of the Sunlit Places.