Otter slipped off her bracelets. She cast nothing. She looked at the cord for a moment. The White Hand seemed to look too. Then Otter made a single slip knot, with a loop no bigger than might hold a cradleboard. “Tamarack?” she said. And held it out.
The pale hands stirred in the darkness like moths. Fluttered, fumbled. Plucked.
The loop lifted from Otter’s fingers. She felt the air stir as the white hands moved next to hers, but not so much as a moth’s feeler touched her. And then the loop was around one white wrist. Around both.
Otter stepped closer still and took the free end of the cord. “I loved you in life,” she said. “I let you go.”
She pulled the loop closed.
There was just one moment where the noose bit in, held. Then it went through the shadow stuff of the White Hand as it had once gone through Otter’s own wrist. There was a fluttering, an urgent movement, like quail flushed from the grass.
And then nothing. The blue yarn fell into the flowers.
Otter lifted her chin and let her voice rise, ring out over the silent pinch. “We will never bind the dead again,” she said.
And then she picked up her slippers and walked back to her lodge.
“It is a good story,” said Orca, leaning on the flank of Thistle’s lodge, watching the chaos near the ward — rangers, dyers, Walkers, children — a fuss of voices and torches such as serious, stable Westmost rarely knew. “A good ending.”
Too much time walking with death had robbed Otter of her quick tongue. On the other hand, she’d become better at listening. She turned to Orca. “But … ?”
“I —” He ducked his head aside. “I must go, Otter. I must go back.”
“To your people.”
“To my father. To find out what happened. To put right what I can.”
The great fire of the spring festival was burning in the palm: It made Orca’s tattoos leap and change, though he was holding very still. Otter said nothing. To go back — it would be a terribly hard thing. But she had little standing to argue against doing terribly hard things.
“I will make the story first,” he promised. “Your story. When I am done, those who hear it — those who hear it will weep. They will never tie a binder’s knot again.”
Otter thought about this, silently.
Orca had pulled a bit of bindweed. The flower was closed against the night, a curl of softness against one of his fingernails. He looked down, then up. His eyes were dark and serious. “It will break me, Otter. It will tear me like the drumskin, to leave you.”
For a moment, she felt her own heart tear. Then she blurted: “But I’m coming with you.”
His face fell open. It was a perfect mirror of Cricket’s look of foolish surprise, and behind her, Otter heard Kestrel laugh.
“Of course she is, storyteller,” she said, coming over. “Did you not see that coming? Otter and I are going west. We have been for some time.”
“Otter and you?” Orca tried to gulp down his gape, which made him look even more foolish.
“I have left enough of myself here,” said Otter.
“If she goes without me, she will probably be eaten by a bear,” said Kestrel. “She has no woodcraft. And she’s stupid with love.”
Orca tucked his chin, blushing. “Is she?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Otter.
“Hmmm.” Kestrel pointed across the gardens to where Newt the bonesetter was trying to keep back a small pack of women who looked likely to storm over to the unbinder and demand answers. “I’d best help take care of that.”
She left, and Otter found herself alone, watching Orca spin the bindweed in his fingers as if he were making a rope. He was blushing deeply, and the waves on his jaw quivered as he tried not to let himself smile. “You don’t know … ?” he murmured, his head bent as if speaking to the sealed flower.
“I just came back to life, Orca,” she said. “You must give me some time to find out.” She stepped in front of him, trapping him against the earth wall. He glanced up at her, shivering as if with fear.
“Take time now,” he said, his voice rough. He put one hand on the flare of her hip.
She slipped a hand behind the back of his neck. She felt him tense, and then — as she kissed the point on his jaw where the waves turned to whirlpools — she felt the fear knots in him releasing.
Something rose in her, certain and sure, as she sought out his mouth. She slid her hand around him until her fingers curled over his collarbone. She pulled herself up on tiptoe, and pressed the other hand over his heart. His heartbeat matched hers.
Their hearts, together, made a music like drums.