Sorrow’s Knot (19 page)

Otter slept badly and woke stiff. Kestrel slept like the dead, and woke pinned under her stiffness as if under a rockfall. She could hardly rise. Her eyes were hollow and her wrist was swollen.

But here, at last, the world was kind to them. As Kestrel lay resting, the day dawned bright and grew warm, then warmer. In Westmost, it would have been the ragged end of winter, the end of the Hunger Moon, coming toward the Moon of Sap-Running. The sun might have been warm once in a while, but the wind would have been raw. In the high caldera, by the steaming lake, the wind was as playful as a butterfly. It plucked at their hair.

And then, day after day, that weather held. It thawed their fear; it softened their hearts.

Their third day in the holdfast, Kestrel sat on a stone in the mild sun and tried to help Otter find the dried feather-flowers of prairie smoke, whose root could be crushed and used as a liniment for pain.

“This?” called Otter.

“That’s a thistle,” said Kestrel.

Otter brought a pod of something over in one hand to show the ranger. “This?”

“That’s milkweed. Binder’s daughter, you’ve led a sheltered life if you don’t know milkweed.”

“Oh, but I do,” said Otter, and brought the other hand from behind her back, releasing milkweed seeds in a puff into Kestrel’s face.

“Tsha! Otter!” The ranger batted the downy, floating, clinging things away.

“Make wishes,” said Otter. “Make a skyful of wishes.”

“But there is only one thing I want.” Dressed in Cricket’s yellow shirt, Kestrel looked little as Fawn, little as a child.

Otter stiffened. “I’m sorry.”

“Ch’hhh. You didn’t remind me, because I hadn’t forgotten. I’ll just wish for him a skyful of times.”

Otter was silent a moment, putting her hand on Kestrel’s shoulder.

“Prairie-smoke root?” Kestrel prompted.

Otter turned, searched. After a while, called: “This?”

“There are squirrels who are better at this than you.”

She found it eventually, and milk vetch too, the root of which is a chew for muscle pains, and soon Kestrel was moving — walking in that sunny, strange place.

Their days in the caldera were a sunflower girl of a time, an idyll between one thing and another. They taught each other. Before the Hunger Moon was dark, Kestrel could tie the simplest of binder’s knots, make a small, one-strand ward. Before the next moon opened, Otter could bait a fishhook, set a snare, gather rosehips without scratching her hands.

And the lake. They swam. Westmost’s drought pool was cold, even in midsummer. This lake was warm — nearly hot. The water had a metal tang, like blood, that made it strange to drink, but the minerals held them floating and the heat pulled the pain and fear from them. When they came out, their bare skins steamed and they were not cold.

Nor were they hungry. There were not many fish in the strange lake, and the rabbits Otter tried to snare seemed smarter than she was, but there were geese. The lake was thick with geese: brown-bodied, black-necked, fat as fall pumpkins. They had missed their migration and stayed the winter on the open water.

“Oh, for a bow,” said Kestrel one day, lounging and watching them. “A bow and a big roasting pit.”

Otter put down her digging stick: She’d been uprooting cattails, whose roots could be baked — a good food, though dull. “Could we snare them?”

“Maybe. I’ve never snared for a water beast.”

“Could we just catch them?”

Kestrel stood up. “Oh, let’s try.”

It wasn’t even hard.

The first few times Otter tried, it turned out badly, with splash and crash and honking. Kestrel laughed and laughed. “You do it, then, Lady Ranger,” Otter said, using a pinkie to scoop mud out of her ears. On the lake, the goose she’d been trying to catch reared up on beating wings, snaked out its black neck, and hissed at her. “Don’t argue with me,” Otter told it.

“Try it a ranger’s way,” said Kestrel. “Try it quietly.”

She crumbled the roast biscuit-root she’d been eating and tossed the crumbs toward the geese.

The hissing one stopped hissing. It looked at the crumbs.

Kestrel made a clucking, coaxing noise. Otter backed off. Kestrel threw more crumbs. More geese looked. They swam toward her. She threw crumbs. They waddled ashore. With a few more handfuls of biscuit-root, with a few easy steps, Kestrel was up to her waist in eddying, eating geese. She sorted through them with her eyes, picked a fat one, and fell sideways on it.

The little flock exploded into wings and indignation, but it was too late. Kestrel stood up with her arms full of struggling goose. A twist of the ranger’s capable hand — and a flinch from Otter — and it was over. It was, in fact, dinner.

Incredibly, it worked the next day too. And the next. They had, for the first time in their lives, more meat than they could eat.

“They are dumb as rocks,” said Otter, when it worked a fourth time.

Kestrel flicked her sore wrist — breaking a goose neck was near the limit of what she could do. “Well,” she said, “these are the ones that got lost.”

“Oh,” said Otter. “Oh, tell it!”

“‘The Geese that Got Lost Going South,’” said Kestrel.

It had been one of Cricket’s favorite stories.

“‘The Geese that Got Lost Going South,’” she said again.

And — finally, finally — Kestrel started to cry.

They cried until they couldn’t cry anymore. And then Otter told the story, and they laughed.

Cricket. They laughed over his memory, they cried over it. They were warm and fed, and nothing came at them in the darkness. They thought themselves as safe as they had ever been. They forgot, almost, what they had come to do: that they had come to find something, to find Eyrie, to find the living root of the stories about the dead. They did not notice that, apart from the holdfast itself, they had found nothing human at all. In that warm, sunlit place, the perfect place for humans to live — nothing human at all.

Then, one day, they swam out to the island.

They had not meant to go. Why would they? Where most of the caldera was a soft curve of soil, the island was rock: young and ragged. Where the meadow was moss and grasses, the island was trees. Its black pines shocked the eye. It was shadowed.

But one day they were swimming, and they found something curious. There was a place in the meadow where the ground bumped up as if over a huge tree root. Where it met the lake, the bump made a finger of land, pointing straight out toward the island. Off the tip of it, the girls discovered a line of submerged boulders. Their tops were hidden an arrow’s length under the dark, restless surface of the lake. Stepping stones, if you were a giant. Diving stones, otherwise.

Otter dove like her namesake, twisting and flashing into the dark water. Kestrel sat on the edge of one of the stones, up to her collarbone in the water, her bare shoulders shining like copper. Otter dove deep, pushing against the lifting force of the thick water. She felt the darkness and the heat that rose under her. She felt the power of her kick, the strength of her body, and the smoothness of bare skin slipping through the water. When she surfaced and turned, Kestrel was still sitting, twisting droplets from the dark rope of her hair. She was half-smiling, but a deep and silent sadness was sitting beside her.

Otter, though only one winter past her girlhood, knew sorrow. But she had fought it, run from it, bound it tight with her power. She knew nothing of sitting with it. And she was named, after all, for an otter: a spirit of strong play. She was a girl who could aim a snowball. Sneak a peeled acorn into a stew pot, just to surprise someone with the bitter bite. She dove again, and this time stayed under until she found Kestrel’s foot. She pulled the ranger in.

When they came up, Kestrel was spluttering: “Tsha! Otter! I am going to —”

“You’ll have to catch me first,” said Otter, and dove.

But Kestrel did catch her, and then Otter splashed her, and then Kestrel dove — and before they knew it they had collapsed, laughing, on the shingled fringe of the island’s shore.

They both lay panting, half in the hot water, half in the cool air. It occurred to Otter that she’d nearly lost track of the moon: Sap-Running, she thought, but what phase? Kestrel sat up, fingering the tangles out of her hair. Otter’s eye caught on an old arrowhead lying half in the water. The lap of the lake had dulled the glass-black of its obsidian. But though it was old, it was a human thing, a made thing.

The sight made Otter a little uneasy. She was not sure why. But before she could decide, she heard, very faintly, the throb of a drum.

At first she thought,
Oh, a drum,
and then a jolt went through her whole body. She held up a hand, making the ranger’s gesture for quiet. Kestrel snapped into silence. She held still as a startled deer.

Yes, there, under the murmur of the trees, was a drumbeat. A small drum, by the sound of it, like Cricket’s fireside drum. It kept making a few heartbeat beats, and then stumbling and lurching. If a dying man was playing a drum, he’d play it like that.

Otter and Kestrel silently climbed to their feet, looking at each other. They did not dare say his name.

His name that was done with the world. His body that they’d left unbound. What if …

Otter looked around. There was water, right there at their feet. Water was safety. The dead could not cross water.

But if that were true, then how had he — how had Cricket — how had the drummer come to the island? She did not think it could be a human drummer, here at the edge of the world. But what manner of dead thing could play a drum?

The breeze shifted, and suddenly the drumbeats came clearer. And under them — did she fool herself or could she really hear it? — under them came a voice. It came weaving through the drumbeats: light, male. They could make out no words at such a distance, but the cadence was a storyteller’s.

Horror bloomed in Otter’s heart. Cricket. They’d doomed him, they’d made him into something. She turned to Kestrel, not knowing what she would say. She turned just in time to see the flash of recognition on Kestrel’s face, the spring of tears. The ranger bolted for the heart of the island, for the shadows, for the voice.

Otter dove after. She caught Kestrel by the arm, and when that didn’t work, she threw herself on top of her friend’s body. They went crashing together into the rushes, loud as bears. “Wait,” hissed Otter, as they rolled apart. Kestrel met her eyes, and stopped moving. “If it’s Cricket,” Otter whispered, “if it’s Cricket, it’s not Cricket. We can’t — go to him like this.”

It seemed to occur to Kestrel, quite suddenly, that she was naked. She folded her arms around herself. They were both naked, of course, and neither of them cared — but the gesture made Kestrel look small. She looked cold. She looked vulnerable. “If it’s Cricket …” she said.

The wind shifted again, and the voice was lost. The drumbeat vanished under the pounding in Otter’s ears. “We could swim to shore,” she said. “They can’t cross the water.”

“We can’t leave him,” said Kestrel.

If they had made a dead thing, a horror thing, of beloved Cricket, then they had to unmake it. They did not know how to unmake it. But they had to try.

Otter tried to think like Kestrel, since Kestrel clearly could not think. She tried to be calm, practical. So: They could not confront any kind of dead thing, naked. Nor in wet clothes, not during the last turn of winter. “Those diving stones,” she said. “They make a path.” As she said it, she realized it was true. And what if they were a path: not a thrust of the land, but something human-built? Or if not human, at least
built
. An island, surrounded by stirring water, surrounded by sunshine. It should be the safest place in the world. And yet humans had lived there — and they had
left
.

Otter’s breath was coming fast and faster. But she managed: “Give me your bracelets. Any cord you have. Go and fetch our gear.” It should be possible to carry their clothes and coats, her cords and Kestrel’s staff, in a bundle above the head, above the water, dry. Otter could have done it, but she wanted to stay between Kestrel and the voice that might, at any moment, whisper her name.

Okishae.
That was a word that would carry: a word you could blow through a flute made of bone.

Kestrel’s eyes were round and wet. But she nodded. She handed over her bracelets silently. And she went.

Otter wrapped the extra cord up her arms. If something came at her, out of the forest, the cord would give her a chance: She might be able to cast a loop around it. Sorrow’s knot: Pull it closed. Meanwhile, she cast her own bracelets into the cradle-star. She waded out a little way into the water, for warmth, for safety, to be back in the place where she’d just felt herself strong. Then she turned to watch the dark, ragged forest. It loomed over her. And faintly, faintly, came the drum.

The water lapped ceaselessly around Otter’s waist, and her shadow shifted slowly across the dark-bright surface as she waited for Kestrel to come back. Sometimes she could hear the drum, and sometimes she could not. The voice did not return. Her shoulders began to ache from holding up her cradle-star against the blank face of the island. She let the strings lower. Nothing happened, and nothing happened.

The sun shifted one fist across the sky.

And Kestrel came back.

Together, silently, they pulled on leggings, shrugged into coats, laced up boots.

Together, silently, Kestrel with her staff and Otter with her strings, they went toward the wood.

The island shore rose sharply at first, not high but steep: almost a little cliff. The stones had strange colors, rimed by the mineral breath of the lake. They had a strange smell. They had strange shapes.

Otter and Kestrel found a huge rock that had feathered out from the cliff face and scrambled up the tight, scree-choked gap behind it. They went on all fours through the clicky, stony space. It was not a long climb — Kestrel with her damaged wrist could not have managed a long climb — but it was like climbing into another world.

They reached the top. The ground leveled and the forest began. Boulders of obsidian lay like gleaming eggs under the dark trees. Ferns grew everywhere, green as summer, though away from the lake it was colder. They stopped in that green space, breathing fog, and listened.

When Otter had been waiting in the water, the drum had seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. Now it was — that way. She glanced at Kestrel, who pointed in the same direction with her staff, silently.

The voice came back to them, wavering.

Otter made the ranger’s sign:
Let’s go.

Hurry,
Kestrel signed back. And they ran.

Otter thought that Kestrel ran like a wolf — like something fearless and forest-born. Almost silent through the thick fern. Leaping from stone to ground to stone, leaping over branches, quick as dreaming. Otter was no forest thing. The ferns tore at her leggings. Hidden branches tripped her. The drum and the voice rose like dread to block her throat.

Otter did not want to find out what they had made of Cricket, if it was Cricket. But she thought if she were not with Kestrel then the ranger might simply throw herself into dead arms.
No,
thought Otter. They had to find him.
But let it not be him. Let it not be.

Closer. The drum grew louder, the voice clearer. They could have made out words in it, if they had not been running, if they had stopped to listen.

And then —

Otter almost crashed into Kestrel as the ranger came to a stop.

They were on the edge of a small open space, like a dry pool made of stones. It would have been full of sunlight at midday, but it was not big enough to keep such sunlight long. There was only a crescent rim of light now. The light lay a quarter turn around the meadow from them, perhaps a tree’s height away.

In that fragile, shrinking light stood — someone. A living someone, it seemed to be. Huddled up in a coat that was like folds of shadow, with a drum in one hand, a human woman — no. A boy, a man.

And just in front of him, making the edge of the shadow bulge like a hand lifting wet leather, was —

“Tsha!” shouted Kestrel. “Leave him alone!”

The dead thing spun. Its focus snapped toward Kestrel, its stuff twisting like a snarl. It was coming at them before Otter was even sure what it was.

It came over the ground, fast, fast. It came flattened out like a badger. The substance of it was like the black powder mold that grew on corn. An arm shot out: elbow bent backward from human. But the hand. The hand was perfectly human, and bone white.

Otter had already had her cords in her hands, but she’d had nothing cast. You couldn’t run with something cast: It would be like running with your hands tied. Her breath tore up her throat and her body shook as she moved her fingers: turn, flip, under, loop, under — all in four heartbeats as the thing came at them. Its arm hooked forward and the dead thing rushed at them face-first, hook and side.

Otter was shouting with horror, wordlessly, hardly even knowing she was shouting. She could feel her power burning from her heart to her hands, her heartbeat trying to pound its way out of her ears. Turn and under — and she had her star. She thrust it out at the thing.