Sorrow’s Knot by Erin Bow

Otter’s eyes.
    The day they’d bound Tamarack, Cricket had tucked his chin and risked his life for Otter, to tell her the story of Hare the White Hand, and Mad Spider before she went mad. He’d blushed as if shamed; he’d panted as if terrified, but he’d done it.
    And now: “Show me these knots,” Otter said.
    And Kestrel did.
    From that night on, Otter did the forbidden work, and if Kestrel’s staff was stronger than it should have been — if it had so much power that it was more like a sky full of stars than a spring rain — no one noticed. The rangers were hard-pressed, and for all their stoic silences, they were frightened.
    Still, they kept Otter’s work secret. It was a serious business, a deep wrong, that she should know the secrets of another cord — of any cord. It was so wrong and so strange that they did not know exactly what would happen to them. There were tales — the storyteller with her tongue ripped out, the fletcher who lost three fingers. Punishments for giving away the secrets of the cord. If they were found out … But how might they be found out? Their lodge was quiet, and the curtain never lifted unexpectedly.
    Until, one night, it did.
    Cricket was making a porridge and Kestrel was drowsing. Otter had Kestrel’s staff planted between her feet, and yarns wrapped around both hands. The curtain moved.
    Otter jerked, power running down her fingers and up her arms — and there was no way to lay such power down quickly.
    The curtain stirred aside, and in came Fawn.
    She stopped with her back to the curtain and looked at them. Kestrel sat up. Otter had managed to wrap the yarns around her wrists like bracelets, though one cord still tangled the staff, even as she tried to set it aside.
    Fawn shook her head. “Don’t. I have seen already.”
    Around Otter’s wrists the yarns itched as if they were crawling with insects.
    They all stared at one another. It was Cricket who spoke: “What now, then?”
    “It does not matter to me,” Fawn said. “Let those who can knot tie knots. That is the way of the prairie.”
    It should have been a fear lifting — and yet Otter flashed with anger. “We’re not on the prairie,” she said. “You came here. We are the Shadowed People, and you came here.”
    Fawn paused. She was dressed in the manner of the Shadowed People now — a shirt and leggings, not a dress; her face unpainted. But her hair was still coiled around her head, almost as if it were short as a child’s. The ends of the braids quivered like wolf ears above her eyes. She still looked strange. Her voice was soft and child-high: “Need we be enemies, Otter?”
    They had never given each other their names — but, of course, in a place so small, they knew them. As Otter knew Fawn, the binder’s apprentice, so Fawn would know Otter, the binder’s rejected daughter.
    There were three drumbeats of silence.
    “We need not,” said Cricket firmly. “Come to the fire, Fawn, binder of Westmost. We welcome you.”
    So Fawn came in. She perched daintily on the bench by the fire. Otter, defiant, pulled Kestrel’s staff into her lap. The little binder watched the cornmeal bubble for a few moments, and then said: “I come to seek your help.”
    “With what?” said Otter.
    “The binder,” said Fawn, as if the word were difficult. “Your mother, my master. Our binder. Something is wrong.”
    “So they say …” said Cricket.
    “But they haven’t seen,” said Fawn. “Her power is …”
    She fell silent, and they were silent with her. Cricket leaned forward to stir the cornmeal. He sat back and said: “Here is what you’ve seen: Her power turns backward. It pulls too hard, and breaks its travois. It turns too fast, and it entangles her.”
    Fawn blinked at him.
    Cricket tilted his head. “It does not take a binder to see it.”
    “No one else sees it,” said Fawn.
    “The day the last binder died, I was still wrapped in healing cords,” he said.
    Fawn looked blank, and so he