Sorrow’s Knot by Erin Bow Page A

pulled his shirt up a moment. The firelight showed the slickness of the scar between his ribs. “A gast,” he said.
    “In the corn,” said Fawn. “I heard.”
    “The day Tamarack died, Willow came to us,” said Cricket. “She was frightened. She touched the healing cords — she touched me.” He tugged his shirt straight. “It is not a binder’s power, is it, to make knots undo themselves like snake-balls in the spring? That is something gone too far. Something backward.”
    A pause.
    “She cannot dress herself,” said Fawn, very softly. “The brown shirt — the one that laces … ?”
    “With the shells on the collar,” said Otter.
    “It laces across the top of the arms,” said Fawn. “And she cannot lace it. When it touches her, it — the cords — come loose. They move by themselves. Her — her shirt fell off.”
    Otter stared at her.
    “Is she marked?” said Kestrel.
    “Marked?” said Fawn.
    “A handprint — a white handprint. Anywhere on her?”
    Otter felt the knots of Kestrel’s staff pulse in her hand.
    “No,” said Fawn. “I … do not think so.” It was clear she had not looked.
    “She wasn’t,” said Otter. “When she touched Cricket, when she bound Tamarack. She wasn’t then.”
    “It is not a White Hand,” said Fawn.
    “You are from the sunlight,” said Otter. “You have never seen one.”
    “Neither have you,” said Cricket gently. The White Hands, the horror at the heart of all horrors. They were that rare.
    “It is not that,” said Fawn. “It is … an unbinding. It takes all my power to lace that shirt,” said Fawn, spreading her little hands. “And I do have power. I know I do not look it. But I do. To lace her shirt is the barest edge of what I can do, Otter. I cannot go further — and yet Willow goes further, every day. I need your help.”
    Otter looked down at the staff in her hands. “What can I do?”
    “You are a binder,” said Fawn. “I know you are.”
    Otter laughed bitterly. “I’m nothing. Haven’t you heard?”
    The cornmeal had thickened now. They could smell it coming to sweetness, hear it glub. Cricket leaned forward, branch in his hand, and nudged the pot to a cooler part of the fire. Fawn looked at the yellow, stirring stuff.
    “Do you know a story,” said Fawn, “about a rope that rots?”
    All three of them looked up, sharp and silent, like deer when they hear a twig snap. They looked at one another, and then Cricket said: “Will you tell it?”
    “I don’t know it,” said Fawn. “Maybe it is secret? We do not speak much, my master and I. But she begins sometimes to tell this story — or perhaps it is the end of the story. She says that Mad Spider bound her mother too tightly. She says everything is too tight but the rope is rotting.”
    The cornmeal gave a last great glub , like someone drowning.
    A silence tightened, and Fawn said: “She says it will be soon.”

So, winter.
    The summer — the last summer of Otter’s childhood — had been dry. As the winter grew colder the river ran shallower and slower than it should have. Somewhere in the Moon of Wolves, it froze solid.
    The frozen river was a thing to fear. The dead were shy of running water, but they had no fear of ice.
    The Wolf Moon passed and the Hunger Moon grew fat while the slip clotted together in the shadows, and the gast lingered like wolves just under the forest eave, waiting.
    “What do they wait for?” said Cricket, when Kestrel reported it. A storyteller’s question, and a good one.
    “There is something coming,” said Fawn.
    She was often with them. It was like living with a little owl: her watchful eyes, her strange, silent presence. She said she could no longer breathe deep in the binder’s lodge, that the backward powers that surged there made her braids undo themselves. So, often in the evenings, she would bring some of her work, and Otter, no longer shy of her, helped as she could: braiding rawhide, boiling saxifrage to set dyes. Fawn did