Sorrow's Knot Chapter One

Sorrow’s Knot Chapter One: Sunflowers

The girl who remade the world was born in winter.

It was so cold on that day that her mother Willow steamed like a hot spring as she labored. Willow was tall and lean and strong, and not the kind to lie down. For as long as she could she walked round and round the midwife’s lodge, leaning on the earthen walls when pains came fiercely, her hair full of sweat and a cloud around her of mist turning to ice that made her glitter like a comet.

Willow was a binder: a woman with the power of knots. Inside the birth place, as the last binder had taught her, Willow let that power turn backward and undid the knot between herself and her baby, and made an easy birth.

“Ah,” said Willow, as the babe was placed on her belly. “Ah, look! Look at you!” The baby gave a great squall, and started to cry. “Look at you,” said Willow, touching the face. The baby turned toward the touch, rooting for milk. “Just look.”

“A girl,” said the midwife. “A beautiful girl. What will you call her?”

Willow touched the black hair, which was spiked into small peaks with birth stuff and looked like the thick wet pelt of an animal. “Otter,” said Willow. She kissed the closed eyes, and they opened, fathomless. She cupped the baby’s face in her hands and gave the mother’s blessing: “I name you Otter. May you be clever and happy. May you have a fierce bite. May you always be warm.”

She touched the dark hair again, and at the touch of her power - still wild and ungoverned with the wildness of the birth - the straight spikes sprang into curls. The baby gurgled. The midwife frowned.

“May you live with joy,” Willow whispered.

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So Otter was born, and so she came to girlhood, among the free women of the forest, in the embrace of mountains so old they were soft-backed, so dark with pine that they were black in summer. A river came out of those mountains, young and quick, shallow and bone-cold. Where it washed into a low meadow, the people had cleared the birch saplings and scrub pines and built a stronghold of sunlight.

The name of their pinch - a forest town was called a pinch - was Westmost, because it was the western-most human place in the world. If one traveled farther west, upstream, the mountains rose, and the rivers were too small to run in the cold winters, and only the dead lived long.

The dead. Otter grew up almost without fear of them, an honored child, the daughter of a woman of power. Willow was not just the binder of Westmost, she was the greatest binder since the days of the Mad Spider, whose time was sinking from memory to legend. When people came up to Willow they covered their eyes. So Otter grew up as, in another place a young prince might grow, or the acolyte of a great priest. Her shirt was made of the skin of a white deer, embroidered with quills and silver disks. She carried herself tall.

The crown of Willow’s power was the ward. A ring of slender birches encircled Westmost, strung like fence posts with blue cords of braided rawhide, knotted and knitted together, tied here and there with that most precious of things: yarn. The cords dove into the earth to knot unseen roots. They reached three times a woman’s height. The ward thrummed in the wind and cast strange shadows in the sun.

It was a great work, vital and powerful, but to Otter it was just a thing. She was proud of it, yes: it was the greatest work of binder’s power in a hundred years. But it seemed hardly more important than the low wicker-work fence that kept wandering deer from eating the squash blossoms. Until she was twelve she scarcely thought about what it was for.

Otter was then at the beginning of what the Shadowed People called the sunflower years: when girls (and boys, of course) shot into their height, before they were given their medicine pouches and their women’s belts. A sunflower girl would have ordinary work to do: tending gardens and cookpots, hauling wood and water. But she would not yet have given the honor of her life to a particular work: she was not yet a dyer, an arrow maker, a ranger, a binder. A sunflower girl could be anything, and the Shadowed People thought of the sunflower years as an idyll, and blessed.

There came a morning, then, when Otter was meant to be gathering gourds to dry for bowls and spoons, but was instead splashing about in the river with Kestrel and Fawn - not friends, exactly, for they held her in too much awe, but age mates and companions. They were pulling apart the stiff, jointed stems of turkeyfoot grass to make arrows, and with these they played at being rangers. A sunflower girl might grow to be anything, but rangers was what they all played: daring and honored, rangers alone went into the forest itself.

So they shot grass arrows from bows made of whippy braches; they splashed in the river and failed to spear any fish; they lay on their backs in the last summer sun. And then Fawn dared the others to go and touch the ward.

They went. Kestrel and Fawn went together, touching fingers in the manner of friends. Otter went a little apart, watching them. Fawn, who was younger than Otter, was delicate and pretty, clumsy but graceful in her clumsiness like the newborn fawn she was named for. She was giggling at their daring. Kestrel, who was older, was broad-faced and thickset and frank. She was not giggling, and it was hard to imagine her giggling, though she was ready with a slow smile. They could hardly be more different. And yet they were friends, laughing together, while Otter went a little apart.

There was a ranger, green-clad and solemn, staff held ready, guarding the place where the river came through the ward, so the girls cut across the gardens. They wove through the rustling hills of corn, away from the double half-circle of earth lodges that was all the world they knew. The gardens gave out a good pine-height shy of the ward itself. A jumble of pumpkins and gourds emptied into a scrubby meadow: lacey with wild carrot blossom, bright with goldenrod and purple aster. The girls stopped and shied stones at prairie dogs in the pretense of useful occupation. And then they gathered their courage and wandered out to the ward. Kestrel and Fawn went laughing, though their laughs were sharpened with fear, and Otter went silent, aware of her standing.

They stopped, bunched up together like puppies, at the shadow break: a strip of bared earth between the ward and the meadow. Here the ward could be inspected, and here anything that did break through would have to face the sun. On the other side of the ward, the scrub was wilder, dotted with sapling birch and digger pine. The forest edge — the buffalo-calf color of pine trunks and the dark of the gaps between them — was not far away.

“Go on!” Fawn put a hand between Otter’s shoulders, and pushed.

Otter step-stumbled onto the bare earth, and then tripped. She flung out a hand to catch herself on the cords of the ward itself — but jerked back in time, falling hard on her hands and knees.

“Oh!” Fawn screamed — prettily, like a boy. “Binder’s daughter!”

“The binder’s daughter’s clumsy,” huffed Kestrel, but companionably enough. She took Otter under the arm to help her up.

But Otter did not get up. She was nose to nose with the ward: so close that her breath stirred the grass on the other side. And in that stirring….

The grass was a clump of broom, this year’s stems pushing through last year’s broken thatch. That thickness at the bottom made the grass rooted at shadow, and that shadow, a handspan from Otter’s eyes, shifted. And then pulled free from the grass. A piece of shadow, small and damp-soft, a piece of shadow moving on its own, with nothing to cast it. Blind as a mole it nosed forward, seeking her living breath.

And the ward itself responded, the cord tightening, like a web plucked by a spider. Closer, closer, the cord called. Otter found her hand lifting, moving closer.

The ward pulsed, then, moving toward her, moving back toward the frog-blunt shadow - shadows, now, for there were several, and then many: stirring shadows with nothing to stir them.

“Oh,” said Fawn, “oh!”

“Slip,” said Kestrel, naming them.

There were many of the slip now, moving together like a nest of leeches - hungry and silent. They did not even stir the grass. Otter sat up on her haunches: balanced on the balls of her feet with her hands ready in front of her. Fawn had stumbled back a few steps, but Otter could feel Kestrel’s solid presence at her back. “But the ward will hold them…” the girl’s voice shook only a little.

Otter did not answer, but lifted her hands. She wore - they all wore - blessing bracelets woven of Westmost’s most precious thing: yarn. A pierced disk of silver was bound across the back of her left hand. Otter turned the disk now to catch the light. It flashed.

The slip froze.

Even the most powerful of the dead were shy of running water, and the water-bright flash of silver was enough to stun little ones like these. For a heartbeat. Perhaps three. No more.

Beside her Kestrel let her silver flash. Otter fumbled to unwrap the bracelets around her wrists. She wove the long loops, cats-cradle, around her fingers.

They were taught this; they had practiced this - but even Otter, the binder’s daughter, had never done it in the face of the dead. She did it now, raising the cradle-and-star between her friends and the crawling shadows.

At the roots of her fingers, the yarns shifted. They tightened. They tugged. They pulled at her and suddenly she was clench-teethed, trembling, ready to topple forward into the ward, into the shadows, as if pulled by a rope of her own power. Then a hand dropped onto her shoulder, and a strange voice as soft as lichen on rocks said: “Don’t touch the ward.”

Otter risked a glance: it was an old woman’s hand, weathered into bones and strength. “Watch, now, binder’s daughter,” the voice said. “You need to see this. All of you. See this.” A ranger’s staff dipped into Otter’s frozen view, its tip toward the shadows.

And the shadows reacted to the staff; drawn and repulsed in equal measure, moving faster and pulling together.

“Slip,” the woman said. “They are nothing but hunger: no mind, no thought. They smell you and they are hungry. They smell you, Otter.”

At her name Otter glanced round and saw a stranger - in that little pinch, where she knew everyone, a stranger - a grey-haired woman, small but tough as a digger pine. Trembling Fawn and sturdy Kestrel were frozen, as if caught by the old woman’s words, but the woman herself seemed to have eyes only for Otter. She said: “They smell you. You are bleeding power into the air.”

Otter’s hands were still lifted. They were shaking. And something was pouring into the open work of knots between them, something as irreplaceable as blood. “The ward,” she said - and was disgusted to find her voice thick. “My mother’s ward will hold them.”

“A single knot would hold them — or one of them,” said the woman. “But where there is one, there are two. And where there are two, there are four. Where there are four, there are many. And then —” Again, her staff dipped, its tip nearly touching the ward.

And again, the slip reared back - and this time, they moved not as a boil of ants, but like one thing, like a bear with an arrow in it. Slow and bewildered and more powerful for being slow and bewildered.

“A gast,” whispered Kestrel.

“Gast are different,” said the stranger, as the shadow-thing shifted back, swaying. “Gast can wait. Gast can watch. They can find the weakest cords of a ward. They can find a rabbit burrow that goes clean under it. They can remember which door you enter. They can, in short, hunt.”

“Kill it,” squeaked Fawn. “Please, please, kill it.”

“A moment.” The woman watched the gast ease its way backward, toward the darker shadows of the forest. Its retreat suddenly seemed threatening. The woman lifted her staff and said: “Now.”

Otter barely registered the ranger in the forest shadows, an archer in green. An arrow came flying. It struck the creature and went through as if through mud and buried itself in the earth at Otter’s feet: she saw its collar of blessing knots and quail feathers. The gast reared tall and thin and twisted - and then it toppled forward into the ward. The ward pounced. Knots slipped and cords stretched. It folded around gast like a net. And in the net, the creature came apart — its size peeled from it as skin slips from something long dead— its pieces pierced its surface like bones. It was a clump and another clump - it was flailing fists of shadow - it was gone.

“Well,” said the woman. “Willow’s knots have always been a little wild. I remember when you were born: she did that to your hair.” Otter’s hair was curly: she was the only person she knew with curly hair. The woman squeezed her shoulder, companionable. “Would you like, now, to touch the ward?”

The ward was pulsing, in and out, as if it were breathing slowly. “No,” Otter whispered.

“No,” said the woman. “And yet I think you should.” From behind, she took Otter’s wrist, and then pushed her hand - both their hands - into the blue tangle of cords.

The ward thrummed and the knots seemed to pounce like spiders. Otter’s hand was suddenly tangled in yarn. The knots flexed open like tiny mouths and bit. Otter shouted with pain and then the pain was gone and the knots were like leeches, working their way to the soft places between her fingers, drawing power from her. It went rushing out and left her feeling as if she had stood up too fast. She felt sleepy, she felt stupid.

“Otter!” Kestrel shouted at the stranger: “Let her go!”

The woman pulled Otter’s hands out of the ward. She let go of Otter’s shoulder and Otter as if released from a spell leapt to her feet. “Go then,” said the woman. “Go, all of you. And do not come near the ward again.”

So they went, dashing and stumbling through the pumpkins, thrashing through the corn, looking back. They never spoke of the woman, or of the dead they had seen. And it was years before any of them went near the ward again.