Free Sorrow’s Knot by Erin Bow

Cricket, beside her, turn a laugh into a cough, and that made her smile too. She was prepared to like this strange girl.
    Newt, though, looked as sour as one of her medicines. “And what can you do?”
    Fawn paused, then lifted her chin and said: “I am a binder.”
    Otter’s heart lurched.
    A huge silence opened like a pit in front of Fawn. No one could have stood on that edge without teetering a little. Fawn looked down, flushing in the firelight.
    “Well,” said Newt. “In sureness, we need —”
    “Show me,” said Willow.
    Fawn looked up, startled.
    Willow took a step forward. The light caught on the silver disks of her belt, and the disks in her hair shone as if she had a dozen eyes. “Show me,” she said.
    Fawn was done teetering. Looking at Willow, she unwrapped her bracelets. She cast a cradle, then flipped her fingers and made the pattern change: the fourth star, the woman running. Then the pattern that drew up the dead: the tree. When Fawn made the tree into the scaffold, Willow stepped closer still. She slipped her fingers into the yarns beside Fawn’s fingers. She spread the scaffold open so that it became the sky. The two of them stood there, both trembling a little, with the wildest and widest of patterns cast between them.
    “You know that this will kill you,” said Willow.
    Otter could just see Fawn’s eyes, so wide they showed white all around.
    Willow seemed to let the pattern loosen a little, and her voice came more gently: “It is very dangerous, to be a binder. There are other things a girl of knots might do.”
    Thistle spoke: “The binder must have a second.” Otter saw the ranger’s gaze flick toward her. My grandmother, she thought, as she rarely did. My mother’s mother. There was something … soft … in the look Thistle gave her. Grim but sweet, like a mother brushing back the hair of a dying child. “Willow: You must have a second.”
    Standing there, shining with silver, her hands in the knots, Willow seemed to consider. “Your name is Fawn?”
    “It is.”
    “Fawn. Do you want this?” It was almost a whisper. The strings shivered between them.
    “I want this.” Fawn’s voice had come out as a whisper in turn. She shook herself, pulled the sky taut again, and proclaimed: “I want this.”
    Willow yanked her hands out of the pattern, leaving Fawn gasping as the power surged and changed. The girl fumbled to pull the sky back to the scaffold before the slack made the yarns drop free.
    “Well, then,” said Willow, and watched her for a moment: a small girl struggling with a great power.
    Otter thought her mother’s face looked both sane and sad.
    “Welcome, Fawn: daughter of my power, bound to my cord. Fawn, binder of Westmost.”



So. The time of ceremonies passed: the fall fires where cords were joined and pledges made. Otter’s shirt stayed unbelted. It had always been unbelted, but now it felt strange, as if she had lost something. A dream of something.
    What was she going to do?
    Her mother made no announcement, no proclamation that she had rejected her own daughter, but when the time came to tie the new cords, the fact that Otter joined none of them could not be missed. There was whispering. There was outright talk, and some of it to Otter herself. Pokeberry, the midwife, said ridiculously: “She’s just forgotten.” Hart, the silver-worker, said, with black comfort: “That other one won’t last long.” And Newt, the bonesetter, Newt of all people, said gruffly: “In my cord, Otter, you would be welcome.” A kindness.
    The kindness was the hardest thing to take.
    The kindness and the fear.
    Because now that the fall fires had passed, it was time to renew the ward.
    That year, for the first time, it struck Otter how thin the ward was. She had grown up knowing only its power, its knots and its silver disks, a binder’s strength and pride made visible. Now she saw the rest of the truth: The ward was made of rawhide cords, each no thicker than a finger.