“Handy,” said Cricket, and sighed. There was, just there at the very edge of their world, a big slab of granite, smooth as a shell, that slanted lazily down to the water. Cricket sprawled on his back on the sun-warmed stone, and Otter and Kestrel sat on either side of him. Strings of shadow danced over them, and they talked the sun down the sky.
It was the last of their sunflower summers: They stood on the edge. As soon as that fall’s great fire — or the next year, or the next — they would be taken into the cords. They would be given a belt — a woman’s belt, an adult’s. They would learn secrets. And then the silences between them, the warm and easy silences, would fill and change. Otter’s heart wrung, just for a moment, thinking of that, even while chickadees still flitted overhead.
Cricket, meanwhile, was holding his arrowhead up against the bright sky. He kept pinching it between two fingers and closing the fingers to tuck the little object into his palm. The third time the arrowhead dropped and went skittering down the slope of granite, Otter sighed at him. “Cricket, you know that I love you, so trust me in this: That’s hopeless.”
“It’s part of my work,” said Cricket, which was true: Many storytellers used sleights of hand and other small magics to knot a gasp or a laugh into a well-known tale.
Kestrel picked up the arrowhead and handed it back to the sprawling boy. “That doesn’t mean you’re not bad at it.”
“Do you think so?” Cricket grinned up at her. He turned his hand over and opened it. There was an arrowhead there already. He closed his hand again, flipped it, righted it, opened it, and there were two arrowheads. He closed his hand a third time, and when he opened it there were three. “Keep near me, Kestrel,” he said, still looking into her eyes. “I’ll show you wonders.”
And Kestrel — unexpectedly — blushed from her hem to her hair.
Cricket dropped his eyes from hers, as if out of kindness. One by one he made the arrowheads vanish. “I will be a storyteller,” he said. By the measure of their people, he should not have said it. The status of a cord should be given, not claimed. But Cricket walked always at the edge of the forbidden. Being a boy, but not a weak one, he could hardly help it. “I will be a storyteller,” he said again. He looked up at Otter and took one step further: “And you?”
Otter had the blood of a binder; she had never wanted anything else. The work of binding the dead was terrifying and dangerous and difficult — but it was her work, and her heart claimed it fiercely.
And yet …
That day in the corn had changed things. Otter had power now — she had power the way a puppy has feet. It came too early. It was too big for her. It made her conspicuous, and clumsy. It marked her out. After she saved Cricket, the people of Westmost watched her carefully. A child who could cast a scaffold? A sunflower girl who could lift and hold the dead? It was extraordinary. Behind her back they whispered: “Here is a girl who will save us.” And: “Here is a binder born.”
But Willow watched Otter practice her loops and casts with a new and cold gleam in her eye.
For years, Otter had helped her mother and Tamarack with the simplest parts of their work. She’d been very small when Tamarack had first pulled her into her lap and showed her how to use a drop spindle to whirl the buffalo hair into yarn. She remembered laughing as she learned it — the little spinning top was harder than it looked. Once, it flew off and hit Willow on her dignified nose. Tamarack had laughed and Otter had laughed, and Willow had made a show of outrage, like a bluejay, before dissolving into laughter too. As Otter’s hands had grown bigger and stronger, she’d spent long winter days braiding rawhide into cord. The binder’s lodge was always warmed by a good fire, well-lit with pine-resin glims, cozy with the coiled cords and knives of the binder’s trade. The three of them often sang, and when they were silent, the silence was well-lit and rich as amber. It had been Otter’s whole life. She’d been warm and safe inside it.
But since that day in the corn, Willow’s gaze had turned sharp and the silence was first ice: thin and brittle. Otter felt uneasy under that gaze, that silence. Uneasy, and even ashamed. What had she done?
“I will be a binder,” she said, to the silence, to Cricket’s question, to the world. It felt like defiance. But she said it again: “I will be a binder.”
The words hung there. The air was warm and the sun came in long slants. Cricket reached out for her. His hand was empty now, and it seemed to hold light and time. “Otter, you will be a legend,” he said. “There will be stars for you.”
When Cricket said it, it sounded true. Otter looked down at him, for a moment caught in wonder. Then he grinned and pulled the arrowhead from her ear.
“Will you go this year?” she asked him. Another breach. She was sure they had each thought about the day Cricket would leave Westmost, but they had never spoken of it.
But Cricket surprised her. “I’m not going,” he said.
Otter saw Kestrel grow very still. She turned. The two girls looked at Cricket.
“Why should I go?” said Cricket. “Westmost is my home as much as yours. My mother was born here, my mother’s mother.”