Sorrow's Knot by Erin Bow

Author:Erin Bow
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Scholastic
Published: 2013-10-30T22:00:00+00:00

It was louder under the trees: The branches rustled and murmured above as if talking to one another. Otter had lived all her life in sight of this forest, but she had not stood in it before, not in a trackless place, not alone, not like this. The thick light shifted and coiled as the high branches moved. The trees spoke. And the dead: Otter’s bracelets stirred and twisted.

Otter pulled the yarns free and cast a cradle-star between her fingers: a knot to detect and repel. The loops burrowed like leeches toward the soft places between her fingers. The crossed strings pulsed and tugged. But there was no direction to that tug. It was as if something was … everywhere.

She lifted the cradle-star as if it were a torch.

There was nothing near enough to see.

But the pulsing strings, her prickling skin, told her differently. If the cradle had been a torch, it would have cast a circle of light. And right outside that circle, the cords told her, there would be something watching.

Kestrel had stooped. There were footprints again: places where the needles had slipped under a foot, making little curls of bare earth. Kestrel’s eyes were on the ground, but her staff was lifted. They crept forward. The needles gave way under their feet too. The darkness rose up out of the earth and began to swallow them.

But before it did, before it quite did, they found him.

First it was a stick, and then two. And then, as the track cut upward toward a huge nest of boulders, each twice a woman’s height, Otter found a bundle of fallen sticks. Fallen pine branches, all aligned, but sliding over one another. Firewood. Dropped firewood. She met Kestrel’s eyes. Raised her cradle-star, so that the ranger could see how the strings were pulsing.

Kestrel ran her hand down the knots of her staff, making the little silver charms wink in the last of the light. She nodded. They edged forward.

The trees surged and roared in a gust of wind, and then suddenly dropped into utter quiet.

And in that quiet, something drifted to them from behind the gray stones. A voice. Warm and weak, beloved and afraid. “Now,” it was saying, “even Red Fox had to sleep sometime.”

Kestrel hefted her staff and sprang around the flank of the standing stone, and Otter lifted her casting and charged after.

Cricket was sitting on the slope above them, his back to a boulder, his head in a streak of twilight, his legs so deep in shadow they could hardly be seen.

Not just sitting, Otter thought: He looked as if he’d been thrown there, like a jointed doll. His head was leaning back, his braids splayed over the stone, glossy hair catching on the rough places.

He heaved a huge breath when he saw them, and his voice jerked. “Hello,” he said, and swallowed once, twice, three times, “I was just telling it a story.”

The strings on Otter’s fingers jerked sideways. She whipped around. Standing beside her was the White Hand.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.