In the mountains surrounding the warded village of Westmost, every shadow may hide a dead spirit whose touch blights the living. Otter, daughter of Westmost’s binder, grows up knowing that she too will one day tie down their dead to keep them from walking as White Hands. But her mother Willow grows stranger and stranger, binding her master Tamarack to return and talking of “something wrong with the knots”. The untrained Otter and her friends, Kestrel the ranger and storyteller Cricket, secretly begin to unravel the origins of Westmost’s inflexible traditions.
Sorrow’s Knot contains examples of:
- Alas, Poor Villain: The White Hand that was Mad Spider has been trapped alone and, well, mad on the island of Eyrie since the city was abandoned. The White Hand that was Tamarack seems merely sad.
- Amazon Brigade: Westmost's defence is up to its women, since its men are few and helpless.
- Animal Motifs: Various characters have Meaningful Names: a kestrel is a bird of prey, crickets make noise, the otter is playful, fawns are proverbially innocent, spiders weave traps, orcas are icons of the Pacific Northwest coast.
- Anyone Can Die: Tamarack, Willow, Fawn, Cricket, Otter.
- Appeal to Tradition: Ranger captain Thistle’s approach to problem-solving is “we must keep to our ways.” Little does she know, their ways created their biggest problem, the White Hands, in the first place.
- Birth-Death Juxtaposition:“A death, like a birth, can take awhile. In the binder’s lodge, through the warm night, Otter watched as Tamarack laboured with her death."
- Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": A “pinch” is a warded forest village, a “cord” is a profession.
- Calling the Old Man Out: Kestrel confronts Thistle, the captain of her cord, about Cricket's disappearance.
- Cannot Cross Running Water: Westmost is westmost because it’s almost as far upriver as most people can safely travel. Higher in the mountains, the streams are too small to hold back the dead.
- Childhood Friend Romance: Cricket and Kestrel get married as soon as they come of age. Westmost regards mating for life (like some kind of animal!) as an eccentric thing to do.
- Dark Is Evil: The little dead, and even the White Hands, are a kind of congealed darkness that prefer to hide out in shadows.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: Men – defenseless and can’t do the most important jobs.
- Distressed Dude: Cricket, who as a guy and a mere storyteller is incapable of repelling the dead or surviving in the wilderness, needs repeated rescuing by Otter and Kestrel – from the touch of the gast in their childhood, and from starvation, the White Hand, and the slip after Thistle exiles him. Orca is also a guy and a storyteller, but it turns out he only needs rescuing because he’s held off a White Hand for three days straight.
- Due to the Dead: Westmost binds its dead on treetop scaffolds to keep them from getting up while they decompose. Tamarack, Fawn, and Willow are disposed of this way, but Cricket begs Otter not to bind him, and Kestrel compels her to agree.
- Durable Deathtrap: The remains of the world's first ward, in Eyrie, survive in sheltered places where the cords have not weathered away.
- Empire with a Dark Secret: It turns out that binding the dead is actually really super bad for you.
- Excessive Mourning: Mad Spider created the first White Hand by binding her mother Hare too tightly.
- The Exile: Being cast out of the pinch "to walk into the west under the eyes of the dead" is the worst punishment Westmost can impose, since it’s a death sentence for anyone but a ranger. Thistle throws Cricket to the wolves after he reveals a secret of the storytellers’ cord to Willow.
- Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Zig-zagged. Westmost’s landscape is North American and its technology based on First Nations cultures. But its mythology and matriarchal society are invented. Tropes like Cannot Cross Running Water and Silver Has Mystic Powers are shared with European folklore.
- For Want Of A Nail: It’s icy when Willow goes out to face the White Hand, and she slips.
- Forbidden Zone: More or less the entire Shadowed Lands outside the pinches.
- Forest Ranger: The rangers’ cord venture outside the ward to hunt, gather, and unmake the little dead with their knotted staffs.
- Hero of Another Story: Orca is also out travelling in the wilderness because he lost a parent to a supernatural monster that he failed to deal with. After Otter’s return to Westmost, he decides to go back to the Great Sea coast to fix the problem he ran away from.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Otter allows the White Hand that was Mad Spider to touch her in order to release her without risking Kestrel and Orca. Now turning into a White Hand herself, she returns to the burial grounds of Westmost to release the dead there with her own death.
- Incurable Cough of Death: The touch of the slip deadens flesh, and too many is fatal. Cricket, trapped by the White Hand that was Tamarack, is overwhelmed by the slip.
- Kill the Ones You Love: Willow makes her mother Thistle help her to kill herself when she is becoming a White Hand. Otter makes Kestrel promise to do the same for her.
- Lady Land: As far as the Shadowed People know, the dead can only be bound and unmade with knots. Only women can do this. Most men born in the Shadowed Lands head downriver with pardonable haste.Binding power ran in the female line, and few people untouched by that power cared to live in a place so dead-shadowed.
- Land of One City: The Shadowed Lands had one city, but they lost it.
- Late to the Tragedy: In the ruins of Eyrie, Otter discovers the remains of the first ward and the bones of the people who tried to escape through it.
- Loophole Abuse: Otter has to die so that the White Hand in her and the other dead of Westmost can be unbound at the moment of her death. She doesn’t have to stay dead.
- Master-Apprentice Chain: Tamarack, Willow, Fawn, and Otter in Westmost; as well as Silver, Hare, and Mad Spider in legend.
- Maybe Ever After: Orca loves Otter. Otter’s been busy coming back from the dead, but she’ll consider it.
- Mentor Occupational Hazard: Willow’s master Tamarack is dying peacefully of old age, leaving Willow, who’s already uneasy about “something wrong with the knots”, as Westmost’s only binder. Otter learns haphazardly from Willow’s apprentice Fawn, who is killed trying to unravel Otter’s first ward at the same time that Willow is touched by the White Hand, leaving a few days for Willow to teach Otter to be a binder.
- A Minor Kidroduction: Otter’s talent for binding becomes obvious when she draws a gast out of Cricket in their childhood.
- Never Mess with Granny: Otter’s grandmother Thistle is the most powerful woman in Westmost, the captain of the rangers. She lived outside the ward for years and sends Cricket to his death without batting an eye.
- Rite of Passage: Otter, Kestrel, and Cricket are due to receive the belts that mark them as members of a cord. Willow refuses to take Otter as her apprentice, so Otter remains without adult status.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Apparently no binder ever went back to Eyrie to unmake the White Hand that destroyed it, so it’s still trapped on the island.
- Secret Art: Keeping the professional secrets of one’s cord is Serious Business, a fact which our heroes slightly lose sight of when Cricket and Kestrel get married and move in with the uninitiated Otter. Even when sharing knowledge (like how to find food in the forest, how to build a ward, or where the White Hands come from) is clearly in someone’s interests, the penalty is mutilation and/or death.
- Shadowland: The Shadowed Lands, the mountainous forest where there are lots of shadows and therefore lots of dead lurking in them, versus the Sunlit Lands, the prairies where there aren’t.
- Shining City: Eyrie was the high city of the Shadowed Lands. This proves to be less a matter of architectural grandeur than of ideal natural conditions: running water and geothermic warmth.
- Silver Has Mystic Powers: It’s supposed to repel the slip, or the little dead.
- Small, Secluded World: The Shadowed People of Westmost know three ways of life: the pinches of the Shadowed Lands; the Sunlit People who follow the prairie buffalo; and the Water Walkers who trade between the two on the safety of the River Spearfish. If there are other people in the world, Westmost doesn’t know about it.
- Stars Are Souls: Sufficiently glorious people become constellations when they die. The constellation Mad Spider is Orion.
- The Storyteller: Cricket and his mentor Flea, as well as Orca. It turns out that holding off the White Hands by telling them stories is a defence accessible to men, if only the Shadowed People knew.
- Strong Girl, Smart Guy: Action Girl Kestrel and Non-Action Guy Cricket.
- Sword and Sorcerer: Ranger Kestrel and binder Otter.
- Textile Work Is Feminine: Zig-zagged. Only women have the power to knot the dead with string for some reason. On the other hand, the Shadowed People don’t have cloth, because string is a rare import made from the sheddings of wild buffalo. Otter and Kestrel are amazed by a woven cedar-bark shirt.
- Volcano Lair: The lost city of Eyrie proves to be an island in the centre of a huge caldera warmed by geothermic activity.
- Wall Around the World: Westmost is surrounded by a ward of cords that keeps out the dead (and fries the living like an electric fence.) Most of the inhabitants never go outside it, except for a funeral.
- Wendigo: The people of the Great Sea don’t have White Hands, but sometimes people go into the forest and come out taller and hungry for human flesh. Orca’s father Three Oars was bitten by one of these stretchy cannibals, and Orca was supposed to talk him into the sea, but couldn’t face it.
- Wild Wilderness: West of Westmost the Shadowed Lands are uninhabited mountains and forest.
