Otter's hair had come undone again.
She lay in a nest of dust and scrap yarn under the loom, knotting curls with long fingers and watching the shifting coloured threads above her. The copper bracelet on the weaver's wrist flashed and the shuttled flew like a bird across clouds. Coloured dust sprinkled down on her. Through the clacketing of the loom she could hear Master Cricket's raspy voice, but the words of the weaving lesson she was supposed to be taking were lost.
But it didn't matter. She would never be a weaver – no one would trust Willow's daughter with yarns – and no knot known could keep her hair bound for long.
The sparrow-brown curls were fuzzing their way free, capping her skinny height like a blown dandelion. "You look like a squirrel’s nest in a lodgepole pine," her mother had told her, back when her mother spoke to her. "With a binder’s blood, you should make better braids." And she had jerked the comb through the tangled hair.
