Plain Kate (12 page)

A little way into the fog they found a tree stump abandoned in the road. It was oak, big as a shed, and still harnessed to a yoke that stood empty. Plain Kate touched one of the hames: ash wood, old but well-made, its inner curve smooth as a lady’s wrist. It was not the sort of thing people in a poor country left to lie in the middle of the road. Plain Kate edged around the stump—and then she saw something that made her stop. In among the biggest roots was a knot of wood, twice as big as her head. It was a burl.

Burls had twisting grains that made them hard to carve, but made them beautiful. Many a carver had made his masterpiece from just such a burl. Kate had dreamed of it—but had never been able to afford the wood. Burl wood was rare and expensive.

Plain Kate looked down at her hands, stiff and patched with scars, white and pink like the belly of an old fish. In an unknown country, with not so much as a kopek in her pocket, there were better things to carry than ten pounds of wood. And there were easier things to carve, when you weren’t sure if your hands would serve you. Indeed, anything she could have chosen would be easier to carve than an oak burl.

But she took it anyway.

¶

Plain Kate walked down the road with the oak burl under one arm. Crumbs and clots of dirt broke into the folds of her white dress. But there was no one to tut over the damage. The foggy road was beginning to grow strange with its emptiness. The fields, which should have been bustling with harvesters, were empty. The farm huts let no smoke from their chimneys. She met a cow that lowed to be milked and butted at her. Mile after mile, there was no one.

She came finally to a wheat field that was half harvested, rough-shorn as Drina’s hair. It was quiet, thick with starlings that were feasting on the fallen wheat.

Plain Kate was a town girl, but she knew that wheat shouldn’t be left to lie in the fields until poppies came up through it. She walked beside the red flowers, feeling her legs begin to tremble with their weakness. Something was wrong. Something was wrong.

She kept walking. There was a brew-house sour smell of wheat rotting. A wave of starlings startled as she passed, and flew up, twisting over her head like a ribbon of smoke. Taggle craned his neck to follow the flight, but he was staying close to her side, almost like a dog. She didn’t mention that, of course.

She trudged on. Her legs felt like old wineskins: her skin stiff and her muscles sloshing. She teetered a little as she walked, though she tried not to. But there was nowhere to stop. She squinted ahead. There was a place where the wheat was still standing, and beyond that, at the edge of the field, a windrow of birch. When she reached that windrow, she promised herself, she would cut a walking staff and stop to carve it. She locked her eyes on the white trees and tried to keep her feet from dragging. When she got to the windrow, she kept thinking. When she got to the windrow—

But she never reached it.

At the raged shore between the cut and uncut wheat, there was a splash of poppies. Something dark lay in them like a log. She would sit down on that, she thought, staggering, and—

She saw that the log was a body. A half-grown lad with wheat-bright hair lay sprawled there with his scythe stuck in the ground beside him. Kate toppled to her knees.

Taggle sniffed the lad’s face. “He’s alive. He had fish to eat…but…Katerina. I smell the thing. The thing has done this to him.”

Kate took the boy’s limp hand, shook the rough-clad shoulder. The lad didn’t stir, didn’t even sigh in his sleep.
Like Wen,
she thought.
Like Stivo and like Wen.
She shut her eyes and tried to get up, but fell forward instead. She might have passed out. Time stopped, blankly.

When it moved again, Taggle was butting at her hand. She could feel the lump on his skull where the axe had hit him, a gnarled spot under his soft fur. “There are more of them,” he hissed. His fur was on end. “The thing. More sleepers. The thing has been here.”

“The white shadow.” Plain Kate gagged and spit out the sourness in her mouth. “The thing that killed Wen and Stivo.” She looked at the limp, sleeping lad, then yanked the scythe out of the earth, and, leaning on it, staggered to her feet. She stood panting.

Taggle was looking at the sky, a ridge of fur standing up from his spine. Plain Kate looked up too, her skin beginning to goose-bump with a slow-dawning fear. It was dimming toward evening. A fog twined off the river, snaking over the road. It would be night in an hour or two; the fog would come; the white creature would come with it. It had killed Stivo with one touch. She had no defense. “We have to go back,” she said.

So they went back. Exhausted, Kate went stumbling and limping, hauling her burl, leaning on the scythe, until its smooth handle rubbed through her scars. She arrived at Linay’s boat in purple twilight, both hands bloody, stooping like the angel of death.

Linay raised his eyebrows. “That was a long bath.”

Taggle bit him. Kate collapsed at his feet.

“That cat of yours really is something of a bother.” Linay was perched on the edge of the bunk; Kate saw him blurred then silhouetted as she struggled to get her eyes open. She was awake again and confused again. It took her a moment to put the boy in the poppies and the bear cage and the willow pool and the violin bow and the axe in the darkness all together, and in the right order. They swirled around Linay. They were all his fault, and there he was sitting beside her, dressing a wound on his wrist, whistling. “He’s bitten nearly to the bone, look!” He held up one—scratched—finger.

It was day again, and either dawn or sunset. The light at the hatch was soft and birds were singing.

“Sit up, then, fair maid. You should be able to manage that. Though perhaps you ought not strike out on pilgrimage again.” He reached for her hand and pulled her up. Her own hands were bandaged, softly and well, in clean linen.

Linay flexed his hand closed, then mimed his fingers rippling over the violin’s fret. His bitten finger seemed stiff. “It will make a merry mess of my fingering.” He looked at her, smiling but humorless, implacable as snow. “You’re lucky I do not hurt him.”

Plain Kate went cold. She could hear Taggle on the deck, yowling. And Linay sang softly, giving words to the cat’s song:

Oh bats, oh bats, oh snacks with wings—

Come and hear how Taggle sings!

Oh squirm, oh squeak, my wriggly bats—

You’ll make a gift for lady cats!

“I would be sorry to hurt him, Plain Kate. Truly I would.”

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Blood,” he said lightly. Then, as if remembering he’d said that once before, he added, “Yours this time, Kate, my girl. I’ve given most of what I can spare.”

She was sitting in his reach, backed into the corner of the bunk. He was between her and the hatch. It was getting dark. She lifted her chin—and felt her new scars tug. “If you want blood you should have killed me in my sleep.”

Taggle’s yowls faded as he struck out to hunt and make kittens. Linay was still smiling. “But that’s not how magic works, fair maiden. Magic is”—he spread his bony hands grandly—“an exchange of gifts. A shadow for a heart’s wish, for instance.”

Kate narrowed her eyes. “What do you need blood for?”

Linay looked at her. The looking seemed to go deep. “Perhaps I’ll show you,” he said.

¶

They went out onto the deck. It was cool and clear, just past sunset, and the evening star was opening its eye and the crickets were getting louder. They had gone farther into the hill country, where the river split like braided hair around shouldering, wooded islands. Alee of one of these, the boat rocked at anchor.

There was a fog bank not far behind them.

“So,” she said. Linay said nothing. Kate looked around. Taggle was nowhere in sight. She could hear him in the distance, singing his courting song. Bats swarmed in the pale sky, and swallows darted above the river, and she thought of him. Linay sat down on the roof of the cabin. Standing, she was as tall as he was seated on the low roof. She could see the sunburn, pink in the part of his white hair. It made him look almost human.

Looking out toward the gathering fog, he asked, “Have you ever been hungry?”

She shrugged.

“Of course you have,” he muttered. “Of course.”

“What do you want, Linay?” It was the first time she’d said his name. It tasted powerful.

“The dead, you know, are hungry. Those that do not rest. They are hungry all the time and cannot even eat grass.” He was halfway to singing again. He seemed to stop himself. “They have mouths the size of needles’ eyes and stomachs the size of mountains. It is a terrible fate.”

“I know that,” she said. “Everyone knows that.” Though in truth the way he had said it was making her skin prickle.

He stopped talking again. His silence swelled up between them like insect song in the summer night. “My sister,” he said at last, his voice little and broken. He swallowed and tried again. “My sister is one of them. One of the hungry dead.”

“I saw her.” Kate guessed, knew it, all at once, and her hair stood up with the realization. “A white woman. A—”

“Rusalka,” he said, lingering over the bitter taste of the word. “The ghost of a woman drowned. Of a witch wrongly driven into the river. Such creatures are called rusalka. There are not many. True witchcraft is a rare gift, and the
gadje
prefer fire when they kill us.”

He said
gadje
the way Stivo had, and Kate saw that, beneath the way he wore his own witch-white skin like a mask, Linay had the narrow bones, full mouth, and uptilted eyes of a Roamer. A Roamer man, alone.

He stood up. “You have seen her before?”

She nodded.

“You will see her again.” He brushed past her, and stood at the edge of the boat, looking down into the water. Plain Kate turned and looked too. There was a skim of fog wavering there: The edge of the fog bank was catching up to them. “Soon,” said Linay. He unwrapped his bandaged arm; it was covered with long, deep cuts. Plain Kate stared. Suddenly there was a knife in Linay’s other hand. It flashed and Kate jerked away, but the knife was gone, swept back into some hidden pocket in Linay’s swirling coat.

Linay had cut himself. He held out his arm and blood ran down it and dripped off his fingertips. The night was very still, and they could hear the tiny sound of the blood drops falling into the river.

Linay sagged and sat down on the cabin’s roof as if his knees had given way. “She’ll come. Blood calls. She’ll come.”

Kate stood staring down at the fog. It had grown thicker, but the holes created by the blood drops remained, tunneling down.

Linay spoke behind her. “What will you do, Plain Kate? If she touches you, just touches you, you will fall into a gray sleep and never wake. They are calling it the ‘sleeping death.’ There is no way to save yourself.” Still Kate would not turn. The holes in the fog were opening like a mouth. Linay said, “She is coming.”

Kate said nothing.

“I can save you,” he said. “I can stop her. There is a spell, with blood. If you give me blood, I can use it to stop her from killing you. I don’t want her to kill you.”

“You’re lying.”

Linay gave a heartbroken bark of a laugh. “I can’t!” His voice was wild. “It would kill me, even to try. I can’t lie, and I can’t give her more blood, not much. I am taking her up the river, to Lov. A month that is, maybe. I don’t need much blood to do it. A cup a day, perhaps. Two.” Now he was wheedling. His panic frightened her.

He looked past her. His eyes locked on something. He closed them. “Decide.”

Plain Kate turned around. Rising from the well of darkness was the ghost.

¶

Plain Kate had to summon all her will to turn her back on the ghost and face Linay. She could feel the thing behind her. It was like standing by a cave mouth: The stilled breath chilled her neck. Her own breath was tight with terror. But she didn’t turn around. “I want something,” she said.

Linay snorted, almost a laugh. “What?”

“My shadow.”

“I’m not done with it, though.” He really did seem close to laughter, about to boil away in giggling, like the last bit of water in a pot. “And I might as well keep it, because you’ll have no use for it in a minute. They don’t wear shadows, you know, in the land of the dead. It’s just not done.”

Kate ignored this. “I can’t live without it. So I might as well die now. We’ll both die, won’t we? She’ll take us both.”

His gaze flickered for a moment: behind her, up. “Yes.”

“So,” she said. At the edge of her hearing, music: A voice like a cold chimney was singing.

Linay sat still, biting the tip of his tongue, staining his white lips with blood. Then he nodded, sudden and sharp. “Not yet. I will need your shadow. In Lov. But in Lov, I will set it loose.”

Plain Kate stood frozen, caught between threat and hope.

“It’s a promise from a man who cannot lie,” Linay said. “And it’s all you’ll get. Take it now if you want to live.”

Something feather-touched the back of Kate’s neck. She whipped around, drawing her knife. The creature was right there, close behind her as a shadow.

Kate leapt backward, stumbling. The fog bank billowed and the creature made of fog came forward. The music, the empty music, sluiced onto the deck of the boat. Kate felt it around her, in her, welling up and filling her legs. It was an emptiness that was like warmth; a heaviness that was like floating away. Sleep. “Stop!” she gasped, waving the knife. It went through the fog and left no wound. “Linay!”

“Blood,” he said, sounding calm again, amused. She risked a look at him, reaching out with her eyes the way the drowning reach. He just sat, just watched. “Try the wrist.”

Plain Kate tried to gather herself. Knives; she knew knives. She had nicked herself often enough to know how to draw blood. Breathing hard, she thrust the tip of her knife into her wrist, and with a flick opened a little well. Dark blood welled up. She let it run into her cupped hand.

The rusalka swept toward her—like sleep itself, the thing swept: gray, faceless, huge. The figure flickered like layers of ice, and appeared in little pieces: a long hand, a tumble of hair, one egg-blank eye. Then suddenly she had a face. It was narrow and sad and impossibly beautiful. Plain Kate fell to her knees, as if she’d seen an angel.

Kate wanted to curl up on the deck and cover her face, but she didn’t. She lifted her hand, filled with blood. Nonsensically, she remembered the last time she had lifted her hand like this, for Taggle: One day when the Roamers strayed far from the river, she had poured water from a skin into her cupped hand and held it out. As Kate thought this, the rusalka dipped her head, and drank.

Kate felt something like a mouth close over the hole in her wrist. It sucked blood, or more than blood. Bones. Her own name.

Time went by.

Kate was dying. It felt like being changed into sleep and water.

The a blur of gray came like a cannonball through the fog and thumped into her chest.

Plain Kate fell backward. Taggle was standing on her chest, crying “Katerina! Kate! Kate!” His claws prickled through her clothes. Fur stood in a ridge on his back. “Taggle…” She choked on his name. Groggy and sick, she pushed herself up on one elbow. The rusalka—

—the rusalka was kneeling beside Plain Kate on the deck. She was made of fog and shadow until Kate caught her eye, and then, all at once, she became human. She was young, mischievously sad, a fox in a story. Kate fell in love with her. And then she was gone.

It was like waking up from a dream. Kate sat up and Taggle fell from her chest and tangled himself around her sprawling legs, circling and high stepping, purring as a cat will do when badly hurt. “The thing!” he said. “The thing came while I was not here to challenge it!”

Plain Kate twisted around. Linay, as if he hadn’t moved, was sitting cross-legged on the cabin roof. He gave a fluid, careless shrug. He picked up his fiddle. Kate got up and went below.

¶

Plain Kate lay in the narrow bunk and listened to the skirl of Linay’s fiddle, ringing wild and strange across the water. Taggle paced the edge of the bunk, up and down. His small feet pressed into her like blunted chisels. “Stop that,” she said when she couldn’t stand it anymore. “Lie down.”

The cat sprang over her and started to walk the hand’s space between her body and the boat wall instead. The third or fourth time he made the turn by her face she batted at him. “Taggle! Lie down!”

He stopped, facing away from her, his restless tail switching over her face. “I could go kill you something,” he offered.

“Just sit.”

He turned—stepping on her spleen—and sat. “I am sorry,” he said. “I don’t like it. It is a new word,
sorry
. It should not be a thing for cats.”

“I suppose not.”

He lay down and fit his narrow chin into her hand. “But I am sorry. Sorry I was not here to kill the thing for you.”

“It’s not a thing.” Kate was remembering the rusalka’s bright face—fear and flicker of flame in the ghostly eyes. “She must have had a name once.”

“Bah,” said the cat. “She’s dead now. Dead things should stay dead. Otherwise they might scratch you from the inside.”

“Bah,” echoed Kate. The music sighed and rippled. She rubbed her cut wrist, and then crooked her arm around Taggle’s soft warmth. The nights were getting colder.

The cat rolled and shaped his spine to her side. “Sleep,” he said. “I’ll keep watch.”

But Plain Kate lay a long time in the darkness—long after the cat had drifted to sleep—listening to the sad music, and thinking.

Linay was a witch, and a Roamer man alone. His sister was a witch, a woman both burned and drowned. How many could there be? Linay, Kate was sure, was Drina’s uncle, the man who had given a piece of his shadow to summon the dead. The man who had gone mad.