Plain Kate (13 page)

The next day, Plain Kate looked for it and saw it: the hole in Linay’s shadow.

He was poling the punt. The light threw his long shadow across the deck. In the center of that shadow, over his heart, was a patch that fluttered like a hurt bird. The sun broke through it, once in a while, in coins of light.

Kate watched that roiling patch. Under her, the boat surged, coasted, and slowed; surged, coasted, and slowed. The fog bank was still behind them, the watery sunrise turning the top of it pink and yellow. She was remembering the story of how he had used blood and hair to pull apart his shadow. To give a voice to the ghost of his sister.

“What was her name?” Kate asked. “Your sister. The rusalka. What was her name?”

The boat rocked a little when Linay fumbled the pole, but his eerie-pale face stayed smooth. “She’s dead,” he answered at length. “We do not say the names of the dead.”

“I know. Drina told me.”

That drew a sudden, startled look. “Drina.” He stilled himself again. “Well, well. How a life comes round. I knew as I followed you that you were with the Roamers, but I—”

“You followed me?” It was Kate’s turn for shock.

“To draw your shadow. Did you think its remnants were to be sent to me by the royal messenger? The loss of a shadow, as I told you, is a slow thing. I had to be close, to catch yours as it pulled away.” He shrugged. “There is only one road; there is only one river. It was not hard to follow you.”

Why should she feel betrayed? But she did. His words stirred up the sticky panic of her long loss, her heavy secret, her shadow twisting away from her. She turned from him. His shadow fell past her, and hers was nowhere, gone.

“Why?” she said. “Why did you do this to me?”

She saw his shadow shrug. “I needed a shadow. Yours was the easiest to get.”

Plain Kate looked down at her burnt hands, the light going right through them. She said nothing. Time passed. Then Linay was suddenly, silently, at her shoulder. She shuddered away from him, but he reached out and took her wrists. He lifted them, oblivious to her cold resistance. “These are healing well.”

“Let me go.” She jerked her hands fruitlessly.

“Some salve, first.” He released her and produced, from the billows of his zupan, a stoppered jar. He rubbed some of the chilling, oily stuff into her scars. The mint-sharp smell washed over her. Linay’s head was bent over her hands. “Lenore,” he said softly. “My sister’s name was Lenore. She was a healer. She taught me this. I will see you carve again.”

She could think of nothing to say. Linay stayed bent over her hands, singing softly. Kate remembered what Drina had said: that all magic depended on a gift, freely given, and that healers gave some of their own life for the health of those they healed. Linay rocked as he sang, as if he were praying or exhausted. He sang himself slowly into silence. He let go of her hands but did not lift his head. His voice was low. “What does your cat call you?”

“Katerina.”

“Katerina. I am sorry.” Even if he had not been a witch, bound to the truth by his own power, she would have been sure that he meant it.

But that night as the fog rolled around the punt, he again summoned the rusalka. He again sat and watched as Kate filled her hand—her hand that he had just worked to heal—with her own blood. And he let the rusalka nurse on her blood until Kate found herself sliding into grayness, trying to hold on to the memory that Linay was dangerous, that he did not love her, and that she must not forgive him.

¶

Plain Kate slept deep into the next day. When she woke, the first things she saw were cat eyes. Taggle was sitting on her chest glaring as only cats can. “You let the thing come for you again,” he said. “If you die I am going to be furious with you.”

Her head felt muzzy. “Where were you?”

The cat abruptly decided to groom his shoulder. “He gave me fish,” came the fur-muffled voice. “I went to sleep.”

“He poisoned you?”

“I will not take food from him again,” Taggle intoned. “Please know that this is a great sacrifice. But clearly I must guard you, Katerina.” He looked at her sidelong. “You are thinking of giving it more blood.”

“I think…” she said, and stopped to think. The little cabin was stuffy and rocking; it made her drowsy. She lay watching the herbs and bundles above her slowly sway. “I think I have to,” she said. “He will give me my shadow back at Lov. I can’t live without my shadow.”

“I do not trust him.”

“He can’t lie.”

“So he says.” Taggle’s tail lashed. “Katerina, your shadow will do you no good if the thing kills you.”

“It won’t,” said Linay, and Kate jumped. He had slipped down the ladder without them noticing.

Taggle did not deign to flinch, but his ears flicked back. “It will. I have made many things bleed; I know blood. Katerina, you cannot feed the thing again. It
will
kill you.”

“Well,” said Linay. “There is a trick to it.”

“Faf!” Taggle spat. “You are full of tricks! It is late for tricks! You weaken her; you muddle her!”

Linay ignored this. “Come ashore. I’ll show you.”

Kate wanted only to sleep. The heat lulled; her head pounded. But after a while she got up and climbed the ladder. She found the punt pulled up at the river’s edge where some long-ago flood had left a tangled heap of dead trees. She had waited too long: Linay had gone off on one of his foraging missions and left them alone.

Sitting in the bleached and bony wood, with the sun streaming through her, Plain Kate sat and tried to carve. The knife that had once been like another hand to her now sat stiffly on top of the new scars. Her fingers had lost their sureness and strength. But still, she turned the burl wood she’d found in the road over and over under her knife, cutting away its weak-rotted places, looking for the shape in its heart. It was rough work, the only kind her hands could do.

The burl slowly took a shape like something with wings. She thought of two hands pressed wrist to wrist, with palms and fingers spread. Bound hands.

Taggle sat primly on a deadfall branch and glared at her until she gave up on carving and placated him by catching a fish. She cooked; they ate. Time passed quietly.

“When you were with the Roamers,” said Linay’s voice behind her, sudden and soft as a ghost, “did she come?”

Plain Kate refused to jump again. She nodded without looking at him. Yes, the rusalka had come. And the Roamers—the people who had been almost her family—had blamed Kate.

“Who?” said Linay.

Plain Kate didn’t see why she ought to answer. Let him wonder. But then he said: “Not Drina…?”

Drina. Her first friend, her—the word startled her as it came into her head—her sister. “No,” she said. “Not Drina. Wen. Stivo.”

“Ah,” he said, voice flat. And he sat down across from her and speared the fish’s head.

“Can they be saved?” Kate asked. “The sleepers—could I have saved them?”

Linay shrugged. “If the rusalka was roused from her half sleep, the sleepers might awaken too. I don’t know and I don’t much care.” He flipped up the gill flap with a thumbnail and picked out the morsel of meat behind it.

“We want to see this trick of yours,” said Taggle.

“Hmmm,” hummed Linay. “Come closer.”

Plain Kate hesitated, and shifted her foot to be sure of the knife in her boot. She did it subtly, but he saw it. “Oh, honestly.” He nudged her toe with his. “I saved your life. I’m hardly about to hurt you. Hold out your hands.” He mimed it, making a bowl of his own long hands and lifting it.

She looked at him narrowly. In the sun, the burn scar pulled across her scalp. She cupped and raised her hands.

“I haven’t always been a stealer of shadows, you know,” he said. “I was a weather worker, once—and welcome anywhere, welcome as a summer rain. And I still know the moods of wind and water.” He leaned over her, fitting his own hands against the underside of hers, his long fingers lapping her wrists. “You can’t expect a ghost to lick up spilled blood like a—”

“—dog,” supplied Taggle. The cat had stood up and was watching them, fur on end.

“She will take blood only from a body. But what is a body? Just a bowl for life. A bowl of breath.” And he blew a long breath into the cup of her hands. It was warm at first, and slowly it grew cold.

Kate eased her hands open. Inside them—taking their shape—was a bowl of ice. It was small as a bird’s nest, woven like that, and shining in the sun. She lifted it into the light. Delicate feathers of frost furred its edges.

“You see,” he said, smiling. “It hasn’t always been ugly.”

Then he stood up, fast, like a man insulted. “It’s a bowl. You fill it with blood and she won’t know the difference between this and a body. Thus I control her bottomless appetites. Notice that you can’t do it without me.” He turned his back on her and swung up the skillet as if it were a sword. “Kick out the fire and come aboard,” he said. “I want some distance yet today.”

But when she lifted herself over the edge of the boat he was in the hold below, and he didn’t come up at once. She thought she heard him weeping.

¶

So they went along. The country grew lower, and the weather cooler. Kate’s hands healed slowly. Linay grew stronger, and Plain Kate learned why he had been weak.

Every evening she let her blood fill the bowl of ice that lined Linay’s hands. They were big hands, narrow but long-fingered. It caught up with her like sickness, the blood-letting. The first day she didn’t feel different. But on the second the sun made her drowsy. On the third she found herself nodding over her carving. By the fifth a sort of heaviness came over her, and made her knife shake. She sheathed it and asked, “How far to Lov?”

Linay shrugged. The old fluidness was back in his joints; he no longer moved as if his jumping-jack strings had stiffened. “Two weeks? Three? It’s not my country.” He set the pole to the river bottom, pushed them ahead, and added: “But we’re coming to it,
mira
. I can taste it, like ashes. Lov, at last.”

His voice made her scars ache. She ducked her head and took up the wood again.

Days passed. Linay brought back from his wanderings leather leggings and a farm boy’s smock, and she folded the long linen dress away, gladly. The next day he gave her a roll of hand tools: a rasp, a chisel, three kinds of gouges, an awl, and a carving knife. Kate, whose old knife was as much a part of her as her name, put the new knife away, but she used the other tools gratefully.

“No cat would do this,” said Taggle. “Fight.”

“I am fighting,” she answered. But slowly it stopped being true.

She tried to stop herself from feeling the surge of tenderness that came to her when he worked to heal her hands: the liquid song that had once set her father’s smashed fingers, the crooked sunburned part of Linay’s white hair as he bent his fair head.
He is dangerous,
she told herself.
He does not love me. I do not trust him. I am only going to Lov to get back my shadow.

He does not love me. I do not belong here.

Adrift in a green barge on the tea-colored, slow-flowing Narwe, Plain Kate carved and bled.

She sat on the pole man’s seat, knife in hand, drowsy in the sun. The burl wood wings were almost finished, full of long, strange twists of wood grain, less like feathers now than like long hair spread in water. They had an uneasy beauty. But the lump between the wings would not show her its face. She had cut away the rough and rotten wood and found a smooth knot, like an acorn. Was it a sharp chin and a high forehead? An owl’s beak and flaring ears? Its blank curve told her nothing. She sat with her knife above it and did not know what to do. If the thing was a mirror, then her heart was blank.

She tried to summon up her father’s voice:
Be brave. Trust the wood. Lift your knife.

Kate touched the knife to the smooth curve, took a shallow stroke. The blade hit a knot and shot from her hand, skittering across the deck. Kate stood and fetched the knife. She thought about throwing the carving into the river, and maybe following it in.

Taggle was leaning out from the prow like a figurehead, his whiskers quivering close to the water. Kate glanced: Catfish stirred in the willow roots, slowly working their white mouths. Taggle was staring at them, cross-eyed with desire.

“I’m going to lie down,” she told him.

“Fish, fissssshhh,” he answered.

She eased down the ladder into the warm dim hold—and saw Linay.

He was kneeling beside the bunk. On top of the quilts was the box made from the ruins of her father’s stall. Linay had one hand stretched above it, and blood was dripping from one fingertip, into the box.

“Don’t come closer,” he said.

She came closer.

From a few steps away she could see inside the box. It was empty, but it held darkness as a bowl might hold water. The clotting shadow inside seemed to bubble around the blood, like fish after bread crumbs.

She stopped coming closer.

And Linay closed the lid.

“My shadow,” Kate whispered.

“All things need to eat.” Linay shrugged and lifted his pricked finger to his mouth, sucking away the blood. “Tears are better than blood, but some days one just can’t weep. And the shadow must be fed or it will wither to ribs and eyeholes—useless.”

“Useless,” she said softly, “for what? Why do you need it?”

“To raise the dead and spread the fire.” He answered her as if sunk into his own dreams. Then he roused and looked daggers at her. “You’re sharp, Plain Kate. Be careful, or you’ll find yourself cut. If you love your life, do not open that box.”

And he stalked out.

Plain Kate stood looking at the closed box. She put her hand on the carved hart and let its antlers prick the tight new skin on her palm. It was her father’s carving; it was as familiar to her as her own breath. Did something stir? Behind the thin wood, as if behind the surface of a mirror, did something press its hand to hers?

Her heart gave a little lurch as if at a hero’s hurt in a story. “Yes,” something answered her. “Mine.”

Tears, Linay had said. If she wept, would it come to her? She could almost have wept, wounded by the new hope.

¶

The next day, when Linay went foraging in the abandoned country, Kate climbed back aboard the barge. She went below and sat on the edge of the bunk, looking at the box. Taggle climbed into her lap. “Hello,” he said, then rolled over and peered up at her appealingly. “I am fond of you and present my throat for scratching.”

“Taggle,” said Kate. She knitted her fingers through his fur. “I… ”

There’s this itchy spot, you see,” he said. “Just over the left jawbone. Oooooo, yes, therrrrre…” His voice trailed away into a purr.

As you love your life,
Linay had said. But she had to see. If there was any chance of getting her shadow back—“I have to try.”

“Oooo, you’re succeeding.” Taggle’s claws bared and velveted as he kneaded at the air. “You’re talented, I’ve always said so. Ooooooo…”

“We’re not talking about you.”

The cat’s inner eyelids had been sliding closed. He lifted one, lizardlike. “We’re not? Why not?”

“It’s my shadow, Taggle. The thing in that box is my shadow.”

Taggle’s eyes opened. They looked uncattishly wise. “And how long have you known that?”

“Since yesterday,” she said. “You thought—”

“I thought you might have known longer, yes. I thought you might have known and yet done nothing. You have not been yourself. You have given yourself too much to that man.” He tipped his head at her. “A dog, you know—her master may beat her and she will still be glad to see him. Open the door of her cage and she might still faithfully wait.”

“I’m not a dog,” she said hotly.

He arched his whiskers into a cat grin and rubbed his brow bone against her cheek. “I should say not.” He growled with fierce joy. “Is it dangerous, this box?”

If you love your life…

“Yes,” she answered.

“Then I will stand by you,” he said.

So Kate stood up.

The box sat in its shadowy corner. She nudged it with her foot. It scraped over the deck. She’d thought it would either lean into her like an animal or stand heavy like a lead casket. But it was just a box. She picked it up and set it on the bunk. In the bunched blankets it looked bigger than it should have. It had butt joints, the simplest of joints, but even so they weren’t square. Just a badly made little box.

Taggle sniffed at it, squinted, and backed away. “Bitter.” He snorted to clear his sensitive nose.

Kate lifted the lid.

The box was empty, but around them, the air was slowly tightening. The emptiness began to rise in the box, sitting up on its blind haunches and sniffing at the air.

Kate’s heart reached for it, and her heart followed. “Easy—” said Taggle. The shadow nosed and licked at her fingers, put its not-breath on her scarred palms. She pulled away and it whined after her.

And then it was out—her shadow.

It flowed over her—it joined her hand and foot—it rushed cold across her skin—it dove into her nose and ears. Wherever it touched her, she went numb—the kind of numbness that comes after a blow. It was between her fingers, inside her smock, inside her mouth. She spun away but it followed her, whirling around her like a dancer.

“Katerina!” Taggle spun with her, circling fast, swiping at the clinging almost-stuff.

“Tag—” Kate choked. It was in her. She felt heavier and lighter, buzzing, dizzy. But as she reeled into the light from the hatch she saw it: the Kate-shaped thing flying across the floor, across the wall, a shadow, her shadow!

Yes,
said the presence, as it pushed against her.
Mine. Us.

Kate stopped and stood panting. She lifted a hand and watched the shadow’s hand-thing lift. It slid up the wall. It grew long claws. Kate stood frozen, one hand uplifted. “Is it—”

“Breaking!” Taggle shouted. One of the long fingers flew off. Another. And suddenly the shadow hand came apart into whirling knots. Kate gasped, clutched at her own hand, and crashed to her knees. “Katerina!” Taggle cried.

Kate squeezed her wrist as hard as a tourniquet; her shadow was in a dozen pieces, her hand felt alien as a flock of birds. Across the floorboards, her shadow slumped as she did. She could see its edges tattering and lifting away. “The light,” she gasped. “The light is breaking it!”

They don’t wear them in the land of the dead,
Linay’s voice came back to her. The dead had no shadows. If you had no shadow, were you dead? It felt like death—a breaking apart that was well past any pain.

Something streaked down past her ear and thumped onto the deck: Taggle. He’d gone above and she hadn’t even noticed. “I tried—close the hatch. Block the light,” he panted. “Can’t. Latched. Can’t—Kate! Kate!” She had toppled sideways and lay there in pieces. Taggle seized her by the scruff of her neck and tried to drag her like a kitten, out of the light.

“The box,” she managed. “Close the box.”

He was gone, endlessly. And then back. “The shadow-thing won’t go in,” he said. She could hardly hear him; his words and the whole world was breaking into whirling birds. “What do I do?” A sudden point of pain brought her back. Taggle was biting her hand. “Kate! What do I do?”

“…tears…” It was just a shadow of a thought.

“I can’t!” he wauled. “I’m a cat! I can’t cry! Katerina!”

And then he was gone, or she was. She was alone and broken like the moon in high branches.

And then slowly, like waking from a dream about waking from a dream, she was back. She was sprawled on the deck with no shadow beside her. On the bunk, the box was crookedly closed. Taggle was pushing at her with his nose, his fur standing out in all directions. His eyes were bright with tears. He had put her shadow back in its box.

“More,” she whispered, raising a shadowless hand to touch him. “You’re more than a cat.”

“Bah,” he said, though he was still weeping. “Who would want to be?”

She closed her eyes again. The light from the hatch was blinding, and the rock of the barge huge and sickening. She felt Taggle lean into her. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, but before she could answer, she dropped into a stunned sleep.

¶

Sun. She had been damp so long, and the sun felt so good. Waking, Plain Kate lay still and let it wash over her.

Then she remembered and flailed up. A white hand on her chest pushed her back. Linay was leaning over her, smiling. “Had another adventure, did we?”

“Let me
up
,” she snapped, swatting his hand away. She pushed herself to sitting. She was not in the hold anymore, but on a mat of moss and willow branches by the campfire. She shuddered to think of him scooping her up and carrying her ashore.

Taggle was beside her, stretched limp on his side. “Taggle!” Kate was terrified for him.

“Oh, honestly,” sulked Linay. “I’ve only sent him to sleep. He was my gift to you, Kate, when you gave me your shadow. Do you really think, after so much distance and so much darkness, I would break that exchange?” He drew a thumb between Taggle’s ears. “Wake, cat.”

The cat woke spitting and hissing and leapt at Linay. The magician lifted his hands and sang. The cat seemed to hit a spiderweb midair. He dropped, and pushed again toward Linay, but couldn’t reach him. Plain Kate was just glad to see that Linay already had cat scratches across his nose and neck: evidence that getting her out of the boat had not gone smoothly.

“We
really
don’t like you,” the cat growled.

“And I really don’t blame you,” Linay said, sighing. “But you must listen to me. You cannot steal your shadow back, Plain Kate. If you set it loose without my help, it will kill you. I am not sure, indeed, how you survived this time.”

She wished she had Taggle’s claws, to swipe him. “Leave me alone, Linay.”

He sat transfixed—hurt, she thought. Then he stood. “We will rest here the day,” he said, his back to her, tending the fire. “And I will bleed tonight. But tomorrow we must again travel.” He walked off into the willow trees and out of sight.

¶

Plain Kate slept, and woke feeling stronger, and warmer for Taggle’s chin fitting neatly in her hand. Still, the sun was slipping away. Upriver, she could see a wall of weather: fog and cloud. A cold draft was blowing it toward them; she could smell its dampness. She sighed: more rain. “It’s as if it’s following us,” she muttered, ruffling Taggle’s fur.

“We draw it. Like a bear on a chain.” Kate sat up and Taggle sprang to his feet. Across the fire, Linay was sitting on a stone, skinning a rabbit. “I’m a weather witch remember? The moods of wind and water.” He thrust a sharpened stick through the rabbit like a man who knew swords. “That fog is hungry.”

“You,” said Kate. “You made the fog and the rain. All of it. Through the whole country.”

There was horror in her voice, but Linay bowed modestly as if it had been awe. “It is no small work, I admit. I’d be ashamed to tell you the dark things I’ve done for such power. Your shadow is only the latest—and almost the last. I have been preparing this journey for years.”

“But—” She couldn’t begin to tell him what she was thinking. He’d made the fog and rain, the crops failing in the wet, the damp fear she’d seen growing like a mold in the Toila market. Even Taggle’s ears were edging back as it sank in.

But then, Taggle was still a cat. “I’ve been
wet
,” he snarled. “My paws were damp for
months
.”

Linay shrugged one marionette shoulder. “The fog is the rusalka’s home. She needs it as a frog needs water. It is half her skin. Even the blood-spell would not bring her without this fog.” And he sang:

Foggy little oxbows

Forest pools where no one goes

Lost links of the river dreaming dreams

“Without me she’d be trapped in some lonely place where the fog never lifts. With me, she can travel. All the way to Lov.”

Plain Kate pictured it. The wall of fog was creeping up the river, just faster than a man could walk. In it, the rusalka. Anyone she found, she would take—take like Stivo, take like Wen. This was the dark story they were telling in Toila. By now it was a horror. The countryside was emptying in front of it like a forest emptying in front of a fire.

And she had been helping him. Giving him blood for the drawing spell. For weeks. Kate shook—and turned sideways and was sick.

Linay raised an eyebrow and propped the impaled rabbit up over the fire.

Plain Kate felt gray and cold. Waiting for the Roamers to burn her had been no worse than this. “Why?” she said. “Why are you taking her to Lov?”

“Oh,” he sang. “I have reasons. I have plans and schemes.” He ripped a leg from the roasting rabbit and threw it, bloody, to Taggle—who leapt back. “Come and eat your dinner.”

¶

Plain Kate carved. She carved to keep from shaking. She carved to think.

“Are you all right, Katerina?” Taggle peered into her shattered face. When she didn’t answer he shook his head—actually shook it, side to side, a human “no.”

The gesture struck Kate and made her sad. It looked wrong; it looked right. It made what he was visible: not a cat, not human, something new. “Oh, Taggle,” she said. What was he? What was she? What had Linay made them?