Plain Kate (6 page)

Mira,
she thought, and treasured it each time she heard it.
They must keep me. Family.

The
vardo
inched down the road, deep in the wild country. Plain Kate had always known that Samilae was a little town, a long way from anywhere. But she hadn’t known what it would be like to walk for weeks and see no one, to follow a road through a wood that seemed as large as the story of the sea. Inside its dripping tunnel of branches, the road was sloppy, and her boots had to be greased every night against rot. She oiled her tools too, but rust still dappled them.

At night the fog was thick and full of lights, and sometimes voices.

¶

One night the river fog came up so thick that the
vardo
seemed like islands in it, like boats. Plain Kate sat on the steps of the red
vardo
where she slept with Drina and Daj, carving with Taggle curled over her toes.

The fog was so thick that she couldn’t see the ground. It billowed, and when Drina came walking up, it rippled in her wake. Drina swung up beside Kate and settled in. Taggle cracked an eye open, stood, stretched as if for a long journey, then took the two steps over to Drina’s feet and flopped down over them instead.

“Faithless,” Kate scolded, nudging him with her toe. He leaned his cheek on her foot and rubbed her toe with the corner of his mouth, purring.

Drina reached down and scratched Taggle between his ears. “I wish I had a cat. Before my mother died I had a raven.”

As Drina said it, Kate suddenly remembered seeing it. She had been whittling a top at her father’s feet. The wood she was working had been light birch; it had been that week in springtime when winged maple seeds stuck up between the cobbles; she had been watching Roamers put on a show for coin. How many years ago had that been? She had been careless and cat-less and happy. The show had lifted her spirits: a man playing a fiddle, another man juggling, and a girl—a little younger than Kate—who had a raven on her shoulder, and tumbled.

“I saw!” Plain Kate said to Drina. “You and the raven. And—” Yes, she remembered now: Her father had broken two fingers when a chisel slipped, and Kate had thought it was the end of the world. One of the Roamers was a young woman, who had sad eyes but a quick smile. She re-broke the fingers and set them, singing all the time, a strange, liquid tune.

“That’s worth true silver,” her father said, wincing and holding his hand up, sweat beading on his face like resin coming out of pine when it is very hot. “You sang the pain right under.”

The woman laughed. “And that’s why you’re more pale than me, I suppose.” Kate remembered that she had been a witch-white, like Linay: her hair and skin the color of sunned linen. Before she began her work she’d plaited two rings for Piotr Carver, strange braided things of weeping willow and her own white hair. “I’ll take copper,” the woman said, “and thank you to spread no tales.”

The woman called the girl to her and the raven came flying—and that was the end of Kate’s memory.

“I saw you,” Kate told Drina. “You came to Samilae before my father died, before the
skara rok
. You had a raven, and you tumbled for coin.”

“I went everywhere.” Drina leaned forward. Taggle half rolled over and allowed her to rub the wishbone hollow under his chin. “I went everywhere with my mother’s clan. We tumbled, and sang, and told the bones and the stars.” She leaned farther forward, touching noses with the cat. “When my mother died, my father took me and came here. This is his clan.” Her hair swung around her and Kate couldn’t see her face. “No one asked me.”

“There was a woman,” said Kate hesitantly, caught by the memory but cautious. “A healer woman, a witch-white…”

Drina’s head flicked up, her loose hair flying. “That was my mother! You knew her?”

“I—” Kate began, but just then Taggle, who was no longer getting petted, rumbled, “Oh, please, don’t stop.”

Drina leapt to her feet. Her skirts swirled and tangled and she stumbled and tumbled to the ground. Fog billowed up around her. “Did he—” she gasped. “Did the cat—?”

“Did he what?” the cat drawled.

“Talk,” gulped Drina.

“Drina…” Plain Kate shivered and her skin burned. She was ready to beg but not sure what to beg for, or how to begin. “Drina, if you tell—if people find out—”

“They’ll kill you.” Drina looked white-eyed as a frightened rabbit, ready to bolt.

It was so quiet for a moment that Plain Kate could hear the flame in the lantern behind her beating its wings. “You know,” said Taggle, “you were just reaching that itchy spot over the jaw.”

“Taggle,” hissed Kate. Then suddenly words came spilling out of her. “Drina,
mira
Drina, please, I’m not a witch, there was a man, and he was a witch, he made me give him my shadow—he’s the one who made Taggle talk.”

“You’re under a curse,” said Drina. “He cursed you.”

Plain Kate hadn’t thought of it that way, but she nodded. Her throat had almost closed and her skull felt as if it might break through her skin.

“I’ll—” Drina’s voice broke; she swallowed. “I’ll help you break it.”

Plain Kate stared at her. “You will?”

“My mother—” Drina looked down at her hands, rubbing her thumb against the place on the step corner where the red paint had worn away. “My mother was a witch. I have her power, I think, and I was learning when she—she was going to teach me. But they killed her.”

“They—” said Kate.

“In this city, Lov. It was in the
skara rok
, the witch’s fever. They were burning witches. They found out she had power and—”

Kate remembered thinking that she knew more about witch-hunting than Drina did. She had been wrong. “They burned her,” she said, so that Drina didn’t have to.

“Yes. No.” Drina sat down and Kate could feel the trembling that came off of her, like water fluttering in a breeze. “They took her. They hurt her until she told them—I don’t know. That she had brought the fever, I think. And then they—they burned her. They tried to burn her. But she had power, real power. She broke free and she ran. She was burning. She threw herself into the river and she drowned.”

“Drina…” said Kate, but could not go on.

“So I’ll help you,” Drina said. “I have power and I want to help you.”

Kate closed her eyes. “Help me,” she said.

¶

Late, in the warm darkness of the
vardo
, Drina and Plain Kate lay whispering. The rain tapped on the canvas roof, and Daj snored a few feet away. Taggle was stretched out between the girls, belly up, one ear under each chin, rumbling in bliss. Plain Kate told Drina about the swarm of fish, the stink of the smokehouse, the axe in the dark. About why she had traded her shadow for a handful of fishhooks.

About the man who had done it, who had pulled her shadow from her like the shell from a shrimp, she said little. In that country, people said that if you spoke of demons, demons came. Linay. Kate didn’t want to say his name.

“Your shadow,” whispered Drina. “But—I’ve seen you. I know it’s always raining, but—I’ve seen you. Are you sure you’ve lost your shadow?”

“He said it would be slow.” Saying it that way made it sound awful, like a slow death. She tried to back away from that. “I’m sure, anyway. I can feel it…like a sack with a hole in it. Spilling.”

“Bleeding?” offered Taggle. “Like when you bite something small around the belly. They leak.”

Kate did not feel much helped by this expert observation. “What will happen to me, Drina? Did your mother teach you—?”

Drina was silent a while. Then she said, “When my mother died—after she died, my uncle—” Behind them, Daj snorted and shifted in her sleep. The two girls tensed, then eased as the snoring started again. Drina continued, her voice the softest of whispers.

“My uncle was a witch too. They were twins, my mother and he, and they were always together; it was like they had one heart between them. I remember, we were camped outside the walls of Lov, by the river. When my mother died, I mean. And he found her, her body, floating there against the water gate. All—all burnt and hurt, he said. They wouldn’t let me see her.

“My father screamed and screamed. But my uncle got so quiet. There’s something wrong, he said, he kept saying, something is wrong with her. And my father hit him. He said of course there’s something wrong, she’s dead! But my uncle—he didn’t want her buried. And when we did bury her, he lay flat on her grave and he wouldn’t eat and he wouldn’t talk.

“And finally he said—she’s not here. She’s not resting, she’s not here. Father threatened to kill him if he didn’t shut up, but he wouldn’t. He said: Don’t bother, I’m going to kill myself. And he was a witch, you know, so it was true. Everything he said was true, one way or another.”

“And—did he?” asked Plain Kate. “Did he kill himself?”

“No. He took his shadow—that’s why I’m telling you this. He made a rope out of his own hair—he cut it all off and made it into a rope. And he soaked it in blood, his blood. And he waited until morning and he made a noose out of that rope, and he threw it down on top of his shadow, on top of the shadow’s heart. And—I saw this, it was real—the shadow got a hole in it, like he had a hole right through him and the sun was shining through. This little piece of shadow came loose, got solid, like a bird. And he picked it up and held it in his hand.

“And then he called her, my mother. He used her name. That was—we never speak the names of the dead. But he called her and he said: ‘Come and tell me where you are!’ ”

Drina’s breath, as she echoed her uncle’s cry, stirred Kate’s hair. Daj shifted again, and both girls froze in silence, listening, as if it had been them who had just summoned the dead.

“She was in the shadowless country,” said Plain Kate. “The land of the dead.”

“But she—something—something came.”

A gust of wind blew branches against the
vardo
; they scraped like fingernails. Even the cat was silent now.

“He put the shadow on her tongue,” said Drina. “And she spoke. I didn’t hear. He wouldn’t tell me what she said.”

There was a long pause. The canvas roof of the
vardo
shone faint as the dark of the moon, and that was the only light. “My uncle summoned my mother’s spirit with just a piece of his own shadow,” said Drina. “A shadow gives a ghost life, I think. Power. With a whole shadow—I think a strong witch could raise the dead.”

“That must be why…” Kate trailed off.

“Why your shadow was taken. But what it means to be without a shadow…I do not know.”

¶

The two girls whispered together deep into the night, slept close together with Taggle between them, then got up and stirred the fires, caught the chickens, and hauled the water. And from that day on they walked side by side.

Plain Kate tried to learn the rules of magic, which were stranger and harder than the rules of living among the Roamers. In truth Drina was not a good teacher. She only half knew things herself, and remembering tore her between the joy of her mother’s memory and the fear of her mother’s fate.

So Kate learned only a little.
Magic is an exchange of gifts
: That was the first rule. Thus, Drina’s nameless uncle had given up a piece of his shadow to give speech to the dead. And thus, Linay had had to make payment in magic for Kate’s shadow. Thus, the talking cat.

“A bargain,” said the cat, “at any price.”

All great magic requires a great gift. But even small magics asked something, Drina said. And so a witch would put little parts of hetself into a spell—hair, say, or tears.

“Blood,” said Taggle. “It’s always blood.”

Plain Kate narrowed her eyes at him. “What do you know about magic?”

“I,” he intoned, wrapping his tail over his paws and sitting up regally, “am a talking cat.”

“He’s right,” said Drina. “Blood’s the most powerful. Blood and breath. You shape the magic with breath—you sing it. That is why witches can’t lie, my mother said. Power flows along your words. Lying turns that power against you. It’s a real thing. It can kill you.”

“So your uncle…” A question had been growing in Kate’s mind for days, growing as her shadow thinned and twisted. “Did he die? He said he’d kill himself. Did he die, without his shadow?”

“He—” Drina paused. “He went mad. Eventually—the clan spoke death to him. They cast him out. He went alone.”

“But what happened to him?”

“You don’t understand,” said Drina. “We spoke death to him. He died to us. His name was closed. He went alone.”

It was a Roamer thing, but Plain Kate understood it better than Drina thought. Toila was coming. In Toila they would test her, and after that she might well be cast out. When they stopped next, Taggle snuggled his head up under her chin and purred while she clung to him. “Not alone,” he rumbled. “Not alone.”

¶

The
vardo
inched on, farther into the wild country. One evening they camped near a charcoal burner’s hut, deep in the woods. It was abandoned: The woodpiles were covered with bird droppings, the black doorway drifted with last year’s leaves. Plain Kate didn’t like the place, but it did mean she and Drina had little work to do—there was a well for water, and wood for burning.

Kate was almost out of cured wood for carving. She rummaged through the woodpile until her arms were smeared with black rot and her face was sticky with spiderwebs. She did not hear Drina behind her. When her shoulder was touched she jumped and knocked her head hard on a branch that stuck out from the pile. She sat down, feeling sick. Taggle sprang down and pressed his nose to hers as she leaned over and tried to get her breath.

“I’m sorry!” Drina crouched over her. “Are you hurt?”

Taggle’s amber eyes shone inches from her face. “Would you like me to claw her for you?”

Kate put a hand to her head; her hair was damp, but with rain, not blood: There was no warmth. “Not hurt,” she said. She fuzzled the cat between the ears. “No clawing.”

“I only wanted to say—let me braid your hair.” The way she said it made it sound like something dangerous. It took Plain Kate a few moments to remember the story Drina had told about her uncle carving out the heart of his own shadow:
He made a rope of his hair and soaked it in blood…

Plain Kate felt her throat tighten. “Are you sure?”

Drina took a moment in answering. She sat down beside Plain Kate in the wet moss. “I saw you,
mira
. Yesterday, when the sun broke over the river for a moment. Your shadow—it was like a river flowing away from you. Too long. Thin like a needle. And it pointed toward the river.
Toward
the sun.”

Oak and beech trees brooded over them, muttering in the rain. Plain Kate looked down at her knotted hands. They looked strange: The space inside her fingers held no shadow, only more washed-out gray air. It was as if they were not real.

“We must do something,” said Drina, “and it must be soon.”

Plain Kate turned to look at Drina, and then beyond her, to where the charcoal-burning sheds stood like hives of shadow. “Thank you,” she murmured. “Even if we can’t—thank you.”

“Now! None of that!” Drina stood up, shaking her skirts clean and suddenly sounding like Daj. “You’re not going to die, you know!”

So Plain Kate got up, and followed Drina into the red
vardo
, where the younger girl perched on the bunk and brushed Kate’s hair, and then plaited it. She was singing as she did it, something tuneless, her breath warm on Kate’s scalp. Kate promised herself that no matter what happened, she wouldn’t forget this: having her snarly hair brushed slowly smooth, feeling the warm fingers on her scalp and then the shifts and tugs as Drina made up the braid.

Taggle, all the while, insisted he should be next when it came to fussing over fur.

When they were done, Plain Kate had a small braid, the width of a finger, dangling over each ear. Drina tucked them up on the crown of her head and covered them with one of her own scarves: a bright bit of blue rag with a pattern of stars. She arranged it over the tips of Kate’s ears and tied it at the nape of her neck. “There. Now you look like a Roamer.”

“Not especially,” said Taggle.

They both ignored him.

“Let it dry there,” said Drina. “Keep it covered. Don’t let my father see.”

Then she turned to chase the cat with the comb, threatening to braid his tail. The pair of them romped off, leaving Kate standing very still under the rain-hissing canvas. She could feel her shadow lifting and twisting away.

¶

When they were breaking the morning camp, Plain Kate went to Daj to explain that she was out of wood.

Daj looked around at the trees, the charcoal burner’s woodpile. She said nothing, eloquently.

Kate winced. “Cured wood, I mean. Green wood—living wood—shrinks when it dries. If you carve green wood your work will crack.”

So Daj rumbled and bumbled, and took Kate off to the men’s fire, where she found Stivo hunched up over tea while the other men oiled harnesses and tack. She dragged him up by the ear.

“Take this little one into the forest,” she ordered. “She needs wood.”

Stivo looked around. “She’s knee-deep in wood.”

“Different wood,” said Daj. “Show manners and mind your mother.”

So Stivo got up, hoisted the camp hatchet, and slouched off, leaving Kate trotting after him.

“You don’t need to come,” she said, once they were away from the others. “I’ve looked after myself a long time.”

“You go the Roamer way,” he answered. “We do not go alone.”

“And there are wolves,” piped Drina, appearing with a pail half full of blackberries.

“Aye, a few.” Stivo swung the hatchet idly, the way Drina swung her pail. “And so you’ll stay in the camp,
cheya
.”

“Plain Kate is going.”

“She needs the wood,” Stivo said. “For some reason the wood we have is not good enough.”

Plain Kate thought of explaining, but stayed silent.

“Daj said I could go,” said Drina.

“And I say you can’t, daughter. Be off.”

Drina slinked to a stop. Plain Kate hung back with her and Stivo strode on toward the woods, still swinging his axe. “
Stivo
is your father?” She had never had anything but gentleness from her own father, and found the idea of Stivo being a father unimaginable.