Plain Kate (7 page)

Drina shrugged. “Daj looks after me.” But of course it was true. Behjet had told her that Stivo’s wife had been burned as a witch—Stivo’s wife and Drina’s mother were the same person. And that made Stivo Drina’s father. And Daj her…grandmother? Once again Plain Kate gave up on trying to sort out who among the Roamers was related to whom. It did not seem important to them. They were all family,
mira
, clan.

Stivo, ahead, had turned. “Come along,
gadje
!”

A family she was not part of. At least not in Stivo’s eyes. Plain Kate gave Drina’s arm a quick squeeze, then hurried after Stivo and his axe.

Around the abandoned hut, the wood was thick. Blackberry brambles hid under the skirts of the trees, growing across a forgotten wall of loose stones. Stivo was sitting on a big rock, eating blackberries.

Plain Kate looked around. “It’s a bit drier, anyway,” she offered. The thick trees were keeping off some of the drizzle.”

“This rain’s a curse. The horses are all chewing their feet and stinking with the thrush. Go through the whole herd, if this wet won’t stop.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault, is it. Unless you can work the weather.” Stivo got up. “Off with you then. Find your different wood.”

It was dark beneath the big trees, and the brambles gave way fast to ferns. Plain Kate moved into them slowly. They rubbed around her waist, dripping and rustling. She heard something big moving behind her and shot a look over her shoulder. Stivo was following her, though not close. They went on without speaking.

Finally she found the right tree. A toppled walnut. Bolt struck, half-scorched, a year dead. It would be dense-grained and dry; it would take a knife. “This one,” she said. As she said it the drizzle broke again, and suddenly the fallen tree was struck by a finger of light. Plain Kate was startled for a moment, then saw that of course the tree’s fall had left a hole in the forest’s ceiling, just enough for the light to slant through. It struck her too, and for a moment she could see how what was left of her shadow spun around her like ripples of water.

She stepped back out of the light and nearly knocked into Stivo. “I’ve noticed,” he said, and her heart lurched. “I’ve noticed you spend a good deal of time with my daughter.”

Plain Kate said nothing.

“I can smell the trouble on you, Plain Kate,” he said, swinging the axe. “See that you do not bring it on my Drina. She is all I have left. Do you hear that? I will not see her lost because of some little girl they call ‘witch.’ ”

She turned to face him. “I’m not a little girl. I am Plain Kate Carver. I have lived by my own wits for many years. I am better than any apprentice, and good as many a master. And I am not a witch.”

Then she stopped. She was very aware of the blue star cloth tied at the nape of her neck, and the complex braids underneath.
Don’t let my father see,
Drina had said. These were the eyes she’d been afraid of. “I am not a witch,” she said, trying to sound sure.

“You had best not be,” he answered. And he threw the axe, past her ear. It struck neat and deep into the split heart of the tree.

¶

The Roamers kept walking and Plain Kate kept carving. The wild country sloped down and the trees thinned out. The Roamers’
vardo
came back out into the river valley, where Daj said they were less than a week from Toila. The rolling hills were crested with trees, but the valleys cradled scattered farms. It was strange to see buildings after so long, and Plain Kate felt uneasy. There were so many who might see her sickly shadow.

The braids Drina had put in her hair tugged at her scalp. She could feel the river pulling at her shadow, or her shadow pulling her toward the river. It felt like waking from a nightmare and drifting to sleep again, knowing it is still there, waiting, just under sleep’s thin surface—something grasping and hungry.

So she slept thinly, drowsing over her knife and making strange things while half awake. She was doing that in the twilight, leaning against a stump in someone’s fallow field, when she came to herself and found Drina by her side.

“I don’t want your help,” Plain Kate blurted.

Drina reacted as if struck, jerking back. Plain Kate, still waking, reached after her. “No, wait, Drina—I only mean…” She put down her knife and scrubbed at her eyes. “Your father said—”

“My father—” Drina began, fiercely, angrily—but just then Ciri came toddling up to them. He was the young prince of the Roamers, a boy of two, the favorite of the dozen naked and cheerful children who chased chickens and snuck rides on horses in Roamers’ camps. Just now he had Taggle in a headlock.

“Help,” croaked the cat.

Drina shed her anger and pulled boy and cat into her lap. “Ciri, Ciri,” she said, and dropped into the Roamer language, a liquid coaxing in which Plain Kate caught only the word
cat
. Ciri unfolded his elbows, and Taggle spilled out, bug-eyed.

Plain Kate picked him up and scratched his ruff. “Thank you for not killing him.” By this time she knew how to flatter a cat: praise of ferocity and civility both.

Taggle preened. “He’s a kitten.” He arranged his dignity around him with a few carefully placed licks. “Else I would have laid such a crosshatch of scratches on him he’d have scales like a fish.”

“Cat!” burbled Ciri, reaching.

Taggle allowed himself to be patted roughly and then grabbed by the ear, but flicked Ciri a yellow look. “I do have my limits.”

“Talk!” chirped Ciri. “Cat talk cat.”

Kate glanced at Drina, who answered, “It will be just a story. He’s always telling stories. Don’t worry, Plain Kate.” She staggered up with Ciri in her arms. “A few more days, Plain Kate. There’s a place near Toila where we always stop. We’ll have our own tent there. Darkness and quiet.” She swung the little boy up pig-a-back. “Come,
mira
, let’s find your
dajena
.” She looked round at Kate one more time. “Don’t be frightened.”

But Kate was frightened.
All great magic requires a great gift… He made a rope of hair and soaked it in his own blood…
 And what Linay had said:
Blood draws things. It would be foolish to draw your own shadow to you.

“Blood,” she said.

“Sausages, I think,” said Taggle, sniffing. “Get me one, would you?” But he climbed into Kate’s lap and let her bury her nose in his soft fur and wiry muscle.

¶

A few days shy of Toila, the hills spread into a broad lowland. Oak and fir gave way to willow and alder, and then to fields and gardens. Under the glares of the farmers and herders, the Roamers went carefully, the five
vardo
staying in a line like beads on a string. But the next day the mood grew merrier. “We will stop tonight with Pan Oksar,” Drina explained. “He’s
gadje
, but a friend to us. He keeps horses.” She was almost skipping. “We’ll stay with him.”

There’s a place near Toila where we always stop,
Drina had said. This would be that place. A spell of blood and hair. “How long—” Plain Kate began.

“Long enough to let the mud set on the wheels,” said Daj, from the back step of the creaking, lumbering
vardo
.

“A week or so, and then it’s a few more days to Toila.”

“Can we—” Drina began, but Daj cut her off.

“Yes,
mira
, you two can share a bender tent, if you like.”

Drina’s face lit up. She gave Kate’s arm a quick squeeze, and the blue star scarf that hid the spell-braids a significant glance. But then two little boys herding geese started to jeer the Roamers and toss rocks at the horses, and in the hubbub the two girls got pulled apart. They had no chance to speak before reaching the red-painted gates of Pan Oksar’s farm.

To Kate, Pan Oksar’s farm seemed impossibly prosperous, almost a small town. There were separate houses for animals and people, an orchard and a garden, a house just for the hens. Through the green spaces wandered horses. Round everything was a hedge of red roses tall as a building, thick as a city wall. The Roamers came through the gate singing, and the people of the household all tumbled out to meet them.

They spoke a language Kate did not know, and their dress was strange to her. “No one likes them, because their ways are different,” Drina explained. “Just like the Roamers—no one likes us either. So we have to like each other.”

The Roamers stopped the
vardo
just inside the hedge, with arching roses brushing the canvas roofs. And, for the first time since Plain Kate had joined them, they started pitching tents: one per married couple, one for the bachelor Behjet and the widowed Stivo, one for Daj and the smallest children—and one for the “maidens,” as Behjet called them: Drina and Kate.

“What of me?” groused Daj’s husband, Wen. “I don’t want to sleep with all these squirming puppies!” Plain Kate remembered seeing Daj and Wen hold hands and kiss in the shadows between the men’s fire and the women’s, and guessed the true source of his disappointment. He was still casting glances at Daj when Behjet and Stivo took him in.

Plain Kate was not much impressed with bender tents. They were made with just a few willow saplings stripped into poles, then bent and thrust into the ground at both ends. A sheet of canvas went round the poles, and some rope secured the whole thing—though not very well. They were muggy and mud-floored. Plain Kate, who had slept for years in a drawer, would have preferred to sleep in the
vardo
. But Drina spread her arms to touch both walls, as if she’d been given a palace.

“With my mother’s people, I stayed in the maidens’ tent. But here there are no other maidens—everyone’s married. So they made me mind the little ones.” She set about stacking a small fire in the middle of the space. “I am glad you’ve come, Plain Kate.”

Kate found her throat tightening. She wanted to answer—
I am glad too
—but it suddenly seemed an impossibly hard thing to say. “Is this the place?” she asked. “To do the spell?”

Drina sobered—mostly. A delighted smile was still teasing around the edges of her face, like tendrils of hair curling out from under a scarf. “While we have walls, yes. So that no one stops us.”

The way she said it made Kate wonder if perhaps someone should.

¶

But of course no one did. They had stopped, Plain Kate learned, to breed the horses, a project that required both laughter and serious talk, and took everyone’s attention. There was human business too: trading of news and goods, songs and stories. Pan Oksar’s farm was a bustling, happy place, even in the mud and endless rain. So it was that when Drina lit the fire in the center of their tent, turning the walls golden and the little space cozy with flickering light, for the first time that Plain Kate could remember, they were quite alone, and likely to stay that way.

Drina leaned forward, nursing the newborn flames with twigs and splinters. Smoke and flares of light swirled across her dark face.

The same light rippled through Kate and she felt herself waver like water. She put a hand in Taggle’s warm, solid fur. “So,” said the cat. “You’re cooking something?”

Plain Kate said nothing. There was an ache around her eyes because she had been holding them wide open. “I saw my mother do this,” Drina explained. She seemed embarrassed, tentative. “There was a woman who had lost her memory. My mother bound it back to her with a rope of hair. She bound it with the hair and she called it back with—”

Drina stopped. A silence hung, in which the wet wood popped up and sputtered.

“Blood,” said Kate.

Drina nodded.

“And fire?” she asked.

“Fire,” said Drina. “You gather up the spell slowly, you see,” she said, and Kate could hear the ghost of Drina’s mother’s voice as the Roamer girl repeated something she had not herself thought through. “As a tree gathers the sun. But to loose it all at once—fire is one of the best ways.”

“It really seems a pity not to cook something,” said Taggle, who saw only one use for fire.

“Later.” Plain Kate put a hand on his back. “Drina, are you sure—” she began, but then saw how the quickening fire was throwing Drina’s and Taggle’s shadows sharply against the wall of the tent. Her own shadow was spread out over the glowing canvas in writhing swirls, thin as smoke at midday. She closed her eyes and felt the light go through her like arrows.

“…be afraid,” Drina was saying, when Kate heard again. “It’s only a few drops.”

Plain Kate took a deep breath. “What do we do first?”

“Cut the braids off,” said Drina. “Can I use your knife?”

Kate handed her knife over and undid the scarf with the blue stars. She could not help stiffening as Drina came toward her with the knife raised, drawing back as Drina’s shadow fell across her face. The braids smarted and tugged at her temples as Drina sawed at them with the knife. Finally they came free: The two cut braids were coiled up in Drina’s palm like a pair of young snakes.

“Just let me—” said Drina, leaning toward her again, knife trembling in her hand. Plain Kate winced, but before she even understood what was happening, Drina had cut her on the top of her ear.

Plain Kate gasped and clamped her hand over the little wound. “Sorry, sorry!” Drina tugged Kate’s hand away and put her own hand in its place. “But it’s one of the best places to get blood—lots from a little wound, and you can cover the scars.”

Warm blood trickled behind Kate’s ear and down her neck. “It’s all right,” she said. She could feel the silky ropes of her own cut hair against her skin. When Drina pulled them away, the braids glistened here and there where the blood had wetted them.

Kate fingered the wound. Truly it was only a nick; she could hardly feel it. “Now what?”

Drina was shaking, but she flashed a grin. “Now this.” She threw the ropes of hair into the fire.

The stink of burnt hair instantly filled the tent. The silence got tight, like the top of a drum. Taggle’s fur rose into a thick ridge down his spine. And then Drina started to sing.

It was a low, mumbling, murmuring song, a song a river might sing. Plain Kate couldn’t tell if it didn’t have words or if she didn’t know the language. It was mournful as an old memory, and it made Kate remember—suddenly and so clearly she could smell it—the moment her father had died. He had called her name, but his eyes were already seeing the shadowless country, and she didn’t know—she would never know—if he was calling for her, or her mother.