Plain Kate (18 page)

Linay’s face had a blank, soft-mouthed look, like a man in a dream. One hand was tied to the stone pillar. The other held a jagged fragment of sword blade. Blood dripped off the blade tip and dribbled over the wood at his feet, and as each drop fell, it caught fire. The little flames made spots of smoldering in the pitch-soaked wood.

“Katerina?” said Linay again. “What happens next?”

Plain Kate was shaking. “You don’t want to burn, Linay.”

“But I do,” he insisted. “I’ve planned it. I’ve worked for it. For years.” His voice was still polite, a little distant, but he was beginning to tremble. There was pitch smeared on the white skirts of his zupan, smoke eddying around his knees. He closed his eyes for a moment. “I can do this,” he said. “I want to do this.”

Kate edged toward him. Drina was crouched on the platform steps, Taggle in her arms.
“Mira,”
she pleaded—and then the name she was never supposed to say again: “Linay…”

“I wish you weren’t here, though,” Linay said. “Everyone here…”

Kate could feel it, behind the clouds, the shadow and the rusalka drawing together, lowering like a slow storm. The blood, the fire: The spell was beginning. “Everyone here is going to die,” said Kate.

Linay made a noise deep in his throat, and stepped sideways, away from the fire. The tie on his wrist brought him up short. Kate reached to help him and the winged carving cut into her hip. Suddenly she knew exactly what to do. “Why?” she said.

Linay gave the heartbroken, startled laugh she’d tricked from him once or twice before. “But you know!” His eyes shifted to Drina, and he pleaded: “To save her! To save my sister!”

Kate held the carving out to him. “This is her. Your sister’s face.”

Linay looked thunderstruck, staring at the carving. “Lenore…” he said. And the thing behind the clouds seemed to answer:
yes.

Kate set the carving on the smoking wood at Linay’s knee.

“What are you doing?” said Linay. “Don’t burn it!” Hot smoke made his zupan skirts swirl. The fire ticked and fluttered.

“Would she want to be saved, like this?”

“She was a witch. She understood—the exchange of gifts. The sacrifice.” His eyes darted sideways to the carved face of his sister. “Pick that up.”

“If you’ll answer me. Would Lenore have wanted this?” Fire was raising around the carved face, pushing up from under it and arching above it with fast-beating wings.

Linay’s bound wrist was jerking and jerking like a mink in a trap. He didn’t seem to be aware of it, or aware that he had pulled as far away from the growing fire as the lashing allowed. “Kate,” he said, his breath shuddering. And she lunged forward to cut him free.

Linay flung up a hand between them, and cowered as if from a blow. Kate found herself caught again, in his spell of glass air.

“I can do this. I can do this.” Blood dripped from his cut hand, from his bound and twitching wrist, and fell burning, burning, burning. “Lenore!” he cried, and sobbed as he cried.

“She wouldn’t want this!” Kate had to shout above the roar of fire. “Linay! Let me go!”

Flames were snarling in Linay’s clothes, hot yellow winds lifting his hair. Kate knew how it felt, the pain and panic. And yet still the force of his will held, and she was caught, helpless before the fire as a chestnut on the coals. Her masterpiece was turning black, flames eating through the thinnest places in the wings. “Look at her!” Kate shouted. “Look at her face and tell me she would want this!”

Above them the clouds rumbled and an ugly death stirred.

And from below, high and hysterical, came Drina’s voice. “Lie to her!” Drina shouted. “Lie to her—it will kill you. It can all be over. Just lie to her!”

Linay’s face—it too was turning black—suddenly calmed, suddenly hardened, and his eyes locked with Kate’s. “Yes,” he said. “Lenore would want this.” And he folded up as if he swallowed a sword.

The glass around Kate shattered. She plunged into the flame, clambering over the smoking wood, her knife in her hand. She sliced his wrist free, shouting, “Drina!”

Linay rolled from the fire, and Drina tugged at his arm. Blood poured from his mouth, where the lie had cut him. Kate leapt from the woodpile and crashed, rolling beside them. She saw Linay look at her, his eyes dreamy, and then they turned to the sky. “Sister…” he whispered.

Kate yanked her carving from the bonfire, scorching her hands. She waved it in Linay’s face. “Don’t!”

“Sister,” Linay whispered. “Please. Help me.”

And so called, out of the green-black sky, the winged thing came. Down into the trampled dead and nearly dead, the people heaped at the gates, it swooped like a striking eagle. Kate saw the double wings—fog-white and clotted shadow—saw the bodies sink into a sick, black fire.

“Take it back!” she screamed at Linay. She thrust Lenore’s carved nose at his nose, though his ice-pale eyes were thawing into dull water. “Take it back! Stop it!”

The wing Kate was holding snapped, and the carving fell to the stone and broke open along hot lines. Kate crouched over it, over Linay. “Please,” she said. He was dying in front of her, burned everywhere, his red mouth open. “Please stop it!”

“There’s only one way to stop it,” came a voice from her elbow. She turned. It was Taggle, sitting on the lip of the burning platform, solemn. “And you know what it is.”

Kate looked down at the knife in her hand.

“I’m sorry,” said the cat. The rusalka was coming across the square slowly, tearing at the piles of the dead. It grew bigger as it fed, filling the air above them like a ship at sail. “It has to be you who kills me,” said Taggle. “I was his gift to you. You must be the one to give it back.”

She felt her jaw open, her head shake itself from side to side.

“You can survive it,” said Taggle. “And that is all I want. You do not need me. You can find your own place, with your strength alone.” Behind him, the wings loomed. “Katerina, Star of My Heart. Be brave. Lift your knife.”

Kate met his golden eyes.

She lifted her knife.

And Taggle, who was beautiful, who had never misjudged a jump in his life, leapt toward her with his forelegs out-flung. He landed clean on the blade. There was a sound like someone biting into an apple. And then he was in her arms, with the blade sticking out of his back.

¶

Kate folded up. Taggle was curled in her arms, with the knife handle sticking out of his chest like a peg. She put her hand flat around it; it stuck out between her fingers. Blood came between them too, dark heart’s blood, bubbling like a spring. Drina tried to tug her farther from the fire, and Kate batted her hands away. “Taggle,” she sobbed.

The cat stirred, flinched—and smiled. Not a quirk of whiskers, but a human thing, turning up the corners of his mouth. “Katerina…”

The rusalka was coming toward them, its wings beating steady as a heart.

“Taggle,” whispered Kate. His heartbeat slowed under her hand.

“More…” His voice was only breath.

“More than a cat.”

“And I do not regret it.” His eyes clouded. “Could you…this itchy bit…”

She scratched his favorite place, where the fur swirled above the hard nub of his jawbone. The heat from the fire lifted tears from one side of her face.

Taggle took one more breath.

The rusalka’s shadow wings folded closed. Taggle’s heart fluttered. The rusalka took a step forward, shrinking, and the wings sagged. Another heartbeat. Another step. The darkness trailed from the white woman’s shoulders like the train of a dress. Another heartbeat, and the shadow-wing dragged itself against the cobbles.

And then it was a shadow. And Taggle’s heart was still.

Kate pulled her knife out. The cat didn’t stir. No new blood came.

She put her knife—her knife, her knife—down where the fire could take it, and she thought about lying down beside it.

Beside them, Linay was breathing, eyes open, calm as a man asleep. Below them, in the square, a woman stood. Her witch-white face was stiff with horror. Her shadow jittered behind her as the pyre blazed. The woman lifted a hand against the awful light, squinting. She spread her fingers and shouted something.

The fire went out.

Drina flung herself down the steps and into the woman’s arms.
“Dajena!”
she shouted, and then she was crying.
“Dajena…”
She buried her face in the woman’s shining shoulder.

“Mira cheya,”
the woman muttered. “Drina. What are you doing here? Stay out of sight, I must see to this poor soul.…” But Drina wouldn’t move from her side. So she held the sobbing girl in one arm and tilted up her chin at the stone pillar. Then she stepped forward, dainty as a deer but grim-faced, and climbed the steps, Drina stumbling along beside her.

Kate stood up.

It was surprising, how light Taggle’s body was. All the substance of him seemed to have gone into Kate, into the bloody smock that stuck to her front—into her knife hand—into her body itself. Taggle was thistledown. There was nothing of him left.

And then Lenore and Kate were standing face-to-face, with Linay at their feet. He sprawled with arms and legs bent like a tossed puppet. He looked up first at Kate, then at Lenore, and then—blankly—at the clearing sky. “I feel strange,” he said. “I think I’m dying.”

Kate, with the little body in her arms, answered, “Good. We don’t like you.” But she knelt beside him and took his raw hand.

“Let me,” Lenore murmured, crouching beside them. Kate felt human warmth in the brush of her arm. “Who are you, brother? Tell me your name and I can help you with the pain.” Kate heard her voice slip halfway to song. “Who did this to you?”

“Oh, no,” Linay sang back. “I did it to myself. Don’t you see? A life for a life—how magic must be.”

“Linay?” Lenore’s voice broke with shock. “By the Black Lady—what have you done?”

Avenged your death,
thought Kate.
Undone your fate. Traded his life for yours.
But she couldn’t say any of it.

“Lenore,” Linay breathed, “I love…” But his breath quavered and he could only blink at her. Lenore smoothed what had been his hair back from his forehead, singing. The life-tension was going out of him, like a frozen rope thawing in a puddle of water. Kate watched, with Taggle’s body stiffening against hers. “He’s dead,” said Lenore, holding the limp body in her arms. “My brother is dead! What is happening?”

“The guard will be coming,” Kate said. “Listen.” It seemed to her she could hear the whole city, thousands of sounds jumbled into the pounding in her ears.

“Who are you?” Lenore stood and seized Kate’s arm. Kate jerked away, twisting to keep her body around Taggle—but Lenore didn’t let go, and Kate’s arm was pulled straight and her sleeve fell back, baring the cuts of the bloodletting. The woman who had been the rusalka shivered. “I
know
you.”

“Dajena…”
Drina tugged at her hand. “She’s my friend. Let her go.”

But Lenore ignored her daughter, looking around. “I remember this. I was dead. They tried to burn me.” She looked into the pyre, and down at the charred fragments of her own face. “Look.” She stooped, scooping up a black-edged piece: an eye and a twist of hair, a glimpse of wing.

Drina eased the charred thing out of her hand.
“Dajena.”

Lenore let the carving go and sleepwalked to the edge of the platform, where she stood looking down at the dark surface of the canal. “I died here. I remember it.” Her face went strange. “And,” she said in a voice that could have withered grass, “I remember after.”

“You don’t have to think about that,” said Drina. “You’re saved. We saved you.”

Lenore shook herself and turned. “My daughter. Oh, Drina.” She fingered Drina’s chopped black hair. The sun was just coming out, long fingers of light piercing them, making the woman shine like a wax-cloth window. “You’ve grown.” She took Drina by both shoulders, her eyes huge. “You are marvelous,” she said. “You are brave as the sun.”

And Kate held Taggle’s body tighter.
Star of My Heart.
Her father had died saying that and for years she had thought he was seeing her mother, standing at the door of death. But he had looked at her, just as Lenore was looking now. He had seen her. Her father had seen her.

“Let us go,” said Lenore, and swept down the stairs like a beam of light. Kate and Drina followed.

Kate walked through the streets of Lov with Taggle’s body in her arms. A thin shadow was growing at her heels. The light was murky, but Lenore shone like the moon, with Drina like a shy star at her side.

The streets were still empty, though here and there they found a window being opened, or a huddle of refugees looking about, like survivors of a storm. Voices began again, slowly filling the town like birdsong in the morning. And Kate hated them all—all the thousands and thousands. They were not worth it: They were nothing beside the little weight in her arms.

Lenore paused in the open space of the gate square, where the cobbles were still stained with blood. “It cannot be so easy,” she said. But the gate was open, and no one tried to stop them. They just went through.

The mud in front of the city was churned and hummocked with the half-abandoned camp. It looked as if there had been a battle. Lenore looked around. “I should not be alive,” she said. But no one came to kill them. They just walked on.

In the birch grove, the red
vardo
sat where they had left it, neat as a kettle in the afternoon sun. Kate was only half aware of Drina’s exclaiming and dismay: Cream was nowhere in sight. But the horse had not gone far. As they came around the
vardo
, they saw Cream’s backside and swishing tail. They went farther and saw Behjet sitting on the steps.

The Roamer man was trying to shave, pulling his skin taut over his jawbone and scraping at it with the edge of a knife. The blade trembled in his hand and cast little ripples of light toward them. Cream was nuzzling at him as if he were a foal.

If the rusalka is saved,
Linay had said,
then the sleepers might wake too.
But he didn’t care about them, and Kate could not rouse herself to care either. Drina, though, shouted with a joy so hoarse there were no words in it. Lenore stopped. “Husband,” she breathed, and paled from linen to snow.

Drina took her mother’s elbow as if to guide her through blindness. “It’s not—” she whispered. But before she could explain to Lenore that this was not her husband but his twin, Behjet tottered to his feet. The knife fell and sank its point in the wet earth with a sound that made Kate wince. “Am I dead? Are you my burned ones, come to take me off to hell?”

“No one is dead,” said Drina, but Lenore said “I do not know if I am dead,” and Kate said, “Why did it have to be you?”

“What?” Behjet was bewildered and shivering inside a skin that hung from him as if he were indeed a walking corpse.

“Linay is dead,” Kate said. “And those people in front of the gate, and the ones in the square. And Stivo and Ciri, and my father, and—” She could not speak Taggle’s name. “My—my heart is dead.” She picked up his knife and stood looking at it, the darkness of the mud on the blade. “Of everyone who could have lived, why did it have to be you?”

And she pushed past him, up into the golden quiet of the
vardo
.

¶

Outside, Drina, Behjet, and Lenore murmured together like mourners standing about at a wake. Kate thought that they were telling one another pieces of their long, strange story. Then she thought of how the story ended, and she stopped caring.

She sat down on the bunk. It still smelled of Behjet’s long sickness. The blanket folds were stiff with sweat-grime. Taggle was dead. It should have wiped clean the world, yet here was washing to be done. Kate took a big breath, and put his body down.

His beautiful fur was matted with blood. He would hate that. She got out one of the horse brushes. She brushed until the bristles were thick as if with rust, and his fur was perfect. She liked the grain of it, how it followed the lines of his bones and muscles. It swirled in knots over his joints, and stood in a soft ridge along his breastbone, just beside the wound that had killed him. It was strange that his fur was still so soft, while his body was stiffening.

She sat beside him, numb, forever.

She had never been the sort for ghosts, though she had seen too much of them. But she would have cut off her carving hand to glimpse one now. It wasn’t fair. There should at least be a ghost.

But there was no ghost. Only Behjet, and Drina behind him, hovering at the curtain. She hadn’t seen them come in.

“Plain Kate,” the Roamer man said. His voice was soft as if he were gentling a horse. “I have prayed—Plain Kate—”

“Just Kate.”

“What?”

“Kate.”
She was as plain as she had ever been. And over that she was burn scarred and half bald. But Taggle had thought she was beautiful. “My name is Katerina Svetlana. Kate.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

And no one said anything for a while. The canvas arch around them glowed with sun.

Then Behjet said, “Your cat. Drina has told me—”

“He was more than a cat,” she said.

Another silence. “What should we do with…” said Drina.

Taggle’s body
was what she didn’t say. Kate had been thinking about that. She had been thinking about nothing else. “That place where we met: the meadow by the river. He was happy there. We had sausages.” She looked up. “We can bury—”

But she couldn’t finish.

“I’ll harness Cream,” said Drina.

¶

Inside the
vardo
, Kate took apart one of the trestle benches and put it together again as a box. She used Behjet’s shaving knife, though it sat like a stranger in her hand, though she knew she was ruining its edge and somewhere deep inside, her carver’s soul protested. Her knife—she had killed her friend with her knife. She had left her knife and maybe her heart there, lying in blood and fire.

But still she worked. Her hands as they cut the dovetails for the joints seemed strange to her: Darkness trailed them as they moved; their lower sides wore the darkness like a second skin. It was her shadow. Her shadow, returning.

She worked as Cream was harnessed, bits of tack rattling like muffled bells. She worked as Drina came and wrapped Taggle’s body in her favorite scarf, the red one with the white birds. She worked as the
vardo
rattled over the corduroy road. She worked as the branches scraped the canvas sides like fingernails. She worked as the light failed and the
vardo
shuddered to a stop.

She finished the box. It was strong and square, and would last a long time, even in the earth. And then she waited.

After too short a time the shovel stopped. But Kate couldn’t get up. She thought about Taggle’s name, and how the Roamers didn’t say the names of the dead. And she hadn’t said his, not yet. She was afraid to. It would make it real.

Lenore lifted the curtain and paused, a pale shape in white against the lavender evening. “If a woman,” she said softly, “might enter and speak.”

Kate shrugged.

Lenore came in, trailing light. Though she had asked to speak, she said nothing. After a moment she knelt in front of Kate, and bent her head to Taggle’s body. A gray ear stuck out between the red loops of cloth, guard hairs arching over the intricate, delicate interior. She stood heron-still a long moment before she said: “The grave is ready.”

“I know.”

“I wish,” Lenore said, touching the red wrappings, “I almost wish it were mine. What my brother did for me—and the memory of what I have done. They will not be easy to live with. And I feel so strange. Like a bowl that holds water on the outside; like a goblet with no stem…”

“What happens,” Kate asked, “after you die?”

“I don’t know.” Lenore traced the curve of Taggle’s ear. Under her long fingers it looked delicate and stiff as a cicada wing. “Death was a shut door. I beat against it—oh, so long, my skin split open. But it was blocked. I would like to think that the dead stay close.” Her voice had gone wandering off. “The dead stay close. At least for a little—” And like a wing, Taggle’s ear twitched.

“Fetch my daughter,” gasped Lenore.

Kate stumbled backward. “Drina!” she shouted. “Drina!”

“He was right,” Lenore whispered. “The dead should stay dead. And yet…”

Drina burst through the curtain. “Mother!” Then she froze and her face opened up as if an angel were standing in front of her.

Kate whipped around, and there was her cat. He was standing up on the bed, shaking his head and trying to paw the wrapping away from his face. The indignant howl was muffled: “Yearow!”

“Taggle!” Kate shouted. “Taggle!” She reached out but couldn’t touch him, she was afraid to try in case he melted into the air. Her hands hovered. Loop by loop, Taggle wormed his way free of the red wrappings, and then he was standing there on the bunk: greyhound sleek, golden eyed, perfect, alive.

“Well!” he said. “That was an adventure!”

“Oh,” said Kate. “Oh!” And she scooped him up and hugged him hard, feeling his soft fur and lanky strength. She squeezed him fiercely.

“Oof,” he said.

Drina whirled toward her mother, her face shattering. “What have you done?!”

“What I must do,” said Lenore. “What I could do: one small good thing, after so much darkness.” She unwrapped Drina’s turban slowly, tenderly, and then retied it as a girl’s headband, letting the extra length trail down Drina’s back like the hair she’d lost, like wings. “It is such a gift, to see you again.” She let her thumbs slide along Drina’s cheekbones. “But it is a gift I cannot keep.”

“No…” said Drina. And Kate, looking up startled, found that she could see Drina’s face through Lenore’s hands. “Don’t. Don’t go.”

“What my brother did, I cannot live with. He should have known that. And he should have known that a witch cannot give life, not perfectly, not forever.” Lenore looked at the cat. “Taggle.”

“What?” The cat shook his head so hard his ears made a noise like birds’ wings. “I’m not a murderous ghost, am I?”

“You’re a gift,” said the fading woman. “But not one without a cost. Kate, your shadow returns. As you gain it, so your friend will lose his voice.”

“Then I don’t want it! I don’t want my shadow! Taggle—tell her—”

“Bah,” said the cat, feigning a curled-tongue yawn. “Talking is complicated. What cat would want words?” But his golden eyes filled and shone with tears.

And Drina too was crying silently, though standing straight, looking her mother in the eye: Drina, brave as the sun. “Give us this moment,” said the ghost.

And so Kate took Taggle and they went out into the long soft light of the evening. She could smell the cat: warm and clean and strong. He was alive. Alive. And yet tears were running down her face. He reached up and blotted them away with one velvet paw. “Let us not waste our time in weeping. We must be about our business. We must find you a new knife.”

Kate swallowed three times before she could speak. “I know where there is one. Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” said the cat, with a human nod. “Well. That gives us an evening free to cook things.”

¶

A last evening. A good evening. How could it be a good evening? But it was. Behjet gathered up firewood and carried water and soon they had as homey a camp as could be managed, there by the unused grave. The river ran over smooth rocks and no fog came. Behjet caught a speckled trout and roasted it with wild dill and leeks. And Kate fried three kinds of spiced sausages, with onions and garlic and the last of the dried peppers.

She saved some for Drina, who came out of the
vardo
an hour late, alone. She paused there on the steps. It was nearly night. Stars swayed in the young birch trees. Fireflies blinked slowly over the river, wandering together in pairs.

“She’s gone,” said Taggle softly, to spare Drina the need of saying it.

Drina lit the lantern by the
vardo
door, and its light stroked her cheek as she nodded. “She is at peace.”

“I am sorry,” said Taggle, and Kate remembered when he had said it was not a thing for cats.

“There is something for you, Kate.” Drina came down the steps with the lantern in her hand. Kate saw that in her hand was a small braid of white hair. “She gave me something.”

“I’m done with magic,” said Kate.

“A gift,” said Drina, and laid her hand against the side of Kate’s face, where the burn scar was thick and twisted. “A song.” She bent her head, and she sang.

Kate knew the song. Linay had sung it to heal her burned hands, night after night on the haunted punt. And before that, once on a spring day in the marketplace of Samilae, Lenore had sung it for her father. Linay had sung it sad, full of minor falls. Lenore had sung it like a lullaby. Drina sang it gravely, slow and soft: a hymn.

Under Drina’s hands, Kate’s scars pulsed and stung. She tried to hold still. Across the fire, Taggle watched solemnly. After a long while, Drina dropped her hands. Kate lifted hers. Her fingertips mapped the new skin. It was tight and tender, but the slick, bubbling scar was gone. “Will you be a healer?” she asked.

“Maybe,” said Drina. And then, because hope will break the heart better than any sorrow, she started to cry. “It’s what my mother taught me.”

¶

In the morning, they held what funeral they could, with nothing to bury but the charred fragment of Kate’s carving: an eye and forehead, bit of wing. “For Lenore,” said Kate. “And Linay.”

“We don’t say…” Behjet corrected her gently, but Drina interrupted, saying it softly: “For Lenore and Linay.”

And Taggle said what was the traditional blessing in that country: “May all the graves have names.”

“I will carve a marker for them,” said Kate. “But there is something I must do first. Linay stole me a knife once. I am going to go get it.”

Behjet frowned. “That city—it might still be dangerous.”

“Nonsense,” said Taggle stoutly. “She is fearless. And anyway, I am going with her.”

And so Kate and Taggle walked together, back toward Lov. They started early, their shadows stretched together, cat and human, down the long road behind them. “Your voice,” said Kate. “How…how long?”

“A—” Taggle stopped, head tilted. “I cannot make sense of time.”

“It’s not a matter for cats,” said Kate softly.

“No.”

“You will always be my friend,” she said.

His tail quirked and he growled fiercely, “I should think so.”

A last day. The country seemed as if a great curse had been lifted. White clouds drifted across the mirrored puddles on the road. Kate’s shadow grew stronger as the sun swung up the sky.