Plain Kate (2 page)

The small cry came from somewhere close. Plain Kate’s first thought was that it was a ghost, that its next whisper would be “Katerina, Star of My Heart.” But she was not the sort for ghosts, so she lay listening, afraid but brave. She moved her head from side to side to track the sound, and decided that the crying was coming from one of the drawers above.

So she climbed out of the drawer and looked.

In the smallest drawer of her father’s stall, among the lace-fine carvings packed in straw, she found them: kittens. They were mouse-little, with their eyes still sealed closed and their ears tucked flat. There was no cat. It was almost dawn and frost furred everything. The market square was as still as the inside of a bell after the ringing has stopped. The straw nest was getting cold.

Plain Kate stood for a while and watched the kittens stagger about. Then she scooped them up and squeezed herself back into the drawer.

And that was the beginning of her new life.

There were three kittens: a white cat, a black cat, and a gangly gray tom. Their mother never came back. The next morning Plain Kate traded the cowherd girl the mending of a milk stool for a squirt of milk, and the promise of more each morning. She watered the milk and let the kittens suck on the twisted end of a rag. She kept them in the felt-lined pockets of her leather apron, under her coat during the day, and beside her at night in the warm, closed darkness of the drawer. Day by day, their dark eyes opened and their ears untucked and their voices grew louder.

She was patient with them, and took care of them every moment, and against all odds all three lived. The black cat grew wild and fearless and went to live on one of the pole barges that plied the shallow, twisting Narwe River. The white cat grew crafty and fat, and went to live on mice and milk with the cowherd girl. The gray tom grew long and narrow, and stayed with Plain Kate.

He was dandy with one ear cocked, a gleam on his claw and a glint in his eye. He sauntered through the market square and tattered, admired and cursed: a highwayman, a gentleman thief. His name was Taggle, for the three kittens had been Raggle, Taggle, and Bone.

Plain Kate grew too: skinnier and stronger, but not much taller. The years were thin. But against all odds, and with the cat by her side, she too lived.

The guild man kept the shop, but Kate was the better carver. He took most of the work, because no one could afford to defy the guilds for small matters. Kate made most of the objarka, the charmed charms that drew the luck. Luck in that place was a matter of life and death, and that made the guilds worth defying.

Plain Kate’s own objarka was a cat curled up asleep. She had made it herself, from a burl of walnut that her father had given her. Burl wood, with its tight whorls, was the hardest wood to carve, but she had carved it. Slowly and patiently she followed its flowing lines, looking for the wood’s truth. When she was finished, the curling wood grain suggested lanky strength at rest.

“Kate, My Star,” her father had said, “this could be a masterpiece.” He meant the piece an apprentice makes when the apprenticeship is finished, to gain admission to the guild. The little objarka was not big enough for a masterpiece, but, her father said, it was good enough. “Look at it,” he said. “It is telling you about yourself.”

But he would not tell her what it said.

Plain Kate gave the cat objarka to her father, and he wore it always, around his neck on a leather thong. It was almost black now, shiny with the oil of his skin. She wore it inside her own shirt, over her heart. But if it was telling her something, she could not hear it.

After a while she stopped listening and simply tried to live. She made a hinged front for her drawer, so that she could lock herself in. She put ragged hems in her father’s striped smocks when her dresses wore out. She carved when there was light. When there was no light she fished, and caught trout with her wooden fireflies. Taggle brought her mice and rats, birds and bats. She learned to suck the meat from the smallest bone. She got by.

The kinder folk of the market square gave her what they could not sell: bruised apples, carrots with strange legs. The crueler gave her curses; they spat and whispered. She was lonely, though she didn’t know it. Folk said she had a long shadow.

But every night Taggle came to wrap himself around her as she slept in the lowest drawer.

And so it went for cold days and hot, wet days and dusty, and long, hungry winters.

Then one summer day, change and magic came loping and waltzing into her life, wearing white, and in that moment nothing seemed dark.

The stranger was white. His hair was white-gray like bleached wood, his eyes white-silver like tin, his skin was white as if he were a day dead.

Albino
was the scholar’s word for it—but witch-white was what they said in Plain Kate’s country. It was unlucky, and perhaps, Plain Kate thought, it was what kept him wandering. She felt a surge of sympathy for the man: It was far too easy to lose your place in a town or farmhold, to be forced onto the roads. A chance turn of skin color was more than enough.

But the man was no starveling beggar, she could see that. He was thin but strong, and he moved through the market like a lord. Across the square from Plain Kate’s stall, he flipped open a blanket and spread out an array of tin trinkets. He sat down on the blanket edge with a tambourine on his knee.

Kate was working just then on an objarka for Niki the Baker—a mask in the form of the Wheat Maiden, to hang on the stall door of the new horse he was planning to buy. It was a good-sized piece, and it would earn her a few weeks without hunger. As she carved, she listened. The stranger played the tambourine as she’d never heard it played: not just bangs and jiggles, but music, lively as a quick stream, bright as birdsong, the sort of music that made you tap a toe. The music drew people to his blanket. He tipped his chin up and smiled at one and all, chattering like a baby bird—but he listened like an empty well.

The stranger puzzled Plain Kate. The trinkets he was selling wouldn’t keep him fed. There must be more than that. As evening gathered, Niki the Baker came by to check on his carving. Niki was a big man, soft as bread dough and as kind, and one of the few people in the town of whom Kate might ask an unguarded question. She jerked her chin toward the stranger. “Who’s that one? What’s he selling?”

“That one?” Niki snorted. “Useless frippery. Useless.” The baker hated things that were useless, from lapdogs to wedding cakes. “You watch him, Plain Kate. That one might steal everything that’s not nailed down, and some things that are nailed only loosely.” Without comment he set down a pair of rolls that were too stale to sell, and without comment Plain Kate took them and bit into one. It was a regular thing between them.

The roll was hard as an uncooked turnip. “Easy on that,” Niki said, watching her eat. “It might be the last for a bit—flour’s low.”

She nodded and wrapped the other roll up to tuck away. Niki looked at the bundle with his sad-dog eyes. “It’s bad, bad,” he sighed. “The wheat barges are overdue at least a week. No grain and no news. Something’s amiss upriver.” He crooked his two middle fingers into a sign against witchcraft.

A hungry time. Plain Kate felt cold in the warm evening. The
skara rok
had begun this way.

¶

Plain Kate listened to Niki and watched the stranger. He wasn’t selling much: a few toys and tin charms Kate could have made better in wood. Three days of music put three lonely kopeks into his begging bowl. What he seemed to be selling mostly was talk. When Plain Kate came back from fishing, his blanket was still spread, white in the thickening twilight, alone in the evening-empty market.

Plain Kate was thinking of witches. How in bad times people were more eager to buy her objarka, but also more inclined to take a step back, to crook their fingers at her when they thought she wasn’t looking, or when they were sure she was. How they wanted the witchcraft to protect them, but how they looked too for a witch to blame. It didn’t matter that there was no magic in her blade; people saw it there. They saw witchcraft in her skill, witch marks in her mismatched eyes, her bad luck, her long shadow.

The stranger was selling things in the shadows. All sorts came: from the ragged charcoal man to the wife of the lord justice, men and women, young and old. They came in ones and twos, shying from the others, looking around them. He sold them glass vials that twisted the firelight from the market’s cressets, sold them herbs and feathers knotted with string.

Charms,
Kate thought. Charms against empty wombs, indifferent loves. Against hunger, sickness. Against the rumor of something worse that came off the river. The stranger was selling the witchcraft that people craved to protect them. But he would likely be gone when they began to look for someone to blame.

Plain Kate watched for four days and thought. On the fourth day a sudden silence made her look up, startled as if the river had stopped running. The stranger had set down his tambourine. He stood and stretched and sauntered toward her.

She watched him come. He moved like a jumping jack that strung too loosely, so that he seemed about to turn a flip or clatter into a pile of bones and string. His zupan’s loose skirts swirled around his knees and its undone sleeves swung as he walked. Every man in Kate’s country wore such a coat, but on this man it hung like a costume. Kate wondered if he was foreign. His strange, witch-pale skin and hair made it hard to tell. The white coat bleached him further, made him look like a painting that had half washed away.

“Lovely lass,” he drawled, leaning sharp elbows on her counter, “I hear you work wonders in wood.”

Now, Plain Kate had caught no fish for two days. Niki’s bread was gone and she was hungry. But she was required to turn down work, and she did: “There’s a wood guild shop—” she began.

He laughed elegantly. “Master Chuny? Boxwood for brains, dead twigs for fingers. No, no, Little Knife. I want someone with some feeling. You see”—he widened his eyes at her—“I’ve suffered a loss.” And he drew from his back, where it was slung like a sword, a length of wood. He set it down in front of her.

The thing was the size of a small branch, polished and curved. The back of the curve was splintery and broken, like a bone. A snapped string curled around it. Plain Kate picked it up. “What is it?”

“A courtier to the queen of all wooden things,” he said.

Plain Kate raised an eyebrow and waited for a more sensible answer.

“It’s a bow,” he said. “A bow for my fiddle.” And he half sang: “A walker, a wanderer, a trader in tin—a roamer with a violin. My name is Linay, and I grant wishes.”

Just then, Taggle sprang from nowhere and landed neatly in front of her. He stuck his long nose into Linay’s pack. Plain Kate picked him up. The cat squirmed, then relaxed into her arm and started to purr. She eased him onto one shoulder and he slunk around her neck, where he draped bonelessly, like a fur collar with glittering eyes.

“Why,” said Linay, “no silver mink could match that.” He reached out to chuckle the cat’s chin.

Taggle bit him.

Linay pulled his hand back and smiled with many teeth. “Sweet-tempered little beast.”

Plain Kate had recovered from the strangeness of Linay’s singing, and his eyes that shone like new tine. She ran a finger down the broken bow. “Yes, I think I could make you another. What can you pay me?”

“Mmmm.” Linay leaned close. “I could write a song about your eyes.”

Kate avoided snorting at a paying customer, but she answered shortly: “Something I can eat.”

Linay smiled, slow as a fern uncurling, and sang: “What do you wish for, Plain Kate?” As he sang he reached out and brushed the side of her face with bony fingers. His hands smelled of herbs, and something shot through her like ice on the neck. She leapt backward.

“Now that’s a wish,” he said, smiling at her distress. “But I wouldn’t. To raise the dead, it’s a tricky thing, goes wrong most often.”

Plain Kate was panting. “I don’t want you to raise my father!”

“Of course you do, orphan girl. All folk want their dead back, and I should know. I’ve spoken with the shadowless, and they come shambling, how they come hungry, how they come wrong as a bird in water—”

“Stop it!”

Linay laughed, merry but not kind. “Well, what do you want, then? Beauty? Luck? I sell them all.” He leaned in, smelling bitter as burnt spices. “Of course, the trinkets are nonsense, fodder for fools. But I have true power and a will to use it. It’s more than the work is worth, but we might trade.”

“What do you want?”

“Your shadow.” His own shadow fell across the table between them, and it seemed thin to Kate, swirling as if cast by smoke, not solid flesh. “If you give me your shadow, I’ll grant the secret wish of your heart.”

“But why? Why do you want it?”

“Ah.” He winked at her. “I know a lady who lacks one.” She must have been gaping at him, because he crooked a finger under her chin to close her mouth. Taggle swiped at him lazily. Linay jerked clear, his smile folding up. “I’ve been listening to talk in this town. They say your shadow is long and that no one loves you. You are luckless and defenseless. Do not doubt that I can twist things until you are glad enough to give me anything I like.”

Then suddenly his smile was back and the roiling edge of his shadow was gone. “But in the meantime, what about my bow? Would you like a beauty charm, perhaps, in payment, Plain Kate?” On his tongue her name suddenly sounded like the insult it had once been.

“I’ll take turnips,” she said sturdily. “Or fishhooks. Fine wood maybe. Coin on the off chance you have it. But I’ll have no deals with witches.”

“Won’t you now?” He was merry again. “I have no turnips or fishhooks or oxcarts or sailcloth. Two silver.”

“Five,” she said.

“Three.”

“Five,” she said again.

He shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “Five.”

Plain Kate put the coin he gave her in advance in her pouch and pulled out her slate to sketch the bow. Taggle’s fur was soft against her neck, and that was the only part of her that felt warm. Linay was eyeing the part of her hair. Finally, as she kept working, he turned away, whistling.