Plain Kate (8 page)

Drina, singing, leaned across the fire. “Shadow, shadow, shadow…” went the song.

The air was thick with smoke. The tears on Plain Kate’s cheeks were cold, the rest of her face was scorching. Against the tent wall, shadows whirled—Drina’s thin, Taggle’s dancing, and a third—

An ugly noise came from deep in Taggle’s throat.

Plain Kate watched the third shadow; it pinned her eyes. It was supposed to be her shadow, but it wasn’t. It was sinuous and moved like a water snake. She knew in her stomach that this was not a simple shadow, but some cold thing, some damp dead thing that should be resting. And, though their fire was the only light, she thought this shadow was not cast backward from the flame, but was drawing near to it, from outside the tent.

“Thing!” The cat yowled and spat. “Thing!”

“Drina,” choked Kate. “Stop.”

Drina turned and looked over her shoulder at the thing that had captured Kate’s eyes. She froze. The song stopped. The shadow reached.

Then Kate dumped the kettle over the fire.

Steam and smoke flated. Both girls started coughing. And the shadow was gone.

¶

The air in the bender tent still smelled of burnt hair.

Plain Kate was trying to coax the fire up from its pool of ash-mud, and not having much luck. Even twigs would only smolder. She picked up a branch and started carving curled wood shavings, dropping them into the chittering embers, one by one.

Taggle was pacing around the edge of the tent like a lion around the rim of its cage. “A thing,” the cat hissed. “It makes me feel hungry and wet. I hate it! Thing!”

“It was not my shadow,” said Kate. “It was something else.”

“You don’t know that,” said Drina. Her voice fluttered with fear.

“But I do,” said Kate. She could still feel the prickle of the thing’s presence in her hair.

Rain fell through the smoke hole and hissed in the embers. The struggling fire went out again. The tent sank back into darkness.

“I—” said Drina. “I didn’t think. I’m sorry.”

“What didn’t you think?”

“That blood—” Drina swallowed. “That blood can call more than one thing. We—called into the darkness. We don’t know what answered.”

“Oh,” said Kate.

They drew closer together in the dark.

“In Toila,” said Drina, after a long time. “In the great market of Toila, there are charm sellers. My mother knew some of them. Some of them are really—some of them have true power. We’ll—we can ask one of them, how to call and be sure it’s your shadow that answers.”

“No,” said Kate.

“Plain Kate. We have to try.”

“No.”

There was a scuffling in the darkness, and after a moment, a buttery glow. Drina had found the tallow lamp in their goods box, and lit it. The little flame danced on its clay spout. Kate watched it a while. Taggle climbed into her lap and smoothed his fur—though she could still feel tiny muscles twitching down his spine.

In the safe, domestic light, the two girls sat together until their breathing evened. It seemed like hours.

“Drina,” said Kate. “Drina, it’s too dangerous. Even if—I don’t want you to be hurt. For me.”

Drina sat quietly for a moment, feeding wood curls into the lamp flame and dropping them, burning, into the damp kindling. “Do you remember,” she said, “I told you my mother was a healer. And that to work a great magic, you have to give something away? That’s why your magician had to give you a wish when he took your shadow.”

“Drina,” said Plain Kate. “What are you telling me?”

“My mother—” she said. “Don’t you see? A healer must give a gift in kind to make a healing. A healer gives away her own life, piece by piece. That’s what my mother did. And I want, I want to be like her. I want to help you. No matter what.”

Kate watched the wood curls burn and send up their ribbons of smoke, trying to understand. “Tomorrow,” said Kate at last. “Tomorrow I will ask to show my objarka to Rye Baro. In Toila we can sell them, and—find someone to ask.”

Drina closed her eyes and nodded, little hummingbird-quick twitches of her head.

“But, Drina—I can’t keep this secret. Someone will see. Soon, someone will see. It’s better to tell before someone sees.”

“Just a little longer,” Drina pleaded. “After Toila.”

Plain Kate nodded. “It will be better to have the silver from Toila. When we have to tell. Silver will—they might keep me anyway, if we have silver.”

“Also, I can bring in very large rabbits,” said Taggle. “Possibly a small deer.”

“That will help,” said Kate, and bundled him close, her eyes smarting with what she told herself was the smoke.

¶

Plain Kate had meant to go to the clan the next day, but as it happened she could not. Her monthly woman’s blood had come, for the first time. Face burning, she went to Daj to find out what to do.

“Oh ho!” Daj crowed like a rooster, when she understood what had happened. “We Roamers have fattened you up!”

Plain Kate had only ever heard of pigs being fattened up, for slaughter. Some of her confusion must have shown, because Daj added, “Well, you had been hungry,
mira
, when you came to us. Any fool could see it. Hunger brings the blood late. It’s hard to come into your power when you’re hungry. If you’d had a mother you would know that. And if you were mine, what a cake I’d make you. With berries and honey, and I might, anyway.”

Kate’s blush was turning from shame to pleasure, but Daj wasn’t done talking. “You cannot tell the men, of course. And you must sit apart.”

Daj did make the cake. But Kate was frustrated. She could not go to Rye Baro to show her objarka. She could not go to the men’s fire at all, or stir the food, or fetch the water. Every time she tried to do something useful she stumbled over some new rule, and she spent long days sitting on a trestle bench, with her carving in her lap. The rose hedge dripped on her. Cream tried to eat her hair.

It was strange not to be walking, and not to be working. Plain Kate felt sullen and stupid—but the horror raised by the thing they had summoned was fading in her.

Drina brightened day by day, and was soon sitting by Plain Kate, making little bundles of feather and twig and blossom, hiding them in the folds of her skirt whenever anyone glanced their way.

“Charms,” said Kate. They made her uneasy. Linay had called them foolish, and she had a feeling he might know. And she thought they could draw the wrong kind of eyes. But she did not know how to tell any of that to Drina. She settled for: “What if your father sees?”

“Faw,” sniffed Drina, sounding like Taggle when he got a paw wet. “He’s with the Oksar men, getting drunk and talking about the rain as if it were the end of the world. There’s a sleeping sickness or something. They’re all fluttered up like chickens under a hawk.”

Drina plucked a red thread free from the fraying poppies embroidered on her skirt. She bit through it, then tied the bundle off with a jerk. “We need these. They will help me find the right person—someone who knows how to call a shadow. We cannot just go into the market asking. These bundles will show my gift, to those who know how to look.

“Besides,” she said, “they’ll add to your silver.”

¶

They stayed three more days with Pan Oksar, and then they struck the tents, harnessed the horses, knocked the mud from their wheels, and went off down the road to Toila. The first night on the road, Plain Kate went with Daj to the men’s fire, to present her objarka.

Plain Kate curtsied and knelt, and offered the objarka to Rye Baro with both hands.

He took it with both hands. He raised it up.

Plain Kate had brought only one objarka to show: her best. It was an owl-eyed human face with antlers and a seducer’s smile. She stayed kneeling and watched Rye Baro meet the thing’s eyes. She could hear her father’s voice:
The magic of carving is to tell people the truth.
What was that lush wooden mouth saying?

It was Linay’s mouth, she realized abruptly. That was why it frightened her.

Rye Baro’s face was impassive. No one else spoke. The inspection stretched and stretched. Daj shifted behind Kate, creaking from knee to knee. “By the Black Lady, Rye,” she said. “Don’t tease the child!”

Rye Baro laughed. “Well, does she not know she is good? Good!” He handed the carving to Daj. “You’ve a gift, Kate Carver. Your hands know things.”

Daj looked at the carving. “Aye, good does not begin it. It’s beautiful,
mira
. In its own horrid way, of course. There’s craft in those hands.”

“Too much craft,” said Stivo, taking the carving. “The
gadje
don’t know craft. They won’t pay for it. It is good, though”—and here he smiled at her, both scorn and peace offering—“little girl.”

“Soon we will see what the
gadje
have a mind to pay for,” Rye Baro rumbled. “We will press for Toila tomorrow. And there’s that riding colt that you broke without craft, Stivo. Xeri, the one who eats. See if you can sell him before we’re stuck with the feeding of him for the winter.”

“Ah,” said Behjet, coming to his brother Stivo’s rescue. “Xeri’s a good beast at heart. We’ll wash him in the river and comb him till he shines. All of Toila will cover their eyes against his brightness.”

They fell into talking about the horses, and Plain Kate got up quietly and went back to the red
vardo
, where Taggle was keeping her bedding warm.

And the next day they went to Toila.

Toila was bigger than Samilae, and had three markets: the market of the animals, the market of the vegetables, and the market of the steps. Which, Drina explained, did not of course sell steps, but was held on the broad steps of the tithe barn, near the river. “It’s a city,” she said as if city were another word for “wonderful.” And she turned a handspring, just because she could. Taggle copied her: gray twist and silver flash.

“It’s a city,” echoed Behjet. “And in a city Roamers must be careful. Remember that, girls. Stay together.”

Behjet and Stivo led the dray colt off down a cobbled alleyway, his hoofbeats thudding off the stone walls of the buildings close at either side. Kate had never seen so much stone. She and Drina seemed small in the middle of it.

“This way,” said Taggle, and sauntered off with a curl in his tail. “They’re selling fish cakes!”

They followed him through little nooks and twists, meeting only narrow-faced saints in niches, guarding nothing. To Kate, so long among the Roamers, the figures she had once carved looked foreign. The girls began to think they were lost. But then the alley turned and spilled through a wooden arch and into the market.

Huge and loud, the market stopped them, gaping. Just in front of them lengths of homespun in russet and ocher and indigo flapped in the wind off the river, tossing little showers of rain, chopping the view into confusing glimpses. Banks of spices. Songbirds screeching in cages. Wheels stacked in a heap. The scorched-metal smell of a smithy, the stink of a tanner. There were stalls and blankets, and barrows and people everywhere. The town’s weizi stabbed upward from the center of the market, like one tree left standing in a shattered forest. Scenes of commerce were carved in its sides.

Drina was pressed close to Kate, her confidence gone. Taggle was perched between Drina’s feet, with his tail straight in the air and his eyes round and shining.

“Move there!” came a voice from behind. A handcart crashed into Kate’s back, crunching into her pack-basket. Plain Kate staggered and the cart spilled tin pitchers and cups clashing across cobbles. The carter glared. “What’s this? A country mouse and a Roamer pickpocket? Taking the air, are we, girls? Seeing the sights? Blocking the road, at any rate.” Plain Kate had stooped to gather the pitchers, but at this she straightened up. She took Drina’s elbow, and they walked off like ladies.

The unpleasant carter had at least helped Drina find her tongue. “The great market of Toila,” she said, “is held only thrice a summer. So it can’t always be so…much.” This seemed to comfort her. They threaded their way into the press and the noise, looking for a place to sell Plain Kate’s carvings.

The girls settled on a place at the bottom of the broad steps—a prime spot neglected by the other sellers because it had recently been favored by some horse. Drina, a horsewoman in her heart, kicked the knobs of dung away with no trace of disgust. Nearby a fiddler with white hair was playing for coin. Plain Kate’s heart jerked, but then the fiddler turned, and she saw his face, and it was not Linay.

“We should have brought a blanket,” said Drina, startling Kate free of her focus on the fiddler. “For your charms.”

“Objarka, not charms,” Kate corrected. “They’re not magic. I don’t have a blanket, but my sleep roll is in my pack.” She hated to put the clean fur down on the dung-smirched cobbles, but she did. She spaced the carved faces evenly, and when that was done, she looked up. There was no gathered crowd, but a few passersby gave glances, pursing mouths and raising eyebrows. That was enough to tell Kate, who had spent her life in a market, that her work would sell.

Plain Kate felt her mouth widen toward a smile, and to hide it she looked down at the horrible faces of the objarka arrayed before her. “It will be all right,” she said softly, almost to herself.

“I told you!” Drina grinned and flipped over into a backward handspring. Taggle jumped up and rebounded off her boots. The cat flew, twisting through the air like a ribbon of silver, and landed neatly on his feet. Someone cheered. And they did it again.

Drina paused to spread out a begging scarf and kilt up her skirts, and then she and Taggle danced and flipped, bright as a pair of dragonflies. Drina was far from the only tumbler in the market, but Plain Kate would lay money that Taggle was the only and the best tumbling cat in the world. A crowd gathered. Among them, some stopped to look at the objarka. Plain Kate fell into the easy push-pull of haggling, which was like a two-man saw, and for a little while she was as happy as she had ever been.

When Drina stopped dancing, she was flushed and panting. Taggle preened in her arms. Kopeks lay on the scarf at her feet. “Look!” she said. “And you?”

“Three,” Kate told her, and shyly opened her hand, letting Drina see the silver coins her three sales had garnered her.

“I knew it!” Drina beamed. “Luck will be with us here, Plain Kate. You will make your silver and I will find”—she dropped her voice and glanced around—“our answer.” Still gleaming with sweat and breathing hard, she untucked her skirts and tied the scarf across her shoulder.

Kate had spent time among the Roamers now, and knew that Drina was too young to wear her scarf across her body. It was a woman’s costume, the scarf and the turban. As Drina piled up her hair, she took on a power Kate could only glimpse, and didn’t understand. Drina held the scarf edge out to make a pouch. “Give me the little ones; I’ll stroll the crowd.”

As Plain Kate gathered up some of the smaller objarka, Drina opened her belt pouch and pulled out the charms she had made: bundles of birch twigs and yarrow and herb and feathers, knotted with red thread and white horse hair. Kate looked at them. “Are you sure?”

But Drina was almost laughing with joy. “Luck is with us,” she said again. So Plain Kate put the little objarka burji into Drina’s sash like peas into an apron, and watched her walk away, up the broad, crowded steps.

¶

Kate watched Drina for a while, dark and vivid among the pale damp people of Toila in their browns and beiges. In her red turban she stood out like a poppy in a wheat field. She was moving with a catlike sway Kate hadn’t seen her use before, and she sang as she walked, weaving a spell of wordless notes. Taggle, elegant as a greyhound, shadowed her heels.

Drina was busy. She let young men reach into her apron, and spun them tales about the horrible little burji they drew out. And with older women she exchanged whispers and coins and pointing fingers. She was using the bundles as a passport, looking for the real witch—someone who could teach them how to call into the dark and be sure of what would answer.

But the market was crowded and noisy, and soon Kate lost sight of Drina. Without the tumbling to snare them, the eddy of people around her blanket had dissolved, but still, she had better than her share of interest. Some people merely threw glances at her or her carvings, but some slowed, and some paused, and some stopped a moment, and some stopped.

“I have not seen you here before.” The man who loomed over Plain Kate was bald, but he had long whiskers like a catfish. His dark zupan was covered with little figures cast in pewter: acorns and angels, knots and night creatures. There were hundreds of them. The man jangled faintly in the wet gusts of wind. “Not seen you, eh?” he said.

She shrugged. “I’ve not been here before.”

“Not been,” he squawked. “Not been to the famous market? The great market? The great market of Toila?”

“No.”

“Not been,” he said again, and Kate began to wonder if he was simple or mad. “No, not been. I would have seen you. I would have seen”—he smiled, and suddenly looked horribly sane—“such fine work.”

Plain Kate said nothing.

“Bit of a witch-blade, are you, girl?”

“A carver,” she said. “I’m a carver.”

“Objarka, though.” He raised his arms grandly, and the pewter things chittered all over his coat. “I sell objarka.”

“Not as good as mine,” said Kate. “But don’t worry. I won’t be back.”

“Don’t be,” he said. And he turned away.

“Hmph,” Kate snorted to herself. Taggle was a bad influence.

“He can’t keep you from here,” said the woman at the next blanket. She was selling round-weave baskets, and had a wickerworker’s hands, calloused and tough as roots. “The great market is free to all. And we need better charms than what Stanislaus sells.” She cast some sort of fingered curse at the departing back of the catfish man. “Objarka, ha! They’re meant to draw luck, but that man couldn’t draw bees with honey.”

Plain Kate, looking down at the terrible faces of her big objarka, felt herself smile.

“There you are,” said the woman. “You can see it yourself, surely. There’s no magic in his work.” She fingered her ear; the top was notched strangely, just where Drina had cut Kate. Was this a witch? “Pewter,” the woman sneered. “You can’t draw luck with tin. It needs blade.”

“I’m just a carver,” said Kate again.

The woman looked at her appraisingly, her fingers still pinching at her ear. “As you say.”

A bit later another man stopped. His zupan’s front was bright and stiff with embroidery. He looked a while, then stooped and picked up the pig-snouted face. “Luck! I’m not sure I would enter my own home, if it meant passing this fellow. What do you want for him?” And he gave her eight silver without even bargaining.

“That was the master of the threadneedle guild,” whispered the basket maker, when he was gone. “Now you’ll sell, wait and see.”

And indeed the stream of customers thickened around her, and people of all classes came to see her work, hefting the faces and running fingers over the smoothness of the carving. She sold four of her big objarka and made good silver. But then, suddenly, the crowd scattered, taking flight like a field full of starlings at no cue Kate could see. She found herself looking at a single pair of good boots and the hilt of a sword. She looked up at a man in the dress of the city watch. “We’ll have no witchcraft in the market,” he said.

“I don’t do any.”

“And your little friend?” said the watchman. For a moment she thought he meant Taggle, and her stomach lurched. She looked at the basket woman, whose eyes were wide with fear. “The lass with the pretty ways and little bundles,” he said. “The Roamer girl.”

Plain Kate swallowed and looked straight ahead. This gave her a good view of the watchman’s sword, bumping at his hip. “Well?”

But she could think of nothing to say.

“Have a word with her,” he said more kindly. “They burned a woman here last week.”

When he’d gone, Plain Kate tried to catch the basket woman’s eyes. But the woman, pale, turned her head away.

Plain Kate sat trembling on her bedroll with her three masks in front of her, and didn’t know what to do. She stood up and didn’t see Drina anywhere. She looked and looked. Her eyes lit on every flash of red, but none of them was the red turban Drina had been wearing. She tried to shout Drina’s name, and her voice caught in her throat.

People were still thick around her blanket, but now the glances were for her and not for her work, and some were hot, and some were cold. Plain Kate looked down at the objarka that had the face of a woman burning. She shifted her weight from foot to foot.

“Go find her,” the basket woman said. “Hurry.”

So Plain Kate snatched up her sleep roll and stuffed it, objarka and all, into her pack. She swung it up and ran into the center of the market. She found nothing but confusion. Wet cobbles skidded underfoot. Shoulders and elbows jostled her. Heads and handcarts blocked her view.

She scrambled up the steps to the platform from which the weizi rose. She’d been half expecting to see wood for burning stacked around the column, but there wasn’t, only the carved figures of the weizi itself: men unloading boats, a little too big to be human, their faces too narrow, their limbs too long. From the weizi platform she could see a little way. Something was happening by one of the alleys. The eddying crowds had begun to flow in that direction. Kate saw the catfish man with the jangling coat heading that way, coaxing a priest along, a hand on the holy man’s elbow.

Plain Kate leapt from the platform and fought her way through the dung and puddles. A bridge from house to house made a wooden lip above the mouth of an alley. There was space of shadows beneath the bridge. In front of it was a wall made of human backs and shouting.

Kate heard a high screaming. The yowl of a cat.

Close by she heard the catfish man saying to the wheezing priest: “…the devil’s bundles, holy father, with my own eyes…”

The devil’s bundles,
thought Kate.
Drina’s charms.
But she could see nothing but the tracks of the crowd.

Suddenly Taggle came scrambling over the heads and shoulders of gathered men. He left a trail of blood and cursing. “Katerina!” he yowled—though in the din only she knew it was him. The cat leapt onto her pack-basket, spitting, his hair stiff as a brush. “Katerina! It’s—”

“Shut up!” she snapped. Drina’s witchcraft charms. Her secret questions. “It’s Drina. Is she alive?”

“When I left.”

“What’s this, then?” said the little priest, but the men were packed so tightly that they didn’t—couldn’t—turn.

Kate looked at them desperately. “We have to get through.”

She could feel Taggle’s hot breath on her neck as the cat shifted on her basket, muscles bunching. “Follow me,” he said.

And before she could even think of stopping him, Taggle threw himself at the crowd.

His front claws bit into her shoulder as he leapt; his back claws grazed her ear. And then he was scrambling across the heads and shoulders of the packed people. His claws were out and his teeth were gnashing. He was huge with his hair on end, and screaming like a panther. The men—men he had already bloodied—shouted and squealed and hit and pushed against their fellows to get away from him. The wall of bodies cracked open. Plain Kate followed her cat like a soldier following his spear.

Elbows struck her. Feet tangled her. She stumbled and shoved through the hot press and the human stink. Something hard hit her temple. Another blow to her ribs. A stabbing weight on her instep. And then suddenly she was through. Panting, battered, terrified. But through. Into a little space bordered by the crowd, the walls of the alley, and a cart with a hysterical, rearing horse which blocked the way forward.