Plain Kate

TWELVE FOG

The next day, Plain Kate looked for it and saw it: the hole in Linay’s shadow.

He was poling the punt. The light threw his long shadow across the deck. In the center of that shadow, over his heart, was a patch that fluttered like a hurt bird. The sun broke through it, once in a while, in coins of light.

Kate watched that roiling patch. Under her, the boat surged, coasted, and slowed; surged, coasted, and slowed. The fog bank was still behind them, the watery sunrise turning the top of it pink and yellow. She was remembering the story of how he had used blood and hair to pull apart his shadow. To give a voice to the ghost of his sister.

“What was her name?” Kate asked. “Your sister. The rusalka. What was her name?”

The boat rocked a little when Linay fumbled the pole, but his eerie-pale face stayed smooth.“She’s dead,” he answered at length. “We do not say the names of the dead.”

“I know. Drina told me.”

That drew a sudden, startled look.“Drina.” He stilled himself again. “Well, well. How a life comes round. I knew as I followed you that you were with the Roamers, but I—”

“You followed me?” It was Kate’s turn for shock.

“To draw your shadow. Did you think its remnants were to be sent to me by the royal messenger? The loss of a shadow, as I told you, is a slow thing. I had to be close, to catch yours as it pulled away.” He shrugged. “There is only one road; there is only one river. It was not hard to follow you.”

Why should she feel betrayed? But she did. His words stirred up the sticky panic of her long loss, her heavy secret, her shadow twisting away from her. She turned from him. His shadow fell past her, and hers was nowhere, gone.

“Why?” she said. “Why did you do this to me?”

She saw his shadow shrug.“I needed a shadow. Yours was the easiest to get.”

Plain Kate looked down at her burnt hands, the light going right through them. She said nothing. Time passed. Then Linay was suddenly, silently, at her shoulder. She shuddered away from him, but he reached out and took her wrists. He lifted them, oblivious to her cold resistance.“These are healing well.”

“Let me go.” She jerked her hands fruitlessly.

“Some salve, first.” He released her and produced, from the billows of his zupan, a stoppered jar. He rubbed some of the chilling, oily stuff into her scars. The mint-sharp smell washed over her. Linay’s head was bent over her hands. “Lenore,” he said softly. “My sister’s name was Lenore. She was a healer. She taught me this. I will see you carve again.”

She could think of nothing to say. Linay stayed bent over her hands, singing softly. Kate remembered what Drina had said: that all magic depended on a gift, freely given, and that healers gave some of their own life for the health of those they healed. Linay rocked as he sang, as if he were praying or exhausted. He sang himself slowly into silence. He let go of her hands but did not lift his head. His voice was low.“What does your cat call you?”

“Katerina.”

“Katerina. I am sorry.” Even if he had not been a witch, bound to the truth by his own power, she would have been sure that he meant it.

But that night as the fog rolled around the punt, he again summoned the rusalka. He again sat and watched as Kate filled her hand—her hand that he had just worked to heal—with her own blood. And he let the rusalka nurse on her blood until Kate found herself sliding into grayness, trying to hold on to the memory that Linay was dangerous, that he did not love her, and that she must not forgive him.

Plain Kate slept deep into the next day. When she woke, the first things she saw were cat eyes. Taggle was sitting on her chest glaring as only cats can.“You let the thing come for you again,” he said. “If you die I am going to be furious with you.”

Her head felt muzzy.“Where were you?”

The cat abruptly decided to groom his shoulder.“He gave me fish,” came the fur-muffled voice. “I went to sleep.”

“He poisoned you?”

“I will not take food from him again,” Taggle intoned. “Please know that this is a great sacrifice. But clearly I must guard you, Katerina.” He looked at her sidelong. “You are thinking of giving it more blood.”

“I think…” she said, and stopped to think. The little cabin was stuffy and rocking; it made her drowsy. She lay watching the herbs and bundles above her slowly sway. “I think I have to,” she said. “He will give me my shadow back at Lov. I can’t live without my shadow.”

“I do not trust him.”

“He can’t lie.”

“So he says.” Taggle’s tail lashed. “Katerina, your shadow will do you no good if the thing kills you.”

“It won’t,” said Linay, and Kate jumped. He had slipped down the ladder without them noticing.

Taggle did not deign to flinch, but his ears flicked back.“It will. I have made many things bleed; I know blood. Katerina, you cannot feed the thing again. Itwill kill you.”

“Well,” said Linay. “There is a trick to it.”

“Faf!” Taggle spat. “You are full of tricks! It is late for tricks! You weaken her; you muddle her!”

Linay ignored this.“Come ashore. I’ll show you.”

Kate wanted only to sleep. The heat lulled; her head pounded. But after a while she got up and climbed the ladder. She found the punt pulled up at the river’s edge where some long-ago flood had left a tangled heap of dead trees. She had waited too long: Linay had gone off on one of his foraging missions and left them alone.

Sitting in the bleached and bony wood, with the sun streaming through her, Plain Kate sat and tried to carve. The knife that had once been like another hand to her now sat stiffly on top of the new scars. Her fingers had lost their sureness and strength. But still, she turned the burl wood she’d found in the road over and over under her knife, cutting away its weak-rotted places, looking for the shape in its heart. It was rough work, the only kind her hands could do.

The burl slowly took a shape like something with wings. She thought of two hands pressed wrist to wrist, with palms and fingers spread. Bound hands.

Taggle sat primly on a deadfall branch and glared at her until she gave up on carving and placated him by catching a fish. She cooked; they ate. Time passed quietly.

“When you were with the Roamers,” said Linay’s voice behind her, sudden and soft as a ghost, “did she come?”

Plain Kate refused to jump again. She nodded without looking at him. Yes, the rusalka had come. And the Roamers—the people who had been almost her family—had blamed Kate.

“Who?” said Linay.

Plain Kate didn’t see why she ought to answer. Let him wonder. But then he said: “Not Drina…?”

Drina. Her first friend, her—the word startled her as it came into her head—her sister. “No,” she said. “Not Drina. Wen. Stivo.”

“Ah,” he said, voice flat. And he sat down across from her and speared the fish’s head.

“Can they be saved?” Kate asked. “The sleepers—could I have saved them?”

Linay shrugged.“If the rusalka was roused from her half sleep, the sleepers might awaken too. I don’t know and I don’t much care.” He flipped up the gill flap with a thumbnail and picked out the morsel of meat behind it.

“We want to see this trick of yours,” said Taggle.

“Hmmm,” hummed Linay. “Come closer.”

Plain Kate hesitated, and shifted her foot to be sure of the knife in her boot. She did it subtly, but he saw it.“Oh, honestly.” He nudged her toe with his. “I saved your life. I’m hardly about to hurt you. Hold out your hands.” He mimed it, making a bowl of his own long hands and lifting it.

She looked at him narrowly. In the sun, the burn scar pulled across her scalp. She cupped and raised her hands.

“I haven’t always been a stealer of shadows, you know,” he said. “I was a weather worker, once—and welcome anywhere, welcome as a summer rain. And I still know the moods of wind and water.” He leaned over her, fitting his own hands against the underside of hers, his long fingers lappingher wrists. “You can’t expect a ghost to lick up spilled blood like a—”

“—dog,” supplied Taggle. The cat had stood up and was watching them, fur on end.

“She will take blood only from a body. But what is a body? Just a bowl for life. A bowl of breath.” And he blew a long breath into the cup of her hands. It was warm at first, and slowly it grew cold.

Kate eased her hands open. Inside them—taking their shape—was a bowl of ice. It was small as a bird’s nest, woven like that, and shining in the sun. She lifted it into the light. Delicate feathers of frost furred its edges.

“You see,” he said, smiling. “It hasn’t always been ugly.”

Then he stood up, fast, like a man insulted.“It’s a bowl. You fill it with blood and she won’t know the difference between this and a body. Thus I control her bottomless appetites. Notice that you can’t do it without me.” He turned his back on her and swung up the skillet as if it were a sword. “Kick out the fire and come aboard,” he said. “I want some distance yet today.”

But when she lifted herself over the edge of the boat he was in the hold below, and he didn’t come up at once. She thought she heard him weeping.

So they went along. The country grew lower, and the weather cooler. Kate’s hands healed slowly. Linay grew stronger, and Plain Kate learned why he had been weak.

Every evening she let her blood fill the bowl of ice that lined Linay’s hands. They were big hands, narrow but long-fingered. It caught up with her like sickness, the bloodletting. The first day she didn’t feel different. But on the second the sun made her drowsy. On the third she found herself nodding over her carving. By the fifth a sort of heaviness came over her, and made her knife shake. She sheathed it and asked, “How far to Lov?”

Linay shrugged. The old fluidness was back in his joints; he no longer moved as if his jumping-jack strings had stiffened.“Two weeks? Three? It’s not my country.” He set the pole to the river bottom, pushed them ahead, and added: “But we’re coming to it,mira. I can taste it, like ashes. Lov, at last.”

His voice made her scars ache. She ducked her head and took up the wood again.

Days passed. Linay brought back from his wanderings leather leggings and a farm boy’s smock, and she folded the long linen dress away, gladly. The next day he gave her a roll of hand tools: a rasp, a chisel, three kinds of gouges, an awl, and a carving knife. Kate, whose old knife was as much a part of her as her name, put the new knife away, but she used the other tools gratefully.

“No cat would do this,” said Taggle. “Fight.”

“I am fighting,” she answered. But slowly it stopped being true.

She tried to stop herself from feeling the surge of tenderness that came to her when he worked to heal her hands: the liquid song that had once set her father’s smashed fingers, the crooked sunburned part of Linay’s white hair as he bent his fair head.He is dangerous, she told herself.He does not love me. I do not trust him. I am only going to Lov to get back my shadow.

He does not love me. I do not belong here.