Plain Kate

FOURTEEN BLOOD AND QUESTIONS

The next evening they anchored in a place where the fields of barley and rye came right down to the river, the grain growing among the riverside tangle of bloodtwig and basket rush. The grain—as Kate had come to dread—was unharvested, and full of feasting starlings. As the sunset lit, the birds threw themselves into the sky in tongues of dark fire that flashed back and forth across the river. Linay stood up on the roof of the hold, playing his fiddle. The skirling notes wove through the rush of wings.

Plain Kate kept her head bent over the carving, her heart beating faster as the light sank. The fog rose up around her. The fiddle grew quieter and quieter until both it and its player were lost in the thickening darkness. Plain Kate slotted her carving tools one by one into their leather roll. The tool case was a very fine thing, its felt-lined inner pockets soft with long use, its smooth-grained outside stained dark with someone’s sweat. It hadn’t been abandoned; the carver in Kate was sure of that. Someone had died. And then Linay had stolen it and given it to her. And she’d been grateful.

The fog was so thick now that she felt completely alone. Then Taggle came from nowhere, standing regally at her elbow, with his ears pricked and his fine head lifted. They heard Linay jump down onto the deck. He emerged from the fog and stopped in front of them. Wordless, he held out his cupped hands, ready for her blood.

Kate stood up.“I won’t,” she said.

“Oh, won’t you? I believe we had a bargain. Your blood for your shadow.”

“I gave you blood. I never said I’d keep giving it.” In the rye field the birds settled into a silence that struck Kate as ominous. She drew herself up. “I want something else.”

“I want answers,” said Kate. “To three questions.”

“Three questions!” He laughed. “Do you think you’re a fair maid in a tale? Shall I fetch a mirror, Little Stick, to set you straight?”

“Two questions,” she bargained.

Linay stopped laughing. A thicker fog was beginning to pour over the side of the punt.“You would haggle with hell’s boatman,” Linay spat at her, then thinned his voice to a little girl’’: “One coin or two?”

Kate tried a shrug.“Bleed yourself, if you’d rather.”

“I’ll help,” said Taggle.

Linay ignored the cat, and spoke as if to himself.“I am going to need my strength.”

The boar was full of fog now. Plain Kate felt as if they might sink into it and drown.

“One question,” said Linay.

“One a night.”

“Done. Now bleed.”

So she did, letting the blood trickle into the bowl of ice in Linay’s hands. In the twilight, it looked black. As the bowl filled, the fog rose and thickened and began to eddy around them and rub at them like a stray dog. In another moment the rusalka was there, thin as a rib bone but wrapped halfway around them. She leaned for the blood. There was nothing humanin her face, nothing lovely—just a bottomless avidity.

Kate backed away.

Linay, though, stayed where he was, and when the rusalka knelt to drink he crouched beside her, as if he wanted to wrap an arm around her shoulders. He was singing something. Kate couldn’t hear what.

She reached down and picked up Taggle. Together they watched the rusalka and Linay kneeling together like a bride and groom. They waited.

The rusalka drank the blood from the bowl, and when she was gone, Linay folded up. He sat on the deck with his knees drawn up and his head resting on his arms.

“Linay?” said Kate. She couldn’t tell whether or not he was weeping.

He fluttered a pale hand without lifting his head.“Yes, yes. Ask your question.”

“Why—” she asked softly. She found, to her surprise, that she didn’t want to hurt him. “Why are you taking her—Lenore—to Lov?”

“She died there.” His bent head made his voice soft. “In theskara rok. She was tending the sick.” He laughed, barely louder than the river. “By the Black Lady, they would hardly have needed to kill her—she had spent so much of herself in healing magic. But they did. They killed her. They took her for a witch, they tortured her, and they killed her. The people of Lov.”

Kate sat down on the pole man’s seat not beside Linay but near. “So why? Why take her back there?”

“After—” He swallowed. “After I saw what she had become, I decided I had to save her. I studied dark magic. I went to dark places. I spoke with…things…no man should speak with. I gathered power. And I learned. I learned, among other things, that a rusalka’s fate can be undone by avenging her death.”

“But—people have died.”People I knew, she thought.Stivo. Wen. And maybe—don’t let it be Drina.“It’s already done. People have already died.”

Linay shrugged.“But not the people who killed her.”

“Lov,” she said. “The people of Lov.”

“Lov.” He nodded. “So at last we are going.” With that he lifted his head. He was not weeping. His face was set and fierce as a blade. Plain Kate stood up and wished she had room to back away.

“Enough,” he said, looking down and dashing the fragments of ice from his hands. “Go.”

She went.

The carving of Lenore’s face was going to be beautiful. Even in its rough form, it arrested. The nose, narrow. The mouth, rich and sad. The eyes, tilted as a fox’s eyes. The hair, wild as the fog, vanishing seamlessly into those seaweed wings. All the next morning, Plain Kate worked on it, staying in the hold to avoid Linay’s eyes. And though Taggle disliked the hot closed space, he stayed with her, drowsing at her feet.

Working fast and fearlessly, Kate used a chisel to free high cheekbones and quizzical brows from the wood that had enclosed them. Lenore. Kate could see Drina’s lively eyes in the carving’s face. She felt a stab of loss and guilt. Drina. What had happened to Drina?

And this woman who had been her mother, with her lively eyes, with Linay’s full mouth, with some alchemy of mischief and sadness that was all her own, Lenore: Was there anything left of her, inside the rusalka? Did she know what she had become? When she took her own husband, Stivo, into her gray sleeping kingdom, had she known?

At Pan Oksar’s farm, Plain Kate had seen a new thing: The Oksar people, with their foreign ways, had nailed iron to trees for luck. Horseshoes and rough crosses shaped of broken plowshares and pitchfork tines. Some had been there a long time, and the trees, in their swelling growth, had edged their bark overthe metal like slow lips, had grown around their injury and taken black iron into their mouths, into their hearts.

Linay had taken his sister’s fate inside that way. And its weight and blackness had sent him slowly mad. No wonder his people had cast him out. He was as lost as Lenore was—more lost, because unlike her, he surely did know. He did know what he was doing.

And he was going to do it anyway. Unless she could stop him.

So, on the second night, Kate waited, slapping at mosquitoes, and Taggle came over and sat, sphinxlike, between her feet. The light grew blue and the fog caught up to them. Soon the little punt was alone in a world of it.

Linay shipped his pole and came forward, springing lightly onto the boat roof, and then down again to the deck in front of Kate. He bowed to her elaborately.“Fair maid of the wood, again the moment has come. Ask your question.”

“How?” she said. “You are going to revenge Lenore’s death. How?”

“Hmmm,” he said. “Your interest is…interesting. Are you planning another little adventure? Have you given any thought to how that might turn out?”

“How?” she insisted.

“Why,” he said with a little smile. “I am going to destroy the city, of course.”

He was still smiling when he held out his hands for blood. All that evening he did not say another word.

“I think we should kill him,” said Taggle.

Plain Kate put her head in her hands. The hold was hot, and the rocking made her queasy.“There must be,” she muttered. “There must be something we can do to stop him.”

“Yes,” said the cat, patiently. “Killing him would stop him.”

“I can’t.” She traced the curve of Lenore’s carved cheek. “I can’t.”

Plain Kate stayed below as long as she could, until after the boat stopped moving, until she could smell the fog rising. When she came up the ladder she didn’t see Linay at first, but when she turned he was inches away, sitting cross-legged on the hold roof, grinning like a wolf. “Well, Little Stick,” he said. “Are you ready to match wits?”

Kate turned to face him. They had anchored in a mill-pond, slate-dark in the twilight and lively with swallows. The millrace chattered and the wheel turned, but the grindstones inside were silent and the chimney was cold. Plain Kate knew what she’d find if she went inside: the miller fled, like the rest of the country, before the wall of fog and the rusalka’s gray sleep.A mill, she thought.This country will starve.

“Well?” said Linay.

Kate braced herself.“How do you plan to destroy Lov?”

“Why,” drawled Linay. “With your help, little one. Are you sure you want to know?”

Her scalp prickled. She could feel the rusalka somewhere close, but she was more afraid of the man in front of her. She spread her feet for balance.“How?”

“You’ll die if you try to stop me,” he said.

“Three times, I ask you,” she said. “How.”

Linay chuckled.“Oh, Plain Kate. A little hero. And I took you for the weakest in your town.” He stood suddenly, gliding to his feet. Kate was trembling, but she didn’t wince away. “Would you like to see?” His voice was almost amused, almost gentle. It was like Taggle when he tucked away his claws to make some unlucky thing last longer. “Shall I show you the fate of Lov?”

Fear made her skull push against the inside of her skin. Her lips were numb. Speechless, she nodded.

“Come,” said Linay, and stepped over the side of the boat.

Kate cried out and reached to save him—but he did not sink. Around his feet was a sheen of white on the dark water. Ice. He was standing on ice in the warm, still evening. Linay stepped away from her, toward the mill, and the ice flowed out from him, unrolling like a carpet, like a bridge for a king. The mill wheel clattered and groaned to a stop, jammed with ice, and the stillness tightened in Kate’s throat.

“She’s just a ghost, you know,” he said, his soft voice eddying across the water. He stepped up onto the stone wall between the millrace and the pond and stood there as if on a stage. “Just one more of the shadowless people in this shadowy world. But add a shadow to a ghost—”

And he drew a knife across his wrist.

Blood sputtered and spattered. She could hear it pattering into the black water.

As the blood fell, the rusalka rose up. It was like death happening backward, bones rising and taking on a loose skin.“Sister,” Linay said, and offered the thing his hand. She took it, and stepped onto the wall beside him, dainty. She bent her head toward his bleeding wrist, but he stopped her, putting the back of his hand under her chin and raising her face to his. His whisper carried: “Forgive me.” And he seized her arm and wrenched.

The rusalka twisted like a rope. Strands of her separated and coiled around one another. Her face distorted into a silent scream.

Then something ripped through Kate—cold as a hand on her neck, sudden as a dream about falling. The thing flew across the water toward Linay and Lenore, and Kate recognized it: her shadow.

Linay was chanting something. He was still twisting Lenore’s arm, though she screamed. The shadow followed the ugly curves of his words, insinuating itself into the new rents of the rusalka’s body, a rope braiding itself into another rope.

And suddenly, in the place of the woman-shape made of fog, there was something else. Something huge, something ugly. Linay flung up both hands. The thing screamed like a hawk and opened two wings: one white as a death cap, one clotted in shadow. The wings came together and the whole pond shuddered.

Something hit Kate’s ear and shoulder and smashed to the deck by her feet. It was a swallow, dead. She could hear them falling all over the pond. The shadow-and-white wings smashed open and Kate threw herself downward to get under them. She could feel thick death moving just above her head.

Then Linay dropped his hands again. And the shadow wings closed, folded.

“She is gone for now,” said Linay. He stepped down from the wall and came across the groaning ice.

Taggle sprang up on the gunwale between Kate and the striding man.“Keep your distance!” he hissed.

“But it was her question!” Linay laughed, bitter and wild. “How will I destroy Lov? With the ghost and the shadow. It will take a spell of great power to bind your shadow to the rusalka for more than a moment. But I have worked for years to gather that power. Do not doubt that I can do it. And when I do it—do not doubt that everyone those wings touch will die. The whole city of Lov. And you, Plain Kate—”

But at that instant, Taggle snarled and sprang.

Linay caught the leaping cat with his eyes and a rhyme like a thrown spear. Taggle crashed to the deck and made a high, terrible noise.“Tag!” Kate shouted. She went to her knees beside him. The cat was shaking as if in seizure. She tried to scoop him up but Linay’s hand closed on her wrist. He was back aboard the boat. He jerked her toward him. Kate felt the crush of his strong hand, even as she twisted around to get at Taggle.

“He’ll live,” Linay snapped.

“What did you do to him?” she gasped.

“I am still answering your question,” he hissed at her, “and you will listen to me.” He scooped up the dead bird from the decking. It was falling apart in his hands, crumbling like termite-rotted wood. “This is why I need a shadow. This is the fate of Lov. The city that tried to burn my sister. She will have her revenge and thus her fate will be undone. The gray wing will kill everyone in that city, from the bell ringer in the church tower to the orphan huddled in the lowest cellar. This is what I will do with your shadow.”

“I won’t help you,” she gasped; he was breaking her wrist. “I’ll kill myself.”

He laughed.“Your shadow is bought and paid for, and your death will not remit that payment. You can go shadowless into the shadowless world, and your death will only be one last dark thing on my long dark road. It will hurt me but I do not care. It is all but over.”

He released her. Kate staggered back. Her wrist pounded.“Go to bed,” he said. “I have the blood I need.”

Kate picked up Taggle and leapt into the hold, not bothering with the ladder. Her ankles jammed and she welcomed the clean pain that cleared her eyes of tears. She ran to the box that had held her shadow and wrenched the lid open. She was ready to die if she could take her shadow with her. But the box was empty, holding only splinters and air. It was gone. Her shadow was gone.

She sat on the bunk edge with Taggle limp on her lap. She waited in shaking silence, until silence fell on the deck above. Then she tied the carving of Lenore to her hip, stole Linay’s socks, took the unconscious cat in her arms, and lowered herself over the side of the boat, into the river.