Plain Kate

TWO THE STRANGER

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 bangsand 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. Theskara 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.