Plain Kate

FOUR THE ROAMERS

Plain Kate scooched back and stared.“Taggle!”

Taggle was absorbed in the meat pie.“It’s covered inbread,” he huffed. “What fool has coveredmeat withbread?” He batted at the crust, then sprang back as it broke, and began licking gravy off his paw. “Ooooo,” he purred. “Ooooo, good.”

“Taggle,” gulped Kate, again.

The cat looked up from his licking.“Oh. Well. I could share.” He arched his whiskers forward and, like a lord, demonstrated his beneficence by giving away what he didn’t want. “There is bread you might like.”

“You’re—” Kate closed her jaw with deliberation. “You can talk.”

“It was…hrrmmmm…your wish.” His yellow eyes seemed to look inside himself. “So that you would not have to go alone.”

“Oh.”I will grant the secret wish of your heart, Linay had said.

Taggle cocked his head at her.“There’s meat too. Besides the bread. You may have some of that as well.”

The night was cool and rustly with rain. Everything she had in the world was in a haversack crushed against her hip. She was wearing an old quilt belted with a bit of twine, and the damp night was wrapped around that. And now her cat could talk. Plain Kate felt ridiculous and relieved and terrified and—despite the cat—very alone indeed.

“It is beneath my dignity to coax you.” Taggle butted at her hand. “Eat.”

So she did.

Full of meat pie and trailed by a talking cat, Plain Kate turned her back on her town and walked into the mouth of the road. Her legs wobbled and her mind whirled. Her cat could talk. She had made a deal with a witch. She was leaving her only home. She was heading for the bend, the third big stone. What she would do if Linay had not left her gear there, she didn’t know, and couldn’t think about. She had only a little food in the haversack of tools and half-done carvings. If there was nothing behind the third big stone, she would simply and slowly die.

Taggle sauntered along, arching his whiskers and tasting the night. He was wordless, and Plain Kate could almost believe she had been dreaming.So you wouldn’t be alone, he’d said. Whatever was going to happen next, she wouldn’t be alone. She spotted the stone. Leaning against it was a basket.

It was the kind of basket farmers wore on their backs, to haul harvest to market: shaped like half a barrel, with leather straps to go over the shoulders. It was new and finely made: Plain Kate fingered the smooth paleness of the woven ash splints. Taggle reared up and put his front paws on the basket rim. He worked his head under the hinged lid.“Do you suppose he packed more meat pie?” His voice was muffled, but not a dream.

“Well,” she said, feeling dazed, “let’s look.”

There were packets of hurry bread that made Taggle sniff in disgust. There was a bedroll of oilskin and fur. A hatchet. A sheepskin coat, too big for her. A hat and mittens of rabbit fur. A jumble of small things: a fire flint, a leather folder of fishhooks and another of needles, tall wool socks, a linen shift.

Linay had been generous. The thought made her uneasy.

Plain Kate took off her haversack and started tucking her tools and carvings into the basket. The last thing she pulled out was the Wheat Maiden objarka. She stopped and looked at it. The woman’s carved face seemed to shiver in her hands, and Kate realized she was shaking.

The objarka was finished and paid for. Fear urged her down the road, but honor made her turn around and look at the dark bulk of the town behind her, the weizi rising like a ship’s mast from a bank of fog.

Plain Kate set the basket on a rock and struggled into the straps. She had just managed to get herself upright when Taggle sprang up onto the basket lid and skidded to a stop by her ear. Kate yelped in surprise and wobbled as the cat shifted and turned, his side rubbing against her neck and his tail flipping around her head.“What are you doing?” she demanded.

“You couldn’t follow?”

“Dogs follow,” he said, in such a horrified tone that she didn’t bother arguing. She felt him sway behind her as she walked, then settle into the movement. They went on in silence for a while, beside the river.

A thick fog slid off the water and over the road and the town. It was like moonlight hanging in the air: a little light everywhere, so that nothing could be seen. It wrapped sounds around her, changing her footfalls and the chuckling of the river into an underwater music. It lulled and rocked her, singing.

Plain Kate felt muddled and strange. She hadn’t slept since the axe. The music seemed real; she could hear a fiddle in it, a voice singing in a language she didn’t know. She thought the river itself was singing, or the moon, or all the ghosts in the world. She shook herself, and out of the night the town’s wall suddenly loomed. Kate stopped with a bump.

“We have been fleeing,” Taggle intoned, “in the wrong direction.”

“Did you hear that?” There was still ghost music, somewhere.

“Yes,” the cat said haughtily, “it’s real. I can talk. You wished for it. And I was saying, this is the town where they were going to kill you.”

“I have to give the objarka to Niki.”

“Hrrmmmm,” he said. “Well. No one is trying to killme.”

But just in case, he wormed his way under the basket lid. Plain Kate felt him settle against her shoulder blades. She squared them and set off into the dark streets.

At the bakery, Plain Kate stopped in the doorway. She had meant to leave the Wheat Maiden on the doorstep like a baby—but she had forgotten that bakers rise early.

The half-moon mouth of the oven glowed with the coals ready deep within it. The long-handled peel lay across a table like a pike. Niki the Baker was standing at the dough trough, punching down the dough for white bread—dead pale, sticky stuff. Plain Kate watched the muscles bunching in his big arms. He looked up. “Plain Kate!”

She stood on the doorstep with the night at her back.“I brought…” She held out the objarka. “It’s finished.”

“Come in, come in.” Niki rubbed his sticky hands together, making worms of dough that dropped to the floor. “This has to rise for the morning baking. You needn’t have come so early—too early for anybody but bakers! Set her down, let’s have a look.”

Plain Kate set the objarka down and took a step back. She needed to go, but she couldn’t stop looking at the Wheat Maiden’s face.The truth, she kept thinking.The truth is—

“Plain Kate. Katerina. You’re running away.”

She shrugged.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, you are. Ah, Plain Kate. Where will you go?”

She shrugged again, and Niki sighed.“But it’s wise, little one. Wise. There’s talk.”

She stood, still looking at the objarka. Niki faltered and looked at it too.“It’s very fine, you know, very fine work. You have a way with a knife, that’s sure, a blessed blade. This will be lucky for me, sure. But I’ll miss you.” As if the admission embarrassed him, he started to bustle. “I can give you bread. Two-day-old millet, only a little stale. And I think”—he was rummaging—“there’s some hurry bread, you know, for traveling. I—” He stopped as a thought took him. “You should go with the Roamers.”

Unexpected hope rocked her. Going with other people—even a foreign and despised people—would give her a real chance to survive. “The Roamers?” she echoed.

“Yes, that’s it, Roamers,” said Niki.

They both looked at each other, not sure of how one went about being taken in by outcasts.“I’ve dealings with them, you know, over the horse,” said Niki at last. “So they’ll talk to me, I suppose. They’re down by the sheep meadows.”

He stopped, seeing her face.“No fear,” he said, patting her hand. “Roamers are right enough.”

But he had mistaken her: She was afraid not that the Roamers would take her in, but that they would turn her away.

So, at dawn in misty rain, Plain Kate found herself with Niki the Baker at the edge of the sheep meadows, just outside Samilae’s lower gate. The Roamers were just stirring: an old man uncovering a banked fire, two young women chatting and gathering eggs from sleepy chickens. Their bright-painted wagons floated in the morning dew-fog. On the far side of the camp, two dozen horses wove like shadows in the mist, and a young man in blue moved among them.

“Wait a moment,” murmured Niki, and left her standing by the low wall of stones and raspberry brambles that marked the edge of the meadow. She watched Niki go toward the horses and stood waiting. After a moment she shrugged off her basket. The lid lifted and Taggle poured himself over the side.

“Are we finished fleeing?” the cat asked, the last word swallowed by a huge yawn. He stretched forward, lengthening his back and spreading his toes, then sprang onto the wall beside her. His nose worked. “Horses,” he said. “Dogs. Hrrmmmmm. Humans. Chickens. And—ah, another cat! I must go and establish my dominance.” He leapt off the wall.

Plain Kate lunged after him.“Taggle! Wait!” She snatched him out of the air by the scruff of his neck.

“Yerrrrowww!” he shouted, hanging from her hand. “The insult! The indignity!”

Kate fell to her knees and bundled the spitting cat against her chest.“Taggle!” she hissed. “Stop!”

“I shall claw you in a moment, no matter how much I like you. Let mego!” He writhed against her chest.

“Tag, you can’t talk.”

“Ican talk,” came the muffled, outraged voice. “I can also claw and bite and scra—”

“No,” she interrupted. “Youcan’t, you mustn’t talk. Listen to me. They’ll kill you if they hear you talk.”

The cat stopped twisting.“Who would? Who would dare?”

“The other people. Please, Taggle. They’ll think it’s magic. They’ll kill us both.”

“Itis magic,” he said, reproachful. “And it wasyour wish.”

“I know—I’m sorry. But please.”

“Well. I am not afraid. But to protect you, Katerina, I will be discreet.” Plain Kate considered a cat’s idea of discretion, and was frightened. But it was the best she could do.

“Now, let me go,” said Taggle. “I have business to conduct in the language of fur and claw.”

“Good luck,” she said, and wished hard.

Plain Kate was still sitting with her back to the wall when Niki reappeared with the young man who’d been tending the horses. “Up, up,” the baker fussed. Kate stood and kept herself from backing into the wall. “Meet someone. Meet Behjet, who sold me my horse. Best horseman among the Roamers, it’s said.”

The flattery made it obvious that Niki wanted something. Plain Kate wanted to wince, but the man just said,“And who have we here, Nikolai?” He was soft-voiced, slender, wearing a blue shirt with a green kerchief knotted round his neck: kingfisher colors.

“She is, this is,” Niki sputtered, “Plain Kate. Orphan girl, orphan to Piotr Carver.” He drew Plain Kate forward into the crook of his arm. “Behjet, she needs a place.”

“Among the Roamers, you mean?” The man, Behjet, wiped his palms on his groom’s apron. “That’s no small thing to ask. Where is she going?”

Plain Kate pulled away from the soft, doughy warmth of Niki and answered for herself.“Away.”

“Hmmm,” said Behjet. “And why’s that?”

From far off, Plain Kate heard Taggle’s yowl of victory. The cat was establishing his dominance. Finding his place. “Because.” Kate swallowed. “Because they’ll kill me if I stay here. They think I’m a witch.”

“Which she’s none of,” Niki added.

“Ah,” said the young man softly. Like all the Roamers, he had dark skin and wide, uptilted dark eyes. They were horse deep and horse soft; they made him look kindly. But still he didn’t move.

Niki fluttered his hands.“And you were saying you were in need of a carpenter, that you had to fix your wagons in every other town and wished for a carpenter among you. Plain Kate is a woodworker.”

“A good one,” added Kate. Her voice came out level. She was proud of that.

Behjet blew through his lips, whuffling like one of his horses.“Taking in agadje—it’s not for me to decide. But let me take you to meet my mother.” He started off across the close-cropped, drizzle-gray grass.

Plain Kate pulled on her pack-basket and hurried after him, with Niki trailing.“What does ‘gage-eh’ mean?”

“Gadje-eh,” Behjet corrected, pulling herg towardz.“It means ‘not one of the Roamers.’ It’s not the kindest word, and I’m sorry for it. But you must not think that because we have no walls, we have no ways. We are not wild men, for all that we are not welcome most places. Now then.” They had come to the wagons. They were small, with high wheels, their beds wooden and heavily carved, bright with paint. Their decks were covered by canvas pulled across bows of wood. On the back steps of a red-painted wagon, an apple-faced old woman was plucking a rooster. She was bundled in green and yellow skirts and many scarves. Gray hair frizzed from under her turban and dripped into her dark face.

Niki did not bow, but he twisted his hands in front of him as if he thought maybe he should.“Mother Daj,” he said.

“Daj,” said Behjet, who did bow a little, and then added something in another language. It seemed to Plain Kate like a long speech, and she was frustrated. If her fate was being decided, she wanted to understand.

Behjet fell silent. Plain Kate found the woman looking at her, her eyes small and bright as a hawk’s among her wrinkles. Copying Behjet, she bowed, but said nothing.

“A carver, eh?” the woman drawled. She used the rooster’s beak to point at Kate’s objarka. “Just fancy work?”

Plain Kate planted her feet as if about to fight.“Plain and fancy. Boxwork, wheelwork, turned wood. But mostly carving.” She took off the objarka, which her father had called a masterpiece, and passed it to the woman.

She turned the dark wooden cat round and round in her dark hands, put its little nose to her big one.“She’s a good blade, Mother,” said Niki. But the old woman ignored the baker, intent on Kate’s objarka and some internal question. At last she said, “Well, we could use a carver, and that’s sure, child.” Her head was still down, as if she were speaking to the carved cat. Then she looked up, her face soft with wrinkles. “And though you keep it from your face, I think you could use us. You have your own gear? Your own tools?”

Plain Kate nodded.

“I can’t promise you a place. But come with us to Toila. A month on the road. We’ll sniff each other out.”

A test. Plain Kate understood tests. She nodded again. A lump was tightening in her throat, but she wasn’t sure if it was hope or fear.

“Well, then,” said the woman. “I’m Daj. Or Mother Daj if that sets better on a town tongue. And you’re Kate.”

“Plain Kate,” she corrected.

Daj raised her eyebrows, but before she could say anything, Taggle sauntered up. There was a fresh scratch across one ear and a dead rat in his mouth. He dropped the pink-footed body at Daj’s feet and stood there grinning. Plain Kate winced. “I also,” she said, “have a cat.”

“A fine beast, Mother Daj,” put in Niki. “A famous mouser.”

“Well,” said Daj. “A useful pair, then. Welcome, cat.”

And Taggle nodded.

Plain Kate, at Daj’s gruff coaxing, swung her basket into the wagon bed, and Taggle, with no coaxing at all, sprang up beside it. “Did you see?” he said, arching his back into her hand, preening. “My gift has proven that we’re useful.”

“Taggle,” Kate hissed. She looked round. No one had heard.

The cat sulked.“One would think praise was in order.”

“Please be quiet,” she said. “Look, here.” She pulled her new coat out of the basket and spread it, woolly side up, for him to nestle in.

“Ah,” he said, stepping onto the wool like a king deigning to enter a hovel. “Better.” He high-stepped daintily in three circles, then curled up, tucking his tail over his nose.

“Sleep quietly,” she urged him, rubbing a thumb between his ears. He gave her a bleary glare and closed his eyes.

Plain Kate rushed after Behjet and Niki the Baker. Their feet had knocked down the dew and left dark prints in the silver grass, which was short where the sheep had grazed. The trail of darkness made her think of her shadow.The loss of a shadow is a slow thing, Linay had said.Find someplace to belong. If the Roamers took her in, if she proved herself useful, then there would come a moment where she could explain, before someone saw.

Niki left her with Behjet, though not without fluttering about like a bird trying to get its nestling to fly. Behjet sighed after him, then went back to tending the horses.

Plain Kate watched him work. She was desperate to be of use, but didn’t know what to do. Behjet was tending a dun mare, holding one of her hooves up clamped between his legs, and working a stone from the hoof’s spongy bottom with a little hook. The other horses milled around. Plain Kate had never been so close to horses. They were big. She smelled horse sweat, leather, and dung each time one shifted. Behjet’s dark head was bent; he murmured to the restless beast. The work looked dangerous. She didn’t even dare ask how she could help.

Behjet finished with the mare and moved on to another horse. He spoke smoothly to the animals in his own language. Plain Kate liked his voice: calm but rich. It made her a little more comfortable, and she almost missed it when he began speaking to her.“It was the witchcraft that swayed her,” he said.

“What?” said Kate.

“Daj. I told her your people took you for a witch. It is why she decided to take you in. You should know.”

“Oh,” said Kate.

“My brother’s wife—she was burned for a witch. It happens to Roamers. More than our share.” He stood up, wiping his hands on his leather apron and mopping the drizzle from his face with his green kerchief. “Stick to Daj, Plain Kate. Don’t take her for softhearted—she’s badger fierce. But if she decides to take your part, your place here will be sure.”

Plain Kate didn’t know what to say to that. A sure place—it was too big a thing even to think about. Behjet had read her heart’s wishes as well as any witch. Not alone.

“Off you go then,” said Behjet. “It’s busy work to break camp; I’m sure your hands will find something.”

Plain Kate found Mother Daj still sitting on the wagon steps. The rooster was mostly plucked, and Daj wore a spray of glossy tail feathers tucked into her turban. She was presiding over two younger women shaking out great rugs and another bent over a jumbled box of gear. At Daj’s feet, a girl a little younger than Kate was scouring a pot. The girl looked up with eyes as bright and frank as a sparrow’s.

“Mother Daj,” Kate asked, feeling shy. “Can I help?”

“There’s naught that needs carving this minute,” Daj answered. Kate swallowed—it was such a quick dismissal. Daj seemed to see the twitch and guess the reason. Her face softened, and she said, “Drina, lass. Finished that, nearly?”

The girl with the pot replied,“I have to go for more sand.” Her voice was a sparrow’s too: clear and piping, hiding nothing. She had a narrow nose and a wide mouth, and big eyes that were uptilted, like a cat’s. Though younger than Kate, she was taller, and softer: a girl who had never been hungry. Her long black hair was bound back with a scarf of green and yellow; her dark skirts were embroidered with poppies.

“Take this one,” said Daj, pointing an elbow at Kate while she turned the chicken over. “This is Kate Carver, who will go our way a while.”

“Plain Kate,” corrected Plain Kate.

“Hmph, so you said.” Daj eyed her. “As you’d have it, kit. But you’re not so plain as it needs remarking on every moment.” Kate blushed, and Daj smiled softly, and said, “Drina here will show you about. Keep you from being trampled.” She lifted the limp, feathery head and pointed around with it. “What with the great bustle.”

So Drina picked up an empty pail and led Plain Kate down toward the river. They climbed over the loose wall of stones at the edge of the sheep meadow and into the unkempt land where the river sometimes flooded. The grasses there were tall and bent with water. Sapling birch trees trembled and dripped in the misty rain. Plain Kate’s leggings got soaked and heavy. Drina’s long legs shone wet, and her skirts drooped around her knees. The two girls went silently, sneaking glances at each other.

“You wouldn’t really get trampled,” offered Drina after a while. “Daj was joking.”

“Oh, it was funny,” said Kate. She meant it but it came out dry, and Drina laughed.

“Anyway—you must be used to more people than this.”

“Yes, but—” Plain Kate wasn’t sure how to explain. “They don’t usually talk to me.”

“Well,” said Drina, swinging her pail in a full loop, “if you go the Roamer way, we’re not short on talk. Lots of other things, but not talk, is what Daj says.”

“Is Daj your mother?”

“Oh, no!” Drina laughed. “She’s too old! I just call her that. Everyone does. It’s respect.”

“Call her…?” Kate was lost.

“Daj. Oh, you don’t speak the tongue. You’ll have to learn a little.Daj means‘mother.’ But she’s not, she just looks after me, because my mother is dead.”

“So’s mine.” Plain Kate was glad of it, for the first time. It gave her something in common with this cheerful, well-loved girl.

“Oh!” Drina stopped swinging her pail and stood there, skirt-deep in the soaked grass. She looked legless, like a chess piece. “Do you miss her?”

“No. She died when I was born.”

“Oh,” said Drina, and started walking again.

“I miss my father, though.” Plain Kate was trying to keep the flow of talk going. “He died four years ago, in theskara rok. He got the witch’s fever.”

And Drina—cheerful, smiling Drina—snapped at her, almost snarled: “Don’t call it that!”

Plain Kate felt her shoulders tighten and come forward as if to protect her heart.“Don’t call it—skara rok?”

“Don’t call it ‘witch’s fever.’ Witches don’t make fevers or sicken cows or kill crops or any of that.”

“I didn’t say they did. But witch’s—I mean, the sickness. Everyone calls it that.”

“I know.” Drina’s voice was softer now. They had reached the river at the inner side of a broad curve where a slope of clay and pebbles eased into the water. Drina walked on the margin, placing her feet delicately as a heron and watching her prints fill with water. “But it’s—with theskara rok, people look for someone to blame. Ugly people. Outsiders. Witch-whites. Roamers.”

Carvers, thought Kate. She thought she knew more about being hunted and blamed than Drina did, but she did not say so.

The winding river Narwe was turning again; there was a huge stone a pace or two into the channel, and jammed against it a wall of tangled trunks and limbs, remnants of some old flood, cut across their way. Drina blew through her lips in frustration.“Nothing here!”

“What are you looking for?”

“Sand. Clean sand, to scour the pots.”

The anger that Drina had shown a moment ago had slid from her completely and easily, like water off of oiled wood. That sort of generosity was a new thing to Plain Kate; she didn’t know how to take it. But she said, “There’s sand just alee of this fall.” She pointed past the snarl of bleached wood. “That’s what I use.”

“I guess even a town girl has to scrub pots,” said Drina, swinging up over the timbers, staining her legs with moss.

Plain Kate climbed carefully up behind her.“I’ve only got one pot. I use the sand to smooth wood. For carving. That’s who I am, a carver.”

The drizzle had broken into patches as they walked. As Drina scooped up the pale sand, Kate found herself standing in the smudge of shadow cast by the deadfall. She had never before noticed the way shadows gave things weight, made them look heavy and real and connected to the ground. Without hers…

She edged into the light.

Her shadow looked strange and thinned. It seemed not cast against the ground, but floating above it, like a fog. What Linay had said was true: No one would notice this, at first. It was just an uneasy little change, like the half-felt movement of a boat that slowly induces a great sickness.

“Got it!” Drina’s voice came from her elbow, suddenly. She scrambled up the bank toward the field, and Kate followed. At the meadow wall, Drina stopped. “If we go back now, we’ll have to pluck chickens.” She snuck Kate a sly, friendly look. “Let’s go see if Behjet needs help.”

“I asked him already,” said Plain Kate, then regretted it as Drina’s face fell.

Drina rubbed a bare foot against the other leg, smearing mud.“Well. Let’s go see the horses, anyway. Just for a moment.” She swung up onto the wall and walked along the loose, wobbly stones, easy and graceful. “Come on!” Plain Kate walked beside her, though Drina’s feet were level with Kate’s shoulders. Even if she could have walked the wall—and it looked like an acrobat’s trick—Kate would not have dared. It could attract attention.

The horses were picketed on the far side of the camp. There were about two dozen drays: big, powerful animals, the engines of farms and towns. Scattered among them were a handful of draft ponies, and some of the smaller, faster, feistier horses meant for riding.

Drina flipped off the wall, heels over head, landed neat-footed, and ran over to them. Kate came cautiously with her. Drina was stroking a cart horse’s pink, freckled nose. The horse was nearly white, but dappled with dun patches, like butter floating in buttermilk. “This is Cream,” said Drina. She stooped and pulled a handful of grass and held it out. The horse wrapped her tongue around Drina’s hand. “She’s mine.” Drina glanced sideways at Plain Kate, then twitched a smile and amended: “I mean, she’s my favorite. I helped her be born.” Cream worked her jaw and whickered. Drina leaned her cheek into the hollow between Cream’s huge collarbones. Her face looked like stained walnut against the horse’s coat of pale newpine.

Drina looked at Plain Kate, eyes shining.“Do you want to ride her?”

Plain Kate looked up at the horse: way up.“I don’t know how.”

“I’ll teach you. It’s not hard, you just have to hold on.”

“I… Shouldn’t we get back?”

“We should.” Drina wrapped her arms up toward Cream’s shoulders and kissed her chin. The horse whuffled and lipped Drina’s hair. “But I’ll teach you to ride soon. You can’t go the Roamer way without riding.”

There were a hundred things to tend to, a thousand things to do, in the breaking of a camp, and Plain Kate didn’t know how to do any of them.

She didn’t know how to unhook a cooking tripod and bind the three legs together into a single iron staff, or where to tuck the tripod under the cart. She didn’t know how to fold a wet rug so that it wouldn’t mold. She didn’t know how to oil horse tack or fix a harness.

There were eggs to gather and chickens to catch and stuff into wicker baskets, which were in turn piled into a rough iron cage.“A bear cage,” said Drina, her arms full of squawking feathers. “We had a dancing bear for the markets. She died.” Plain Kate didn’t know how to catch chickens.

“I’ll show you,” offered Taggle, who was still drowsing on her coat.

“Tomorrow,” she whispered, and hoped she could keep him quiet that long.

The Roamers hoisted the iron cage onto the top of one of the wagons with a block and tackle. Kate didn’t know how to use a block and tackle. She didn’t know why the one wagon was like a little house on wheels, built of solid wood, while the others were like tents. She couldn’t even keep the three women straight: one was Daj’s daughter, and the other two some sort of complicated cousins. Shewasn’t sure where the men were or whether she was allowed to talk to them, since the other women did not.

But she did know how to scrub a pot. It was not too different from smoothing a finished carving, and was done with a folded square of leather, dipped wet into sand. Plain Kate scoured pots until they gleamed black as the night reflected in the river, and by the time that was done, the Roamers were ready to go.

And when they went, Plain Kate went with them.