Plain Kate

SIX SECRETS AND ROSES

Drina leapt to her feet. Her skirts swirled and tangled and she stumbled and tumbled to the ground. Fog billowed up around her.“Did he—” she gasped. “Did the cat—?”

“Did he what?” the cat drawled.

“Talk,” gulped Drina.

“Drina…” Plain Kate shivered and her skin burned. She was ready to beg but not sure what to beg for, or how to begin. “Drina, if you tell—if people find out—”

“They’ll kill you.” Drina looked white-eyed as a frightened rabbit, ready to bolt.

It was so quiet for a moment that Plain Kate could hear the flame in the lantern behind her beating its wings.“You know,” said Taggle, “you were just reaching that itchy spot over the jaw.”

“Taggle,” hissed Kate. Then suddenly words came spilling out of her. “Drina,mira Drina, please, I’m not a witch, there was a man, and he was a witch, he made me give him my shadow—he’s the one who made Taggle talk.”

“You’re under a curse,” said Drina. “He cursed you.”

Plain Kate hadn’t thought of it that way, but she nodded. Her throat had almost closed and her skull felt as if it might break through her skin.

“I’ll—” Drina’s voice broke; she swallowed. “I’ll help you break it.”

Plain Kate stared at her.“You will?”

“My mother—” Drina looked down at her hands, rubbing her thumb against the place on the step corner where the red paint had worn away. “My mother was a witch. I have her power, I think, and I was learning when she—she was going to teach me. But they killed her.”

“They—” said Kate.

“In this city, Lov. It was in theskara rok, the witch’s fever. They were burning witches. They found out she had power and—”

Kate remembered thinking that she knew more about witch-hunting than Drina did. She had been wrong.“They burned her,” she said, so that Drina didn’t have to.

“Yes. No.” Drina sat down and Kate could feel the trembling that came off of her, like water fluttering in a breeze. “They took her. They hurt her until she told them—I don’t know. That she had brought the fever, I think. And then they—they burned her. They tried to burn her. But she had power, real power. She broke free and she ran. She was burning. She threw herself into the river and she drowned.”

“Drina…” said Kate, but could not go on.

“So I’ll help you,” Drina said. “I have power and I want to help you.”

Kate closed her eyes.“Help me,” she said.

Late, in the warm darkness of thevardo, Drina and Plain Kate lay whispering. The rain tapped on the canvas roof, and Daj snored a few feet away. Taggle was stretched out between the girls, belly up, one ear under each chin, rumbling in bliss. Plain Kate told Drina about the swarm of fish, the stink of the smokehouse, the axe in the dark. About why she had traded her shadow for a handful of fishhooks.

About the man who had done it, who had pulled her shadow from her like the shell from a shrimp, she said little. In that country, people said that if you spoke of demons, demons came. Linay. Kate didn’t want to say his name.

“Your shadow,” whispered Drina. “But—I’ve seen you. I know it’s always raining, but—I’ve seen you. Are you sure you’ve lost your shadow?”

“He said it would be slow.” Saying it that way made it sound awful, like a slow death. She tried to back away from that. “I’m sure, anyway. I can feel it…like a sack with a hole in it. Spilling.”

“Bleeding?” offered Taggle. “Like when you bite something small around the belly. They leak.”

Kate did not feel much helped by this expert observation.“What will happen to me, Drina? Did your mother teach you—?”

Drina was silent a while. Then she said,“When my mother died—after she died, my uncle—” Behind them, Daj snorted and shifted in her sleep. The two girls tensed, then eased as the snoring started again. Drina continued, her voice the softest of whispers.

“My uncle was a witch too. They were twins, my mother and he, and they were always together; it was like they had one heart between them. I remember, we were camped outside the walls of Lov, by the river. When my mother died, I mean. And he found her, her body, floating there against the water gate. All—all burnt and hurt, he said. They wouldn’t let me see her.

“My father screamed and screamed. But my uncle got so quiet. There’s something wrong, he said, he kept saying, something is wrong with her. And my father hit him. He said of course there’s something wrong, she’s dead! But my uncle—he didn’t want her buried. And when we did bury her, he lay flat on her grave and he wouldn’t eat and he wouldn’t talk.

“And finally he said—she’s not here. She’s not resting, she’s not here. Father threatened to kill him if he didn’t shut up, but he wouldn’t. He said: Don’t bother, I’m going to kill myself. And he was a witch, you know, so it was true. Everything he said was true, one way or another.”

“And—did he?” asked Plain Kate. “Did he kill himself?”

“No. He took his shadow—that’s why I’m telling you this. He made a rope out of his own hair—he cut it all off and made it into a rope. And he soaked it in blood, his blood. And he waited until morning and he made a noose out of that rope, and he threw it down on top of his shadow, on top of the shadow’s heart. And—I saw this, it was real—the shadow got a hole in it, like he had a hole right through him and the sun was shining through. This little piece of shadow came loose, got solid, like a bird. And he picked it up and held it in his hand.

“And then he called her, my mother. He used her name. That was—we never speak the names of the dead. But he called her and he said: ‘Come and tell me where you are!’ ”

Drina’s breath, as she echoed her uncle’s cry, stirred Kate’s hair. Daj shifted again, and both girls froze in silence, listening, as if it had been them who had just summoned the dead.

“She was in the shadowless country,” said Plain Kate. “The land of the dead.”

“But she—something—something came.”

A gust of wind blew branches against thevardo; they scraped like fingernails. Even the cat was silent now.

“He put the shadow on her tongue,” said Drina. “And she spoke. I didn’t hear. He wouldn’t tell me what she said.”

There was a long pause. The canvas roof of thevardo shone faint as the dark of the moon, and that was the only light.“My uncle summoned my mother’s spirit with just a piece of his own shadow,” said Drina. “A shadow gives a ghost life, I think. Power. With a whole shadow—I think a strong witch could raise the dead.”

“That must be why…” Kate trailed off.

“Why your shadow was taken. But what it means to be without a shadow…I do not know.”

The two girls whispered together deep into the night, slept close together with Taggle between them, then got up and stirred the fires, caught the chickens, and hauled the water. And from that day on they walked side by side.

Plain Kate tried to learn the rules of magic, which were stranger and harder than the rules of living among the Roamers. In truth Drina was not a good teacher. She only half knew things herself, and remembering tore her between the joy of her mother’s memory and the fear of her mother’s fate.

So Kate learned only a little.Magic is an exchange of gifts: That was the first rule. Thus, Drina’s nameless uncle had given up a piece of his shadow to give speech to the dead. And thus, Linay had had to make payment in magic for Kate’s shadow. Thus, the talking cat.

“A bargain,” said the cat, “at any price.”

All great magic requires a great gift. But even small magics asked something, Drina said. And so a witch would put little parts of hetself into a spell—hair, say, or tears.

“Blood,” said Taggle. “It’s always blood.”

Plain Kate narrowed her eyes at him.“What do you know about magic?”

“I,” he intoned, wrapping his tail over his paws and sitting up regally, “am a talking cat.”

“He’s right,” said Drina. “Blood’s the most powerful. Blood and breath. You shape the magic with breath—you sing it. That is why witches can’t lie, my mother said. Power flows along your words. Lying turns that power against you. It’s a real thing. It can kill you.”

“So your uncle…” A question had been growing in Kate’s mind for days, growing as her shadow thinned and twisted. “Did he die? He said he’d kill himself. Did he die, without his shadow?”

“He—” Drina paused. “He went mad. Eventually—the clan spoke death to him. They cast him out. He went alone.”

“But what happened to him?”

“You don’t understand,” said Drina. “We spoke death to him. He died to us. His name was closed. He went alone.”

It was a Roamer thing, but Plain Kate understood it better than Drina thought. Toila was coming. In Toila they would test her, and after that she might well be cast out. When they stopped next, Taggle snuggled his head up under her chin and purred while she clung to him.“Not alone,” he rumbled. “Not alone.”

Thevardo inched on, farther into the wild country. One evening they camped near a charcoal burner’s hut, deep in the woods. It was abandoned: The woodpiles were covered with bird droppings, the black doorway drifted with last year’s leaves. Plain Kate didn’t like the place, but it did mean she and Drina had little work to do—there was a well for water, and wood for burning.

Kate was almost out of cured wood for carving. She rummaged through the woodpile until her arms were smeared with black rot and her face was sticky with spiderwebs. She did not hear Drina behind her. When her shoulder was touched she jumped and knocked her head hard on a branch that stuck out from the pile. She sat down, feeling sick. Taggle sprang down and pressed his nose to hers as she leaned over and tried to get her breath.

“I’m sorry!” Drina crouched over her. “Are you hurt?”

Taggle’s amber eyes shone inches from her face. “Would you like me to claw her for you?”

Kate put a hand to her head; her hair was damp, but with rain, not blood: There was no warmth.“Not hurt,” she said. She fuzzled the cat between the ears. “No clawing.”

“I only wanted to say—let me braid your hair.” The way she said it made it sound like something dangerous. It took Plain Kate a few moments to remember the story Drina had told about her uncle carving out the heart of his own shadow:He made a rope of his hair and soaked it in blood…

Plain Kate felt her throat tighten.“Are you sure?”

Drina took a moment in answering. She sat down beside Plain Kate in the wet moss.“I saw you,mira. Yesterday, when the sun broke over the river for a moment. Your shadow—it was like a river flowing away from you. Too long. Thin like a needle. And it pointed toward the river.Toward the sun.”

Oak and beech trees brooded over them, muttering in the rain. Plain Kate looked down at her knotted hands. They looked strange: The space inside her fingers held no shadow, only more washed-out gray air. It was as if they were not real.

“We must do something,” said Drina, “and it must be soon.”

Plain Kate turned to look at Drina, and then beyond her, to where the charcoal-burning sheds stood like hives of shadow.“Thank you,” she murmured. “Even if we can’t—thank you.”

“Now! None of that!” Drina stood up, shaking her skirts clean and suddenly sounding like Daj. “You’re not going to die, you know!”

So Plain Kate got up, and followed Drina into the redvardo, where the younger girl perched on the bunk and brushed Kate’s hair, and then plaited it. She was singing as she did it, something tuneless, her breath warm on Kate’s scalp. Kate promised herself that no matter what happened, she wouldn’t forget this: having her snarly hair brushed slowly smooth, feeling the warm fingers on her scalp and then the shifts and tugs as Drina made up the braid.

Taggle, all the while, insisted he should be next when it came to fussing over fur.

When they were done, Plain Kate had a small braid, the width of a finger, dangling over each ear. Drina tucked them up on the crown of her head and covered them with one of her own scarves: a bright bit of blue rag with a pattern of stars. She arranged it over the tips of Kate’s ears and tied it at the nape of her neck. “There. Now you look like a Roamer.”

“Not especially,” said Taggle.

They both ignored him.

“Let it dry there,” said Drina. “Keep it covered. Don’t let my father see.”

Then she turned to chase the cat with the comb, threatening to braid his tail. The pair of them romped off, leaving Kate standing very still under the rain-hissing canvas. She could feel her shadow lifting and twisting away.

When they were breaking the morning camp, Plain Kate went to Daj to explain that she was out of wood.

Daj looked around at the trees, the charcoal burner’s woodpile. She said nothing, eloquently.

Kate winced.“Cured wood, I mean. Green wood—living wood—shrinks when it dries. If you carve green wood your work will crack.”

So Daj rumbled and bumbled, and took Kate off to the men’s fire, where she found Stivo hunched up over tea while the other men oiled harnesses and tack. She dragged him up by the ear.

“Take this little one into the forest,” she ordered. “She needs wood.”

Stivo looked around.“She’s knee-deep in wood.”

“Different wood,” said Daj. “Show manners and mind your mother.”

So Stivo got up, hoisted the camp hatchet, and slouched off, leaving Kate trotting after him.

“You don’t need to come,” she said, once they were away from the others. “I’ve looked after myself a long time.”

“You go the Roamer way,” he answered. “We do not go alone.”

“And there are wolves,” piped Drina, appearing with a pail half full of blackberries.

“Aye, a few.” Stivo swung the hatchet idly, the way Drina swung her pail. “And so you’ll stay in the camp,cheya.”

“Plain Kate is going.”

“She needs the wood,” Stivo said. “For some reason the wood we have is not good enough.”

Plain Kate thought of explaining, but stayed silent.

“Daj said I could go,” said Drina.

“And I say you can’t, daughter. Be off.”

Drina slinked to a stop. Plain Kate hung back with her and Stivo strode on toward the woods, still swinging his axe.“Stivo is your father?” She had never had anything but gentleness from her own father, and found the idea of Stivo being a father unimaginable.

Drina shrugged.“Daj looks after me.” But of course it was true. Behjet had told her that Stivo’s wife had been burned as a witch—Stivo’s wife and Drina’s mother were the same person. And that made Stivo Drina’s father. And Daj her…grandmother? Once again Plain Kate gave up on trying to sort out who among the Roamers was related to whom. It did not seem important to them. They were all family,mira, clan.

Stivo, ahead, had turned.“Come along,gadje!”

A family she was not part of. At least not in Stivo’s eyes. Plain Kate gave Drina’s arm a quick squeeze, then hurried after Stivo and his axe.

Around the abandoned hut, the wood was thick. Blackberry brambles hid under the skirts of the trees, growing across a forgotten wall of loose stones. Stivo was sitting on a big rock, eating blackberries.

Plain Kate looked around.“It’s a bit drier, anyway,” she offered. The thick trees were keeping off some of the drizzle.”

“This rain’s a curse. The horses are all chewing their feet and stinking with the thrush. Go through the whole herd, if this wet won’t stop.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault, is it. Unless you can work the weather.” Stivo got up. “Off with you then. Find your different wood.”

It was dark beneath the big trees, and the brambles gave way fast to ferns. Plain Kate moved into them slowly. They rubbed around her waist, dripping and rustling. She heard something big moving behind her and shot a look over her shoulder. Stivo was following her, though not close. They went on without speaking.

Finally she found the right tree. A toppled walnut. Bolt struck, half-scorched, a year dead. It would be dense-grained and dry; it would take a knife.“This one,” she said. As she said it the drizzle broke again, and suddenly the fallen tree was struck by a finger of light. Plain Kate was startled for a moment, then saw that of course the tree’s fall had left a hole in the forest’s ceiling, just enough for the light to slant through. It struck her too, and for a moment she could see how what was left of her shadow spun around her like ripples of water.

She stepped back out of the light and nearly knocked into Stivo.“I’ve noticed,” he said, and her heart lurched. “I’ve noticed you spend a good deal of time with my daughter.”

Plain Kate said nothing.

“I can smell the trouble on you, Plain Kate,” he said, swinging the axe. “See that you do not bring it on my Drina. She is all I have left. Do you hear that? I will not see her lost because of some little girl they call ‘witch.’ ”

She turned to face him.“I’m not a little girl. I am Plain Kate Carver. I have lived by my own wits for many years. I am better than any apprentice, and good as many a master. And I am not a witch.”

Then she stopped. She was very aware of the blue star cloth tied at the nape of her neck, and the complex braids underneath.Don’t let my father see, Drina had said. These were the eyes she’d been afraid of. “I am not a witch,” she said, trying to sound sure.

“You had best not be,” he answered. And he threw the axe, past her ear. It struck neat and deep into the split heart of the tree.

The Roamers kept walking and Plain Kate kept carving. The wild country sloped down and the trees thinned out. The Roamers’vardo came back out into the river valley, where Daj said they were less than a week from Toila. The rolling hills were crested with trees, but the valleys cradled scattered farms. It was strange to see buildings after so long, and Plain Kate felt uneasy. There were so many who might see her sickly shadow.

The braids Drina had put in her hair tugged at her scalp. She could feel the river pulling at her shadow, or her shadow pulling her toward the river. It felt like waking from a nightmare and drifting to sleep again, knowing it is still there, waiting, just under sleep’s thin surface—something grasping and hungry.

So she slept thinly, drowsing over her knife and making strange things while half awake. She was doing that in the twilight, leaning against a stump in someone’s fallow field, when she came to herself and found Drina by her side.

“I don’t want your help,” Plain Kate blurted.

Drina reacted as if struck, jerking back. Plain Kate, still waking, reached after her.“No, wait, Drina—I only mean…” She put down her knife and scrubbed at her eyes. “Your father said—”

“My father—” Drina began, fiercely, angrily—but just then Ciri came toddling up to them. He was the young prince of the Roamers, a boy of two, the favorite of the dozen naked and cheerful children who chased chickens and snuck rides on horses in Roamers’ camps. Just now he had Taggle in aheadlock.

“Help,” croaked the cat.

Drina shed her anger and pulled boy and cat into her lap.“Ciri, Ciri,” she said, and dropped into the Roamer language, a liquid coaxing in which Plain Kate caught only the wordcat. Ciri unfolded his elbows, and Taggle spilled out, bug-eyed.

Plain Kate picked him up and scratched his ruff.“Thank you for not killing him.” By this time she knew how to flatter a cat: praise of ferocity and civility both.

Taggle preened.“He’s a kitten.” He arranged his dignity around him with a few carefully placed licks. “Else I would have laid such a crosshatch of scratches on him he’d have scales like a fish.”

“Cat!” burbled Ciri, reaching.

Taggle allowed himself to be patted roughly and then grabbed by the ear, but flicked Ciri a yellow look.“I do have my limits.”

“Talk!” chirped Ciri. “Cat talk cat.”

Kate glanced at Drina, who answered,“It will be just a story. He’s always telling stories. Don’t worry, Plain Kate.” She staggered up with Ciri in her arms. “A few more days, Plain Kate. There’s a place near Toila where we always stop. We’ll have our own tent there. Darkness and quiet.” She swung the little boy up pig-a-back. “Come,mira, let’s find yourdajena.” She looked round at Kate one more time. “Don’t be frightened.”

But Kate was frightened.All great magic requires a great gift… He made a rope of hair and soaked it in his own blood… And what Linay had said:Blood draws things. It would be foolish to draw your own shadow to you.

“Blood,” she said.

“Sausages, I think,” said Taggle, sniffing. “Get me one, would you?” But he climbed into Kate’s lap and let her bury her nose in his soft fur and wiry muscle.

A few days shy of Toila, the hills spread into a broad lowland. Oak and fir gave way to willow and alder, and then to fields and gardens. Under the glares of the farmers and herders, the Roamers went carefully, the fivevardo staying in a line like beads on a string. But the next day the mood grew merrier.“We will stop tonight with Pan Oksar,” Drina explained. “He’sgadje, but a friend to us. He keeps horses.” She was almost skipping. “We’ll stay with him.”

There’s a place near Toila where we always stop, Drina had said. This would be that place. A spell of blood and hair.“How long—” Plain Kate began.

“Long enough to let the mud set on the wheels,” said Daj, from the back step of the creaking, lumberingvardo.

“A week or so, and then it’s a few more days to Toila.”

“Can we—” Drina began, but Daj cut her off.

“Yes,mira, you two can share a bender tent, if you like.”

Drina’s face lit up. She gave Kate’s arm a quick squeeze, and the blue star scarf that hid the spell-braids a significant glance. But then two little boys herding geese started to jeer the Roamers and toss rocks at the horses, and in the hubbub the two girls got pulled apart. They had no chance to speak before reaching the red-painted gates of Pan Oksar’s farm.

To Kate, Pan Oksar’s farm seemed impossibly prosperous, almost a small town. There were separate houses for animals and people, an orchard and a garden, a house just for the hens. Through the green spaces wandered horses. Round everything was a hedge of red roses tall as a building, thick as a city wall. The Roamers came through the gate singing, and the people of the household all tumbled out to meet them.

They spoke a language Kate did not know, and their dress was strange to her.“No one likes them, because their ways are different,” Drina explained. “Just like the Roamers—no one likes us either. So we have to like each other.”

The Roamers stopped thevardo just inside the hedge, with arching roses brushing the canvas roofs. And, for the first time since Plain Kate had joined them, they started pitching tents: one per married couple, one for the bachelor Behjet and the widowed Stivo, one for Daj and the smallest children—and one for the “maidens,” as Behjet called them: Drina and Kate.

“What of me?” groused Daj’s husband, Wen. “I don’t want to sleep with all these squirming puppies!” Plain Kate remembered seeing Daj and Wen hold hands and kiss in the shadows between the men’s fire and the women’s, and guessed the true source of his disappointment. He was still casting glances at Daj when Behjet and Stivo took him in.

Plain Kate was not much impressed with bender tents. They were made with just a few willow saplings stripped into poles, then bent and thrust into the ground at both ends. A sheet of canvas went round the poles, and some rope secured the whole thing—though not very well. They were muggy and mud-floored. Plain Kate, who had slept for years in a drawer, would have preferred to sleep in thevardo. But Drina spread her arms to touch both walls, as if she’d been given a palace.

“With my mother’s people, I stayed in the maidens’ tent. But here there are no other maidens—everyone’s married. So they made me mind the little ones.” She set about stacking a small fire in the middle of the space. “I am glad you’ve come, Plain Kate.”

Kate found her throat tightening. She wanted to answer—I am glad too—but it suddenly seemed an impossibly hard thing to say. “Is this the place?” she asked. “To do the spell?”

Drina sobered—mostly. A delighted smile was still teasing around the edges of her face, like tendrils of hair curling out from under a scarf. “While we have walls, yes. So that no one stops us.”

The way she said it made Kate wonder if perhaps someone should.

But of course no one did. They had stopped, Plain Kate learned, to breed the horses, a project that required both laughter and serious talk, and took everyone’s attention. There was human business too: trading of news and goods, songs and stories. Pan Oksar’s farm was a bustling, happy place, even in the mud and endless rain. So it was that when Drina lit the fire in the center of their tent, turning the walls golden and the little space cozy with flickering light, for the first time that Plain Kate could remember, they were quite alone, and likely to stay that way.

Drina leaned forward, nursing the newborn flames with twigs and splinters. Smoke and flares of light swirled across her dark face.

The same light rippled through Kate and she felt herself waver like water. She put a hand in Taggle’s warm, solid fur. “So,” said the cat. “You’re cooking something?”

Plain Kate said nothing. There was an ache around her eyes because she had been holding them wide open.“I saw my mother do this,” Drina explained. She seemed embarrassed, tentative. “There was a woman who had lost her memory. My mother bound it back to her with a rope of hair. She bound it with the hair and she called it back with—”

Drina stopped. A silence hung, in which the wet wood popped up and sputtered.

“Blood,” said Kate.

Drina nodded.

“And fire?” she asked.

“Fire,” said Drina. “You gather up the spell slowly, you see,” she said, and Kate could hear the ghost of Drina’s mother’s voice as the Roamer girl repeated something she had not herself thought through. “As a tree gathers the sun. But to loose it all at once—fire is one of the bestways.”

“It really seems a pity not to cook something,” said Taggle, who saw only one use for fire.

“Later.” Plain Kate put a hand on his back. “Drina, are you sure—” she began, but then saw how the quickening fire was throwing Drina’s and Taggle’s shadows sharply against the wall of the tent. Her own shadow was spread out over the glowing canvas in writhing swirls, thin as smoke atmidday. She closed her eyes and felt the light go through her like arrows.

“…be afraid,” Drina was saying, when Kate heard again. “It’s only a few drops.”

Plain Kate took a deep breath.“What do we do first?”

“Cut the braids off,” said Drina. “Can I use your knife?”

Kate handed her knife over and undid the scarf with the blue stars. She could not help stiffening as Drina came toward her with the knife raised, drawing back as Drina’s shadow fell across her face. The braids smarted and tugged at her temples as Drina sawed at them with the knife. Finally they came free: The two cut braids were coiled up in Drina’s palm like a pair of young snakes.

“Just let me—” said Drina, leaning toward her again, knife trembling in her hand. Plain Kate winced, but before she even understood what was happening, Drina had cut her on the top of her ear.

Plain Kate gasped and clamped her hand over the little wound.“Sorry, sorry!” Drina tugged Kate’s hand away and put her own hand in its place. “But it’s one of the best places to get blood—lots from a little wound, and you can cover the scars.”

Warm blood trickled behind Kate’s ear and down her neck. “It’s all right,” she said. She could feel the silky ropes of her own cut hair against her skin. When Drina pulled them away, the braids glistened here and there where the blood had wetted them.

Kate fingered the wound. Truly it was only a nick; she could hardly feel it.“Now what?”

Drina was shaking, but she flashed a grin.“Now this.” She threw the ropes of hair into the fire.

The stink of burnt hair instantly filled the tent. The silence got tight, like the top of a drum. Taggle’s fur rose into a thick ridge down his spine. And then Drina started to sing.

It was a low, mumbling, murmuring song, a song a river might sing. Plain Kate couldn’t tell if it didn’t have words or if she didn’t know the language. It was mournful as an old memory, and it made Kate remember—suddenly and so clearly she could smell it—the moment her father had died. He had called her name, but his eyes were already seeing the shadowless country, and she didn’t know—she would never know—if he was calling for her, or her mother.

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. “Thegadje 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 thegadje 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 redvardo, where Taggle was keeping her bedding warm.

And the next day they went to Toila.