Plain Kate (4 page)

The running watchmen stopped when they saw it was only her. The drinkers from the inn had begun to talk again, and wandered inside. Windows closed. Plain Kate stood alone. Her muscles were so tight that they made her tremble, the way wood trembled when bent almost to breaking.

Her father’s stall—her home—was a jagged, jumbled ruin. Tools and half-finished carvings were scattered across the wet cobbles. One pale deer, still whole, leapt toward the edge of a splintered piece of awning. She lifted it and looked at it for a while.
Where shall I put it?
she thought.
I don’t have anywhere to put it.
She took four steps away from the wreck, and set the deer gently on bare stones.

Taggle came back and tangled around her feet, bleating. She stooped, stroked him between his ears, then picked up an awl that had spun out from the shattered heap, a little way. She set the tool down beside the deer. She edged back toward the wreck. She moved one broken drawer. Things tumbled out of it. It made a lot of noise, but Plain Kate said nothing. No one came. She worked without a word, sorting carvings and tools from junk and straw.

After a while, Linay came over from his white blanket and worked beside her, and he too was silent.

Plain Kate knew that the axe had come because of the rumors Linay had twisted into life. Perhaps he had even sent the axe wielder—a nudge, a seemingly innocent word in the right ear. But she took his help because some of the things she had to move were heavy, and because his strange, washed-away face was hollowed as if someone had died. He pulled her parents’ marriage quilt from under the last of the rubble. She saw the axe holes in it, the way the fog moved through them like snakes.

¶

Plain Kate folded the quilt into a mat; she hammered some broken planks into a rough workbench. Day came. Summer thunder cleared the market square. Soaked and cold, Plain Kate worked alone to finish the bow, her hair dripping into her face, stinging her mismatched eyes.

When the bow at last was finished, it was as good as anything she’d ever made. It had no ornament, but its simple lines were beautiful, like one bird against the sky.

And now that it was finished, Kate had no more work to do.

She sat for a while, empty as the empty square, thinking. Then without a word she stood up. She picked up the bow like a sword and went off to find Linay.

The afternoon was damp and clammy. Plain Kate followed the faint sounds of the tambourine around the puddles and the horse droppings, through the river-ward gate of the town. Down by the docks she found Linay sitting on the roof of the hold of a small boat. It was the punt she’d seen him on the night the fish had swarmed: a small, neatly made little barge, painted grass-green. Linay was singing a sad song about river spirits, to entertain the men who were smearing pitch in the chinks. She walked toward him, ignoring the looks that beat on her like rain. Big Jan grabbed her arm. “You’re not welcome here, witch-child.”

Linay stopped singing and stood up. “Her business is with me.” Big Jan was broad like a wild ox, but Linay was skinny like a rabid wolf, and Jan backed down. Linay swept by and caught Kate up in his wake. She trailed him down the dock, then down the road toward the forest.

The rain had stopped. The light was storm-green and the trees were stirring restlessly. The smell of the river was heavy in the air.

Plain Kate held out the bow. Linay took it as if it were a rose, and bowed over it. He looked at her silently. She looked back.

At last Linay moved. “Your four silver.” He pulled coins out of her ear, like a merry juggler—but his eyes were piercing. “Does that finish our business?”

“I’m leaving,” she said. “I need food, things.”

“Hmmmm,” he said, sinuously. “Did you have in mind a trade?”

“For my shadow,” she said. “I want oilcloth. And a sleep roll, and a pack. A packet of fishhooks, a camp hatchet. Ten yards of rope.”

He laughed. “Do you think you can live on the road? In the woods?”

“I’ll get by.”

“You’ll get by, you’ll get by,” he sang. “I’d almost like to see you try.” He drew himself up. “Done.”

Faraway thunder clacked. It sounded like a latch closing. “Done,” she said.

Linay wiped the rain off his face. “The docks. Meet me beside my punt, at the third bell past midnight.” He turned back toward the town.

Plain Kate, empty-handed, went over to the ruins of her father’s stall. She thought about what she could carry and what she must leave. Behind her she heard Linay’s fiddle begin to play: Wild and powerful as a storm, it swept across the rainy twilight.

She took one of her silver coins to the cobbler and bought good boots: deerskin, double stitched and sturdy. She took a second coin and bought a haversack from the tanner, who took her money but spat on the doorstep as she left. She took the third to the butcher to buy jerky, but he would not trade with her at all. She took the last coin to Niki’s bakery to buy hardtack, but by then the light was sinking and the bakery was dark and shut. She went back to where the splintered heap of the stall lay like a dead horse among the puddles of the market square.

Plain Kate packed her best tools in their felt pouches; she packed her one pan; she packed her two striped smocks and extra socks. She coiled her fishing line and twine. She came to her parents’ marriage quilt. It had once smelled of her father, and though it now smelled of sawdust and cats, she remembered how that smell had wrapped her, her first night in the drawer. But she needed a coat, and the quilt was too big. She was practical. She sliced it in half. She cut a hole for her head, pulled it on over her wet hair, and belted it with a bit of rope. The other half lay on the cobbles, soaking up rainwater.

She picked up the piece of the wreckage with the carved stag on it. It was too heavy to take. It served no purpose. She set it back down. It seemed to blur and leap in the half light, and it took Kate a moment to realize that her eyes were tearing. She picked the stag back up. She put it back down.

Taggle was sitting on top of the heaped wood, watching her. “I’ll leave it,” she told him. “I don’t need it.“ Her eyes stung as she said it. She dashed her hand across them, disgusted with herself. The cat chirruped inquiringly. “It’s nothing,” she told him, her throat angry and aching with the effort of not crying. Decisively, she took the carving knife her father had given her—the knife her hand had grown up knowing, the knife that had shaped her—and thrust it into the sheath in her new boot.

“Now we can travel,” she told Taggle. She sat down on her makeshift workbench. “I couldn’t go without my knife. Though I don’t suppose I’ll find much work, living wild.” The wet evening was sinking into darkness. The cat hopped down and ambled over to sniff her ankles.

“What about you?” she asked, lifting him into her lap. “A dog would come without question—but I suppose a cat must make his own choices.” It was foolish to talk to no one, and she stopped. And so she left unspoken her deepest wish: that she did have someone to talk to, that she didn’t have to go alone.

¶

Deep in the night, Plain Kate went down to the river. She carried her haversack on one hip and Taggle in her arms. No cat would follow a wanderer; she realized that now. But she was not ready to give him up, to leave him as she had left the carved deer from her father’s stall, propped up against her workbench in the abandoned square. Not yet; not quite yet. And maybe he would follow her, a little way.

Away from the cressets of the market, under the lid of clouds, it was very dark—and very quiet. She heard the throaty murmur of the river, the plop of a jumping fish. Behind her, someone pulled a shutter. Across the river, a fox barked.

Linay was sitting quietly, watching the black gleam of the river, dangling his legs off the dock like a child. A pierce-work tin lantern sat on the dock beside him, and in its feeble light he looked pale as a moth in the deep of the night. He was eating a meat pie. As Plain Kate came up he held a second pie out to her. She ignored it. He shrugged, licked the gravy from his dagger, and set the pie on the wet wood at her feet.

Taggle’s nose started twitching.

Plain Kate stood over Linay. Taggle had begun twisting in her hands like a strong fish—a fish who wanted meat pie. She would have to put him down soon. “Now what?” she asked.

“Blood,” Linay said. Kate drew back and he laughed. “Oh, mine, Little Knife, don’t worry.”

“Kind,” she said, trying to mock, though her voice felt high and tight. Linay’s dagger looked as if it could gut a deer.

“Blood draws things. And it would be foolish to draw your own shadow to you.” He hesitated a bare second, then picked up his dagger, flipped it round, and drew it fearlessly across his wrist. His white face didn’t flicker, but Plain Kate winced for him as blood welled. Taggle gave a strangled cough, as if she were squeezing him too hard.

Linay leaned over and opened the lantern’s top. He let the blood dribble onto the flame. Plain Kate braced herself for darkness, but instead of dousing the flame, the blood caught fire, burning like oil, brightening the night.

“What—” she started to ask.

“Fire to set loose the spell,” he said absently, watching his blood catch. “You’d be surprised, the things a witch can make burn.”

His absentness and the way the blood ran with flame made the night suddenly eerie. Taggle hissed and Kate backed away.

“Where are you going?” said Linay.

Plain Kate began to babble something—but Linay had risen to his feet silently as a wave. His hand flashed, his wrist flicked. Blood flew and fell over Kate like a net. She leapt back shouting, and Taggle spilled from her arms and howled like a dying thing. Then the air turned to glass.

“Stay,” said Linay, soft, coaxing, into the sudden silence.

Kate couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Taggle lay belly-flat as if his back was broken.

Linay looked at her with his head tilted, smiling softly as a father smiles at a sleeping child.

Plain Kate thought she was dying and that when she died she would remain as a statue, held in place by the stiffness of the air. Linay reached out a hand for her. She was sure she would die when he touched her but she could only watch his hand coming.

And he touched her.

The air was air again. Kate staggered and crashed to the dock. The world spun and sparks shot through her vision. Linay loomed over her, dim and white as a pillar.

“Well,” said the witch. “That’s that.”

“What—” Kate gasped. She coughed, blinked. Taggle shook his head hard.

“I have left your goods at the third big stone around the bend of the road.”

“But—” Kate couldn’t stop him, couldn’t even see him. He was a sort of white shadow above her. She lay panting on the wet wood, her hair hanging over the dock edge, down toward the river.

He looked down at her, his face fuzzy—she thought he looked genuinely sad. “The loss of a shadow is a slow thing,” he said. “You will have a little time before someone notices. Find a place to belong before that happens.” Then he sang:

Go fast, Plain Kate, and travel light

Learn to walk the shadowy night

Without a shadow, flee from light

Become a shadow, truly

He crouched down beside her. “Will you come with me to the stone city?”

“No.” She could hardly get the word out.

“No,” he echoed. “But I will see you again, I think.” He looked over at Taggle. “The pair of you.” And he rose and went, leaving her lying helplessly in the dark, beside the water.

It was a long time before she could sit up, before Taggle could gather himself enough to resume sniffing around the meat pie. Plain Kate leaned forward and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyelids until she saw spots. Something had been taken from her, and though it was supposed to be her shadow, she felt as if it might have been her soul. “What did I do?” she muttered.

Over by the meat pie, Taggle gave a hiss and a hair-ball cough. Plain Kate opened her eyes. “Mussssssicians,” the cat spat. “Do you know what fiddle strings are made of? Bah! I’m glad he’s gone. Let’s eat.”

Plain Kate scooched back and stared. “Taggle!”

Taggle was absorbed in the meat pie. “It’s covered in
bread
,” he huffed. “What fool has covered
meat
with
bread
?” 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 kill
me
.”

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 me
go
!” He writhed against her chest.

“Tag, you can’t talk.”

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

“No,” she interrupted. “You
can’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.”

“It
is
magic,” he said, reproachful. “And it was
your
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 a
gadje
—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 her
g
toward
z
. “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?”