Erin Bow - Plain Kate

“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 word cat . 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 your dajena .” 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 five vardo 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’s gadje , 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, lumbering vardo .

“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 the vardo 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 the vardo . 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 best ways.”

“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 at midday. She closed her eyes and felt the light go through her like arrows.