Erin Bow - Plain Kate

“…tears…” It was just a shadow of a thought.

“I can’t!” he wauled. “I’m a cat! I can’t cry! Katerina!”

And then he was gone, or she was. She was alone and broken like the moon in high branches.

And then slowly, like waking from a dream about waking from a dream, she was back. She was sprawled on the deck with no shadow beside her. On the bunk, the box was crookedly closed. Taggle was pushing at her with his nose, his fur standing out in all directions. His eyes were bright with tears. He had put her shadow back in its box.

“More,” she whispered, raising a shadowless hand to touch him. “You’re more than a cat.”

“Bah,” he said, though he was still weeping. “Who would want to be?”

She closed her eyes again. The light from the hatch was blinding, and the rock of the barge huge and sickening. She felt Taggle lean into her. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, but before she could answer, she dropped into a stunned sleep.

¶

Sun. She had been damp so long, and the sun felt so good. Waking, Plain Kate lay still and let it wash over her.

Then she remembered and flailed up. A white hand on her chest pushed her back. Linay was leaning over her, smiling. “Had another adventure, did we?”

“Let me up ,” she snapped, swatting his hand away. She pushed herself to sitting. She was not in the hold anymore, but on a mat of moss and willow branches by the campfire. She shuddered to think of him scooping her up and carrying her ashore.

Taggle was beside her, stretched limp on his side. “Taggle!” Kate was terrified for him.

“Oh, honestly,” sulked Linay. “I’ve only sent him to sleep. He was my gift to you, Kate, when you gave me your shadow. Do you really think, after so much distance and so much darkness, I would break that exchange?” He drew a thumb between Taggle’s ears. “Wake, cat.”

The cat woke spitting and hissing and leapt at Linay. The magician lifted his hands and sang. The cat seemed to hit a spiderweb midair. He dropped, and pushed again toward Linay, but couldn’t reach him. Plain Kate was just glad to see that Linay already had cat scratches across his nose and neck: evidence that getting her out of the boat had not gone smoothly.

“We really don’t like you,” the cat growled.

“And I really don’t blame you,” Linay said, sighing. “But you must listen to me. You cannot steal your shadow back, Plain Kate. If you set it loose without my help, it will kill you. I am not sure, indeed, how you survived this time.”

She wished she had Taggle’s claws, to swipe him. “Leave me alone, Linay.”

He sat transfixed—hurt, she thought. Then he stood. “We will rest here the day,” he said, his back to her, tending the fire. “And I will bleed tonight. But tomorrow we must again travel.” He walked off into the willow trees and out of sight.

¶

Plain Kate slept, and woke feeling stronger, and warmer for Taggle’s chin fitting neatly in her hand. Still, the sun was slipping away. Upriver, she could see a wall of weather: fog and cloud. A cold draft was blowing it toward them; she could smell its dampness. She sighed: more rain. “It’s as if it’s following us,” she muttered, ruffling Taggle’s fur.

“We draw it. Like a bear on a chain.” Kate sat up and Taggle sprang to his feet. Across the fire, Linay was sitting on a stone, skinning a rabbit. “I’m a weather witch remember? The moods of wind and water.” He thrust a sharpened stick through the rabbit like a man who knew swords. “That fog is hungry.”

“You,” said Kate. “You made the fog and the rain. All of it. Through the whole country.”

There was horror in her voice, but Linay bowed modestly as if it had been awe. “It is no small work, I admit. I’d be ashamed to tell you the dark things I’ve done for such power. Your shadow is only the latest—and almost the last. I have been preparing this journey for years.”

“But—” She couldn’t begin to tell him what she was thinking. He’d made the fog and rain, the crops failing in the wet, the damp fear she’d seen growing like a mold in the Toila market. Even Taggle’s ears were edging back as it sank in.

But then, Taggle was still a cat. “I’ve been wet ,” he snarled. “My paws were damp for months .”

Linay shrugged one marionette shoulder. “The fog is the rusalka’s home. She needs it as a frog needs water. It is half her skin. Even the blood-spell would not bring her without this fog.” And he sang:

Foggy little oxbows

Forest pools where no one goes

Lost links of the river dreaming dreams

“Without me she’d be trapped in some lonely place where the fog never lifts. With me, she can travel. All the way to Lov.”

Plain Kate pictured it. The wall of fog was creeping up the river, just faster than a man could walk. In it, the rusalka. Anyone she found, she would take—take like Stivo, take like Wen. This was the dark story they were telling in Toila. By now it was a horror. The countryside was emptying in front of it like a forest emptying in front of a fire.

And she had been helping him. Giving him blood for the drawing spell. For weeks. Kate shook—and turned sideways and was sick.

Linay raised an eyebrow and propped the impaled rabbit up over the fire.

Plain Kate felt gray and cold. Waiting for the Roamers to burn her had been no worse than this. “Why?” she said. “Why are you taking her to Lov?”

“Oh,” he sang. “I have reasons. I have plans and schemes.” He ripped a leg from the roasting rabbit and threw it, bloody, to Taggle—who leapt back. “Come and eat your dinner.”

¶

Plain Kate carved. She carved to keep from shaking. She carved to think.

“Are you all right, Katerina?” Taggle peered into her shattered face. When she didn’t answer he shook his head—actually shook it, side to side, a human “no.”

The gesture struck Kate and made her sad. It looked wrong; it looked right. It made what he was visible: not a cat, not human, something new. “Oh, Taggle,” she said. What was he? What was she? What had Linay made them?

Find your shape. Lift your knife.

Plain Kate stopped thinking and carved, her knife knowing things. The gouge she’d made when her knife had slipped suggested the lower lid of an uptilting eye. She roughed it out, put in the other eye, then used the knife tip to sketch the lines of the nose and brow and mouth, and suddenly the oak burl had a face: a woman’s face, narrow and strong and sad, too strange to be beautiful. With only the eyes done it seemed to look at her. And already she knew it: the rusalka’s human face, the face of Linay’s lost sister, Drina’s mother, Lenore.

Find your shape. She was Plain Kate Carver, daughter of Piotr, the girl who knew the secrets inside the wood. The girl who was brave and lifted her knife. The girl who had told her father she would be a master by the time she was twenty.

But instead she was going to die. Because she was going to stay with Linay.

Long enough to find out how to stop him.

fourteen

blood and questions

The next evening they anchored in a place where the fields of barley and rye came right down to the river, the grain growing among the riverside tangle of bloodtwig and basket rush. The grain—as Kate had come to dread—was unharvested, and full of feasting starlings. As the sunset lit, the birds threw themselves into the sky in tongues of dark fire that flashed back and forth across the river. Linay stood up on the roof of the hold, playing his fiddle. The skirling notes wove through the rush of wings.

Plain Kate kept her head bent over the carving, her heart beating faster as the light sank. The fog rose up around her. The fiddle grew quieter and quieter until both it and its player were lost in the thickening darkness. Plain Kate slotted her carving tools one by one into their leather roll. The tool case was a very fine thing, its felt-lined inner pockets soft with long use, its smooth-grained outside stained dark with someone’s sweat. It hadn’t been abandoned; the carver in Kate was sure of that. Someone had died. And then Linay had stolen it and given it to her. And she’d been grateful.