Erin Bow - Plain Kate

“Well?” said Linay.

Kate braced herself. “How do you plan to destroy Lov?”

“Why,” drawled Linay. “With your help, little one. Are you sure you want to know?”

Her scalp prickled. She could feel the rusalka somewhere close, but she was more afraid of the man in front of her. She spread her feet for balance. “How?”

“You’ll die if you try to stop me,” he said.

“Three times, I ask you,” she said. “How.”

Linay chuckled. “Oh, Plain Kate. A little hero. And I took you for the weakest in your town.” He stood suddenly, gliding to his feet. Kate was trembling, but she didn’t wince away. “Would you like to see?” His voice was almost amused, almost gentle. It was like Taggle when he tucked away his claws to make some unlucky thing last longer. “Shall I show you the fate of Lov?”

Fear made her skull push against the inside of her skin. Her lips were numb. Speechless, she nodded.

“Come,” said Linay, and stepped over the side of the boat.

Kate cried out and reached to save him—but he did not sink. Around his feet was a sheen of white on the dark water. Ice. He was standing on ice in the warm, still evening. Linay stepped away from her, toward the mill, and the ice flowed out from him, unrolling like a carpet, like a bridge for a king. The mill wheel clattered and groaned to a stop, jammed with ice, and the stillness tightened in Kate’s throat.

“She’s just a ghost, you know,” he said, his soft voice eddying across the water. He stepped up onto the stone wall between the millrace and the pond and stood there as if on a stage. “Just one more of the shadowless people in this shadowy world. But add a shadow to a ghost—”

And he drew a knife across his wrist.

Blood sputtered and spattered. She could hear it pattering into the black water.

As the blood fell, the rusalka rose up. It was like death happening backward, bones rising and taking on a loose skin. “Sister,” Linay said, and offered the thing his hand. She took it, and stepped onto the wall beside him, dainty. She bent her head toward his bleeding wrist, but he stopped her, putting the back of his hand under her chin and raising her face to his. His whisper carried: “Forgive me.” And he seized her arm and wrenched.

The rusalka twisted like a rope. Strands of her separated and coiled around one another. Her face distorted into a silent scream.

Then something ripped through Kate—cold as a hand on her neck, sudden as a dream about falling. The thing flew across the water toward Linay and Lenore, and Kate recognized it: her shadow.

Linay was chanting something. He was still twisting Lenore’s arm, though she screamed. The shadow followed the ugly curves of his words, insinuating itself into the new rents of the rusalka’s body, a rope braiding itself into another rope.

And suddenly, in the place of the woman-shape made of fog, there was something else. Something huge, something ugly. Linay flung up both hands. The thing screamed like a hawk and opened two wings: one white as a death cap, one clotted in shadow. The wings came together and the whole pond shuddered.

Something hit Kate’s ear and shoulder and smashed to the deck by her feet. It was a swallow, dead. She could hear them falling all over the pond. The shadow-and-white wings smashed open and Kate threw herself downward to get under them. She could feel thick death moving just above her head.

Then Linay dropped his hands again. And the shadow wings closed, folded.

“She is gone for now,” said Linay. He stepped down from the wall and came across the groaning ice.

Taggle sprang up on the gunwale between Kate and the striding man. “Keep your distance!” he hissed.

“But it was her question!” Linay laughed, bitter and wild. “How will I destroy Lov? With the ghost and the shadow. It will take a spell of great power to bind your shadow to the rusalka for more than a moment. But I have worked for years to gather that power. Do not doubt that I can do it. And when I do it—do not doubt that everyone those wings touch will die. The whole city of Lov. And you, Plain Kate—”

But at that instant, Taggle snarled and sprang.

Linay caught the leaping cat with his eyes and a rhyme like a thrown spear. Taggle crashed to the deck and made a high, terrible noise. “Tag!” Kate shouted. She went to her knees beside him. The cat was shaking as if in seizure. She tried to scoop him up but Linay’s hand closed on her wrist. He was back aboard the boat. He jerked her toward him. Kate felt the crush of his strong hand, even as she twisted around to get at Taggle.

“He’ll live,” Linay snapped.

“What did you do to him?” she gasped.

“I am still answering your question,” he hissed at her, “and you will listen to me.” He scooped up the dead bird from the decking. It was falling apart in his hands, crumbling like termite-rotted wood. “This is why I need a shadow. This is the fate of Lov. The city that tried to burn my sister. She will have her revenge and thus her fate will be undone. The gray wing will kill everyone in that city, from the bell ringer in the church tower to the orphan huddled in the lowest cellar. This is what I will do with your shadow.”

“I won’t help you,” she gasped; he was breaking her wrist. “I’ll kill myself.”

He laughed. “Your shadow is bought and paid for, and your death will not remit that payment. You can go shadowless into the shadowless world, and your death will only be one last dark thing on my long dark road. It will hurt me but I do not care. It is all but over.”

He released her. Kate staggered back. Her wrist pounded. “Go to bed,” he said. “I have the blood I need.”

Kate picked up Taggle and leapt into the hold, not bothering with the ladder. Her ankles jammed and she welcomed the clean pain that cleared her eyes of tears. She ran to the box that had held her shadow and wrenched the lid open. She was ready to die if she could take her shadow with her. But the box was empty, holding only splinters and air. It was gone. Her shadow was gone.

She sat on the bunk edge with Taggle limp on her lap. She waited in shaking silence, until silence fell on the deck above. Then she tied the carving of Lenore to her hip, stole Linay’s socks, took the unconscious cat in her arms, and lowered herself over the side of the boat, into the river.

fifteen

the abandoned country

Stumbling down the road to Lov, Plain Kate dripped and shivered. Taggle was slumped in her arms like a little child, sleeping. He had slept through her huddled wait in the boat, slept through her wade to the shore, slept through the slap and sting of alder branches as she fought her way up the bank. She tried not to be terrified for him. He’ll live, Linay had said, and that made it true.

The night was white-blind with fog, and Kate staggered over every stone and stumbled in every puddle, but she pushed on as fast as she could.

Apart from the sleeping cat, she was almost empty-handed. The carving of Lenore banged at her hip. Her haversack held only stolen socks, a few apples, and a barley loaf. It was not much, not enough to live long. But in the abandoned country, it should be easy to find what she needed.

Except her shadow.

In Lov I’ll set your shadow loose, Linay had promised her.

Set it loose, she should have asked, to do what? She could still see the swallow, limp as a glove, falling into clots of dust and feathers, broken as last year’s leaves. The whole city.

And she had made it possible. Her blood. Her shadow.

The moon came out, a broken thing tangled in the birch branches. The road to Lov appeared before Kate, stretching into the distance. She walked along it until she found her eyes closing and her arm, where she held Taggle, growing stiff and numb. At last she found herself walking off the road. She eased the cat off her shoulder, muttering, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”