Erin Bow - Plain Kate

“Why? What for?” said Taggle. “Did I miss something? Was there food?”

And she dropped him in her joy.

¶

For three days and two nights, Kate and Taggle walked the road to Lov. They hurried when they could, and dozed when they had to, hiding in tangles of bloodtwig and heartsease at the edge of the road. When Kate couldn’t sleep, she hunched up, shivering as if fevered, and freed Lenore’s face from the burl wood. The twisting lines of the grain flowed across the carving’s features like tongues of fire. She was rushing down the road to beat Linay to Lov, but she had no idea how to stop him.

Kate carried Taggle the first day, and the second, while waves of shivering broke over him, subsided, and broke. On the third day he walked. They went as fast as they could, and following them came a line of fog and rain, solid as a wall, slow as an army.

The sleeping death had not come yet, but the flight before it had created its own devastation: The road was rutted and littered with broken wheels, abandoned boxes, the bodies of horses driven too hard whose eyes buzzed with flies. The wheat fields were trampled with the remains of hasty camps. Yet they met no one. The farmsteads they passed were empty and sometimes burned. Outside one farmstead three women dangled dead from the branch that overhung the road, signs against witchcraft slashed into their hands. Kate closed her eyes and ducked under their black feet and hurried on.

On the evening of the fourth day, the road swung away from the river and they found themselves walking in a tunnel of willows. And through them, across the river, Kate glimpsed something white. Big. Moving. It was just a glimpse but Plain Kate stopped short, squinting. On her shoulder, Taggle stirred awake. Kate put a hand up to touch him and edged forward. Her throat was tight, as if it had seen and recognized something her eyes had not.

The river bent, the tunnel ended, and Kate looked back along the bank.

On the other side of the river, something looked back at her. Just a horse, a big white cart horse. It was picketed outside a single Roamer vardo , red. “It’s Cream,” said Kate.

“Cream?” Taggle sprang down. “Cream?” He tangled himself with her feet, purring. “Cream, yes, please, how kind, what a thoughtful human…”

“No, the horse. It’s Drina’s horse, it’s Cream.”

“Oh.” Taggle sniffed and flicked his ears. “I knew that.”

Kate kept walking with Taggle beside her prancing grandly in his embarrassment. The horse Cream whinnied to them from her circle of mud, but no one stirred from the vardo and Kate didn’t stop. The sun came down under the clouds and red light ran over the river like fire. Kate glanced back again, watching as the vardo got smaller. Her hands were clenched. Her pulse beat at the underside of her scars.

One vardo , one horse. A horse left at picket so long she’d eaten the grass down to dirt. Cream stomped and screamed to them again.

Kate stopped, turned around. “Something’s wrong.”

“Even if it is Cream, it might not be Drina,” said Taggle. Kate tried to remember when the cat had become the voice of caution and reason. “It could be anyone.”

“Stivo,” she murmured.

“ He said Stivo was dead.”

And Kate remembered that it was Behjet—soft-voiced, softhearted Behjet—who, wearing Stivo’s face, had set her on fire.

“I might also point out,” said Taggle, “that these are the people who tried to kill us. And also that we already have a daunting quest.”

“But it’s not the Roamer way,” said Kate, “to go alone.”

And she bundled up Taggle and waded into the river.

¶

The horse was Cream, with her familiar constellation of dun patches, and the vardo was the little red one in which Plain Kate had slept for months. In the twilight she could see the carving of the horses braided into ropes, the place on the edge of the top step where the paint had worn away. Kate’s heart lurched, and she wasn’t sure if it was recognition, loss, or fear. Hungry and desperate at the center of her muddy picket circle, the horse squealed and jerked her head sideways against her bridle rope. Kate edged around her, hoping for silence. The horse bellowed. But no one came out of the vardo . Kate crept up the steps and lifted the door flap.

A girl in a dark turban was kneeling in front of the back bunk, on which was a tumbled hump of blankets. Kate let the flap drop. It rustled. The girl turned. It was Drina. Kate had known it would be.

Drina looked at Kate with large black eyes, blank as a frightened rabbit.

Kate lifted her hand and touched the slick, bubbled scar on her own face. She said nothing.

“Oh,” said Drina. She took a step forward. And then Kate could see that the heap of blankets wasn’t a heap of blankets, but a man lying asleep. Drina took another step and Kate saw it was Behjet.

“Oh, it’s these two,” said Taggle. “I hope they have sausages.”

But Kate stepped back so fast she felt her heels wobble on the edge of the step—she spun and leapt. She stood there, knee-deep in the grass, silent. Cream came over, jerking her head against the picket rope. She heard the step creak behind her.

Kate took a step forward—away from Drina—and stroked Cream’s freckled nose. “You just left her tied up here?” The horse whuffled and started sniffing her hand for food. “She’s been here too long. She’s trapped. She, she—” Her breath snagged, surprising her, and as clearly as if she were there, she smelled the rankness of the bear cage, the smoldering straw.

Drina lowered herself slowly down to stand with her—side by side but not touching, not looking.

“I—” said Drina, and stopped. Kate edged away so that Drina could undo Cream’s lead. The horse tossed her mane and shouldered Drina aside on her way to fresh grass. “I’m sorry,” Drina whispered, and patted Cream’s neck. Cream stamped but didn’t pause from her browsing.

“Mira—” Drina’s voice broke as Kate’s had.

“Is he dead?” she asked without turning. “Is Behjet dead?”

Drina shook her head. “Are you really a witch, Plain Kate? Can you save him?”

“Why would I?” snapped Kate.

They both stood a while, watching the horse and listening to the night rising: bullfrogs, crickets, the birds of evening. Finally Kate turned. She saw that Drina looked thinner and smaller, and that her mouth closed crookedly, like a mis-made box. “I’m just a carver,” she said. “But you have power. I saw it.”

Drina swallowed as if trying to get down a stone. “I don’t know how to use it.”

Plain Kate remembered the spell braided into her hair, the nick of the knife on her ear. The shadow on the wall of the bender tent. That shadow had been the rusalka. It might have killed them. Kate remembered the rush of steam into her face as she doused the fire, Drina’s walnut face gray as if flashed to ashes. Drina had tried to help her, had used all she knew—which wasn’t enough—and when she’d tried to find out more, the crowd had attacked her. It wasn’t Drina who had set her on fire.

She remembered sleeping in the vardo , with Taggle in her arms and Drina’s back warm against her back.

Kate was silent a moment, and then she said, “I don’t know what to do. And I can’t stay here. I have to get to Lov. But—I will try.”

They went back into the vardo , where they found Behjet lying as if dead, and Taggle balanced on his chest, trying to pull sausages down from a hook on the wall.

¶

Behjet looked as if he were only sleeping. Kate both did and did not want him to wake up, both did and did not want him to die. She crouched and picked up his hand. It was heavy and cold and a bit stiff, like a raw fish. A pulse lubbed sluggishly in the hollow of the wrist. There was a healed burn across the back of his hand, where the lamp oil had splashed when he’d tried to kill her.