Erin Bow - Plain Kate

Kate braced herself and shook him by the shoulder. “Behjet? Behjet, it’s Plain Kate.” She shook him harder. His head lolled to one side as if he’d turned to look at her. She leapt back. But the face was slack. Kate turned toward Drina.

“It’s been four days,” said Drina. “Daj says the body can’t live if the soul gets lost. I’ve been trying. I’ve been feeding him and…cleaning him. I even tried to travel downriver, out of the fog. They say the sleep is in the fog. But nothing works. I cannot wake him.”

“Let me try,” said Taggle. He curled his whiskers toward her, smugly. “Waking is not so hard, really, if you know how.”

The cat solemnly placed a paw on Behjet’s elbow and another on his stomach. Kate and Drina edged together and watched. Taggle went high stepping, delicately, to perch on the man’s breastbone. He lengthened his neck and touched his nose to Behjet’s. He sniffed. He mewed. Then he opened his mouth and shouted, “Wake up!”

The girls jumped.

“Wake up,” yowled Taggle. “Get up and feed me! Get up and scratch me! Get up and see me! Wake up!”

It was earsplitting, rattling the vardo . But Behjet didn’t move.

Taggle lifted his nose and quirked an ear at them. “It may be hopeless,” he intoned. “WAKE UP!” he wauled. “Wake up, wake up, wake up!”

Drina was crying and giggling at once. Kate stepped forward and scooped the cat up. “That’s enough, Taggle.”

“He’ll die,” gasped Drina, wrapping her arms around her ribs. “That’s how it is. The others died. My father died. And Daj’s husband.” Kate could hear her avoiding the names: the names of the dead. “And after you left, Magda’s son—the one who grabbed Taggle, that time…”

Ciri. The toddling prince of the Roamer children, who’d exclaimed over the talking cat. Ciri.

Plain Kate led Drina outside and sat her on the vardo steps. She stacked tinder and built a fire. She fetched a pan, cut an onion free from its braid, and lifted a pair of sausages from their hook on the wall above Behjet’s head. She looked down at his face.

“Good,” purred Taggle when she came out with the pan and sausages. “Food, yes. I’m sure that will wake him. Food.”

Kate knocked the edge of the fire down into coals and put the pan on it. “Have you eaten?” she asked Drina. “How long has it been since you’ve eaten?”

Drina was huddled up on the steps. She shrugged. “Since…”

Kate tossed the sausages onto the smoking pan and started cutting the onion. The heating cast iron smelled of Roamer cooking, smelled of being loved, of being safe, home. “I can’t stay here,” Kate said. “I have to go to Lov.”

Drina wrapped her arms around her knees. The night was coming up fast. “I was going to go to my mother’s clan. My father is dead. I have no blood tie to his clan. Daj said I could go if I wanted and Behjet was taking me. And then—” She stopped, swallowed. “Plain Kate,” she said. “Can I come with you?”

Kate didn’t know how to answer. You can’t. I want you to. I’m still afraid of you. You shouldn’t, because I’m going to try to stop Linay and he’ll probably kill me. “Well,” she said aloud. “Eat.” She stabbed the sausage up on a knife and handed it to Drina.

Drina ate it without attention, and put it down half finished. Taggle helped himself and no one stopped him. Drina sat still with the firelight playing over the dark grain of her face.

“You look like your mother,” said Kate abruptly. “You look like Lenore.”

“You shouldn’t—” Drina swallowed, her jaw clicking. “We don’t say the names of the dead.” Then stiffly she whispered, “How—”

And Kate, knowing it would break her friend’s heart held out the burl wood carving. Drina’s hands shook as she took it. She held it by the wings and looked into the wooden eyes. “This is her. You really are a witch. This is her.”

“I’m not,” said Kate. “But I’ve seen her. I’ve seen your mother.”

Drina’s head snapped up. “She’s alive?”

“No.” Kate was sorry she’d started the way she had. She shifted tracks. “She had a brother. The one who went mad. Linay.”

Drina shivered. “How do you know his name?”

“When I—He—After—” Kate stopped and poked at the fire. “After the Roamers burned me, Linay saved me. He pulled me out of the river. He’s the one, Drina. He’s the witch who stole my shadow.”

Plain Kate drew herself up and started from the begin-ning, from the day a witch-white stranger had asked her to fashion a fiddle bow. She told her own story as if it were about someone else, and was amazed at how rich and strange it sounded, like an old tale. She told Drina about learning the rusalka’s name, about trading blood for answers, about the swallow that had crumbled to ash. About what Linay planned for Lov.

“And then I saw you,” she finished. “I recognized Cream—and she’d been tied up so long… I thought I should come… I was afraid, because you burned me. But it’s not the Roamer way, to go alone.”

Drina didn’t answer at once. The two girls sat listening to Cream cropping grass, her tail swishing.

“They were twins,” said Drina at last. “My mother and my uncle. Lenore and Linay. He was my favorite, my other father. He taught me little magics, and how to turn handsprings. He was different, after she died. After that spell, with his shadow—after he summoned her. The clan spoke death to him. He went alone. I remember watching him walk down the road.”

It was full dark now. The trees were stirring and rustling. Nearby a nightjar churred, an eerie whirr that seemed to come from everywhere. Drina traced the lines of the carving’s wooden face. “Plain Kate, you didn’t know her, you don’t understand. She would never have done this.” She was crying. “What you’re saying—the rusalka—it can’t be true.”

“We have ample evidence,” said Taggle. “Scars and stuff, even.”

“But my father,” said Drina desperately. “He was different before she died. She loved him. How can it be that she killed him? Her own husband? And, and—Ciri!” The name burst from her. “Stivo, Wen, and Ciri! Kate, she would never have hurt Ciri. She would have died first.”

“She did,” said Taggle.

“Hush, Taggle.” Kate patted at Drina’s bunched shoulders, awkward as if patting a horse. “Drina. She doesn’t have a choice. Linay, he said it was a terrible fate. That’s why he’s doing all this. He wants to save her.”

Drina sniffed hard and swallowed. “Save her?”

“A rusalka’s fate…” Kate tried to remember the exact words. “He said a rusalka’s fate could be undone by avenging her death. That’s what he wants to do. That’s why he wants to kill all the people in Lov.”

“Undone…” Drina’s eyes were huge. “What does that mean? Would it…bring her back?”

Kate felt as if Drina had kicked her in the belly. Would Drina be on Linay’s side? Lenore had been her mother. Kate had lost her father. What would she do to save him? To stop Linay, would she have to fight Drina?

But Drina fought herself. She grabbed Kate’s hand and squeezed so hard that Kate’s fingers ached. “We can’t let him do this, Plain Kate. My mother wouldn’t want—we have to stop him.”

Kate laced her fingers through Drina’s. She could barely see them in the dark: walnut brown and new pine pale, like a pattern of inlay. “Yes,” she said. “You can come with me.”

¶

So Plain Kate and Drina went together down the road to Lov. Whatever had been between them—the lopsided friendship of Drina’s merriness and Kate’s cautious silences—was gone now, hacked off, burned away. But something new had grown in its place, a bond as strong as a scar. They did not speak of it, and they made the best time they could.