Plain Kate

“My daughter did some of the angels,” he told the man, gathering Kate up and pulling her forward.

The man looked at the faces that were so beautiful they seemed sad, the wings that looked both soft and strong, like the wings of swans that could kill a man with one blow. “Apprentice her,” he said.

“If she likes,” Piotr answered. “And when she is of age.”

When the guild man went away, Plain Kate chided her father. “You know I will be your apprentice!”

“You are the star of my heart,” he said. “But it is two years yet before you are of prenticing age. Anything might happen.”

She laughed at him. “What will happen is that I will be a full master by the time I am twenty.”

But what happened was that her father died.

¶

It happened like this: The spring swung round into summer, full of heat and flies. The wheat crop whithered. The first frosts came and found food already short. And then a sickness called witch’s fever ate through the town.

At first, Plain Kate and her father were too busy to worry. People wanted new objarka—some wore so many of the carved charms that they clacked softly when they moved. They carved all day, and into the night by the bad light of tallow lamps. They carved faster than they could cure the wood. And then they grew even busier, because there were grave markers to make.

Witch’s fever was an ugly thing. The sick tossed in their beds, burning up, sobbing about the devils that were pulling their joints apart. They raved of horrors and pointed into shadows, crying, “Witch, witch.” And then they died, all but a few. It seemed to Plain Kate that even those who were not sick were looking into shadows. The cressets in the market square—the iron nests of fire where people gathered to trade news and roast fish—became a place of hisses and silences. More fingers crooked at her than ever before.

But in the end it was not her the town pointed to. One day, when Plain Kate and her father were in the market square selling new objarka from their sturdy stall, a woman was dragged in screaming. Kate looked up from her whittling, and saw—suddenly—that there was wood for a bonfire piled around the weizi.

The screaming woman was named Vera, and Plain Kate knew her: a charcoal burner, a poor woman with no family, with a lisp from a twisted lip. The crowd dragged Vera to the woodpile, and Piotr picked Plain Kate up and swept her away, though she was too big for it. From their shop they could still hear the screaming. The next day the square was muted and scattered with ash.

And still the sickness ate through the crooked lanes and wooden archways. Plain Kate and her father stopped selling in the square. Their money grew short. The plague burned on and the town shut its gates. Carters stopped bringing food from the countryside; the barges stopped coming down the looping Narwe. Kate had her first taste of hunger.

But slowly the dewy frost gave way to brilliant, hard mornings, and the fever, as fevers do, began to loosen its for the winter. Plain Kate went down to the market to see what food could be had, and found little knots of people around stalls heaped with the last of the fresh harvest: winter-fat leeks and frost-tattered cabbages. The frowning shops that fronted the square seemed to sigh and spread their shoulders.

Plain Kate came home with her basket piled with apples, and found her father slumped at his workbench. He’d left the lathe whirling: a long hiss, winding down in the clotting silence of the shop. She could hear the shudder in his breath.

Somehow she got him up on her shoulder. It made her feel tiny, smaller than she had in years; he was so heavy and she could hardly hold him up. She took him to his bed.

Not everyone who got witch’s fever died. She kept telling herself that. She tried to give him water, she tried to make him eat. She was not sure if he should be kept warm or cold. She tucked his red quilt over him and put a cold cloth on his forehead. Like the others, he sobbed and he saw things. She talked to him day and night until she grew so hoarse that her mouth tasted of blood. “You are here, you are here, I am with you, stay where you belong.” She stayed awake, day and night, saying it.

After two days and three nights, somewhere in the gray hour before dawn, she fell asleep. She woke still sitting on the chair by the bedside, her forehead resting on her father’s hand.

“Katerina,” he rasped.

“You’re here,” she stuttered, lifting her head. “I am here, Father, right here.”

“Not you,” he said, breaking her heart. “Your mother.” There was a screen in the shape of climbing roses between their room and the front of the shop. Light was piercing through it, the long slanting yellow of dawn. Her father was staring into it, his eyes runny and blind. “Look.”

Plain Kate turned for a moment to look, then turned back, afraid of what she might see if she let herself. “Father,” she said. “Papa.”

“Katerina,” he said again. “She is in the light. She’s here. Katerina, you’re here!”