Plain Kate

So she slept thinly, drowsing over her knife and making strange things while half awake. She was doing that in the twilight, leaning against a stump in someone’s fallow field, when she came to herself and found Drina by her side.

“I don’t want your help,” Plain Kate blurted.

Drina reacted as if struck, jerking back. Plain Kate, still waking, reached after her. “No, wait, Drina—I only mean…” She put down her knife and scrubbed at her eyes. “Your father said—”

“My father—” Drina began, fiercely, angrily—but just then Ciri came toddling up to them. He was the young prince of the Roamers, a boy of two, the favorite of the dozen naked and cheerful children who chased chickens and snuck rides on horses in Roamers’ camps. Just now he had Taggle in a headlock.

“Help,” croaked the cat.

Drina shed her anger and pulled boy and cat into her lap. “Ciri, Ciri,” she said, and dropped into the Roamer language, a liquid coaxing in which Plain Kate caught only the word cat. Ciri unfolded his elbows, and Taggle spilled out, bug-eyed.

Plain Kate picked him up and scratched his ruff. “Thank you for not killing him.” By this time she knew how to flatter a cat: praise of ferocity and civility both.

Taggle preened. “He’s a kitten.” He arranged his dignity around him with a few carefully placed licks. “Else I would have laid such a crosshatch of scratches on him he’d have scales like a fish.”

“Cat!” burbled Ciri, reaching.

Taggle allowed himself to be patted roughly and then grabbed by the ear, but flicked Ciri a yellow look. “I do have my limits.”

“Talk!” chirped Ciri. “Cat talk cat.”

Kate glanced at Drina, who answered, “It will be just a story. He’s always telling stories. Don’t worry, Plain Kate.” She staggered up with Ciri in her arms. “A few more days, Plain Kate. There’s a place near Toila where we always stop. We’ll have our own tent there. Darkness and quiet.” She swung the little boy up pig-a-back. “Come, mira, let’s find your dajena.” She looked round at Kate one more time. “Don’t be frightened.”

But Kate was frightened. All great magic requires a great gift… He made a rope of hair and soaked it in his own blood… And what Linay had said: Blood draws things. It would be foolish to draw your own shadow to you.

“Blood,” she said.

“Sausages, I think,” said Taggle, sniffing. “Get me one, would you?” But he climbed into Kate’s lap and let her bury her nose in his soft fur and wiry muscle.

¶

A few days shy of Toila, the hills spread into a broad lowland. Oak and fir gave way to willow and alder, and then to fields and gardens. Under the glares of the farmers and herders, the Roamers went carefully, the five vardo staying in a line like beads on a string. But the next day the mood grew merrier. “We will stop tonight with Pan Oksar,” Drina explained. “He’s gadje, but a friend to us. He keeps horses.” She was almost skipping. “We’ll stay with him.”

There’s a place near Toila where we always stop, Drina had said. This would be that place. A spell of blood and hair. “How long—” Plain Kate began.

“Long enough to let the mud set on the wheels,” said Daj, from the back step of the creaking, lumbering vardo.

“A week or so, and then it’s a few more days to Toila.”

“Can we—” Drina began, but Daj cut her off.

“Yes, mira, you two can share a bender tent, if you like.”

Drina’s face lit up. She gave Kate’s arm a quick squeeze, and the blue star scarf that hid the spell-braids a significant glance. But then two little boys herding geese started to jeer the Roamers and toss rocks at the horses, and in the hubbub the two girls got pulled apart. They had no chance to speak before reaching the red-painted gates of Pan Oksar’s farm.

To Kate, Pan Oksar’s farm seemed impossibly prosperous, almost a small town. There were separate houses for animals and people, an orchard and a garden, a house just for the hens. Through the green spaces wandered horses. Round everything was a hedge of red roses tall as a building, thick as a city wall. The Roamers came through the gate singing, and the people of the household all tumbled out to meet them.

They spoke a language Kate did not know, and their dress was strange to her. “No one likes them, because their ways are different,” Drina explained. “Just like the Roamers—no one likes us either. So we have to like each other.”

The Roamers stopped the vardo just inside the hedge, with arching roses brushing the canvas roofs. And, for the first time since Plain Kate had joined them, they started pitching tents: one per married couple, one for the bachelor Behjet and the widowed Stivo, one for Daj and the smallest children—and one for the “maidens,” as Behjet called them: Drina and Kate.