Plain Kate

And indeed the stream of customers thickened around her, and people of all classes came to see her work, hefting the faces and running fingers over the smoothness of the carving. She sold four of her big objarka and made good silver. But then, suddenly, the crowd scattered, taking flight like a field full of starlings at no cue Kate could see. She found herself looking at a single pair of good boots and the hilt of a sword. She looked up at a man in the dress of the city watch. “We’ll have no witchcraft in the market,” he said.

“I don’t do any.”

“And your little friend?” said the watchman. For a moment she thought he meant Taggle, and her stomach lurched. She looked at the basket woman, whose eyes were wide with fear. “The lass with the pretty ways and little bundles,” he said. “The Roamer girl.”

Plain Kate swallowed and looked straight ahead. This gave her a good view of the watchman’s sword, bumping at his hip. “Well?”

But she could think of nothing to say.

“Have a word with her,” he said more kindly. “They burned a woman here last week.”

When he’d gone, Plain Kate tried to catch the basket woman’s eyes. But the woman, pale, turned her head away.

Plain Kate sat trembling on her bedroll with her three masks in front of her, and didn’t know what to do. She stood up and didn’t see Drina anywhere. She looked and looked. Her eyes lit on every flash of red, but none of them was the red turban Drina had been wearing. She tried to shout Drina’s name, and her voice caught in her throat.

People were still thick around her blanket, but now the glances were for her and not for her work, and some were hot, and some were cold. Plain Kate looked down at the objarka that had the face of a woman burning. She shifted her weight from foot to foot.

“Go find her,” the basket woman said. “Hurry.”

So Plain Kate snatched up her sleep roll and stuffed it, objarka and all, into her pack. She swung it up and ran into the center of the market. She found nothing but confusion. Wet cobbles skidded underfoot. Shoulders and elbows jostled her. Heads and handcarts blocked her view.

She scrambled up the steps to the platform from which the weizi rose. She’d been half expecting to see wood for burning stacked around the column, but there wasn’t, only the carved figures of the weizi itself: men unloading boats, a little too big to be human, their faces too narrow, their limbs too long. From the weizi platform she could see a little way. Something was happening by one of the alleys. The eddying crowds had begun to flow in that direction. Kate saw the catfish man with the jangling coat heading that way, coaxing a priest along, a hand on the holy man’s elbow.

Plain Kate leapt from the platform and fought her way through the dung and puddles. A bridge from house to house made a wooden lip above the mouth of an alley. There was space of shadows beneath the bridge. In front of it was a wall made of human backs and shouting.

Kate heard a high screaming. The yowl of a cat.

Close by she heard the catfish man saying to the wheezing priest: “…the devil’s bundles, holy father, with my own eyes…”

The devil’s bundles, thought Kate. Drina’s charms. But she could see nothing but the tracks of the crowd.

Suddenly Taggle came scrambling over the heads and shoulders of gathered men. He left a trail of blood and cursing. “Katerina!” he yowled—though in the din only she knew it was him. The cat leapt onto her pack-basket, spitting, his hair stiff as a brush. “Katerina! It’s—”

“Shut up!” she snapped. Drina’s witchcraft charms. Her secret questions. “It’s Drina. Is she alive?”

“When I left.”

“What’s this, then?” said the little priest, but the men were packed so tightly that they didn’t—couldn’t—turn.

Kate looked at them desperately. “We have to get through.”

She could feel Taggle’s hot breath on her neck as the cat shifted on her basket, muscles bunching. “Follow me,” he said.

And before she could even think of stopping him, Taggle threw himself at the crowd.

His front claws bit into her shoulder as he leapt; his back claws grazed her ear. And then he was scrambling across the heads and shoulders of the packed people. His claws were out and his teeth were gnashing. He was huge with his hair on end, and screaming like a panther. The men—men he had already bloodied—shouted and squealed and hit and pushed against their fellows to get away from him. The wall of bodies cracked open. Plain Kate followed her cat like a soldier following his spear.

Elbows struck her. Feet tangled her. She stumbled and shoved through the hot press and the human stink. Something hard hit her temple. Another blow to her ribs. A stabbing weight on her instep. And then suddenly she was through. Panting, battered, terrified. But through. Into a little space bordered by the crowd, the walls of the alley, and a cart with a hysterical, rearing horse which blocked the way forward.

What she saw—