Plain Kate

“If you do, you must tell me.” With sudden decisiveness, he stopped the horse. She couldn’t see his face, just his long fingers tight on the reins, the little knife in one hand. “Now you’re trembling. What happened, Plain Kate? What happened to you and Drina in that market?”

Plain Kate tried to compose an answer, but found tears stinging to the surface of her eyes. She shook her head harder. Xeri stamped and struggled forward, thrashing his head. Behjet gave him rein and he took up an easy ramble. And still Kate could only shake her head.

Behjet lifted his hand—knife and all—and let it rest over hers. “It’s all right, then, mira,” he said, and she could hear his mother Daj in his voice. His kindness broke her, and she told him. A flood of details came spilling out of her like fish from a net, last caught first: The basket woman who had saved them, the arc of the silver coins over the spitting crowd, the blood on the cleaver, the rearing horse, the booted watchman, the angry tinker—

“A tinker?” Behjet interrupted, sounding urgent. “Selling charms? What did he look like?”

Plain Kate sketched for him the bald man with the catfish whiskers, selling the cheap tin objarka off his own jangling coat.

“Ah.” Behjet relaxed. “I thought perhaps—well. Look here.” He turned the horse almost right around, and took them up a little track that ran slantwise to the road. It curved and wound into the birch wood. Branches brushed their knees on either side and clattered on her basket. Taggle popped his head out again, and this time got a face full of pine needle. He swore in cat.

Behjet chuckled. “Sorry, Taggle.”

They rode on. The track opened and spilled into a streambed of rushes and willow saplings. “It doesn’t go anywhere,” said Kate. “It’s just a deer track.”

“Ah, but that’s the point. Here the vardo may leave the road without leaving too broad a trace. And yet, it’s not a path the town folk will follow, if they come looking.” He swung down, then lifted her from Xeri’s back. She wobbled at the suddenly steady ground, and was hardly standing before Taggle sprang into her arms. She tumbled backward into a clump of marsh marigold. Behjet smirked—but kindly. She had never before known someone who could smirk kindly. He climbed back up on the horse.

“Stay here a moment,” he said, and rode off. Kate watched him go with a shaking heart, Taggle with a disgusted sniff.

“That,” proclaimed the cat, squirming down into her lap, “was awful. The jouncing. The rearing! The mud. I have decided that we will not travel again by horse.” When she didn’t answer, he poked her with his damp nose, and rubbed her thumb with the corner of his mouth. “Look, I’m still damp. Fuss over me.”

So she hugged the cat to her chest. “My hero,” she said. “My soft damp little warrior. What are we going to do?”

¶

Behjet was gone for a long time. The woods they had disturbed into silence filled again with birdsong and glimpsed movement, rabbits and deer. Gradually it occurred to Plain Kate that the Roamers could abandon her here, dump her off like a sack of kittens.

But finally Behjet did come back. Together they walked Xeri deeper into the woods, to where the stream widened into a clearing by the river. Behjet fished, and Kate tried to do the chores that she and Drina did together. It took longer, and was harder, drearier work alone. She was still piling firewood when the first vardo came nosing through the willow saplings, the horse straining to pull it through the mud.

The clearing was a miserable camp: more bog than meadow. Every step pressed tea-colored water from the grass. The wheels of the vardo sank halfway to the hubs. Flies swarmed and bit. The horses twitched and pulled at the sour-smelling grass. The people swatted and grumbled.

Daj and Drina did not come out of the red vardo. Stivo sat on its steps and sharpened his axe.

So Kate, by herself, took the buckets from their pegs on the green vardo and placed them—one, two, three, four—a few paces apart along the stream. She took the big bucket from the blue vardo and set off toward the river. One of the women, pulling piled chicken baskets out of the bear cage, called after her: “Not alone! It’s not the Roamer way—”

But Stivo interrupted her: “But she’s not Roamer, is she? And she looks after herself well enough.”

So Kate went alone. Full, the big bucket was iron-heavy. She and Drina usually carried it between them, their hands twined side by side on the handle, both of them leaning outward against the weight. Without Drina, Kate staggered. The bucket had to be held out far enough that it didn’t bang into her knee. It made the weight more; it was like carrying her secret. She shook with it.