Plain Kate

Plain Kate knew knives: A man might cut himself there, but only on purpose.

He looked at her watching, and held up a hand as if to show the blood. She turned away.

Her face floated in the dark water. Kate saw herself and closed her eyes, her hands rising up to cover her burnt face. She felt the bubbled scars. She moved her hands away.

The water below was a pool of dark mirror, showing willow and small gusts of sky. And her face. Plain Kate she is, she thought. Plain as a stick. One side of her face was splattered with burn scar, mostly pale and slick, but thickened and bubbled where it was worst, a rectangle from ear to eyebrow. Her hair had been singed off on that side too, and was growing back only in patches, ugly as a chick just getting its feathers in.

“It’s as well,” said Linay gently, behind her. “Everyone will turn away from you. Fewer will see.”

That she had no shadow, he meant. Once she looked past the burns she could see that being shadowless too had marked her: Her nose threw no shadow across her face; her eyes had no weight. She looked half washed away, floating in the water like a drowned ghost. She turned away. Linay was still watching her, intense, as if he were hungry.

He was bloody and wild and pale. Pale…He’d been pale when he took her shadow, but pale and strong. Now he looked gray, weak as she was, and wild in his weakness.

He raised a white eyebrow at her. “If you would wash, do it before darkness.”

She hesitated.

“Go on. It will do you good, if your legs will hold you. I shan’t peek.

¶

Plain Kate was working her way toward the pool that was hidden from Linay’s boat by the largest willow. She inched along the bottom of the V made by the steep bank and the willow’s great furrowed trunk, balancing with both hands. The willow’s rough bark made her feel the fragile tightness of the new scars on her hands. Her hands felt as stiff as if gloved.

“I could kill the heron,” said Taggle. “If I wanted. I would lie in wait on one of the willow branches and take him from above.”

“Like a panther,” said Kate, who wasn’t really listening. Her hands. Her hands that held her carving knife. Her skill with that knife was her whole life, the only thing she had left in the world. Her hands felt so strange.

Taggle curled his tail. “Like a panther. Ah. A panther.” He sprang up on a branch and padded along by her ear.

“Taggle,” she began. She wanted to ask him what would happen to her if she couldn’t carve. What would happen—but she could not think of any words. And then she came clear of the willow, and found herself above the edge of a pool set like a jewel into the bank. The willow branched above and green fronds trailed like a curtain, all around.

Taggle stretched himself out on a branch over the pool. “I would wait,” he announced, “like this.”

Plain Kate stood looking down at the green, dappled space. Her skin was sticky and grimed as if she’d been wound up in a spiderweb for months. Her legs trembled with weakness. And her hands felt numb, bigger than they should have, and farther away.

“I will keep watch,” yawned the cat, and closed his eyes.

What will I do? she had wanted to ask him. What will I do if I cannot carve? But it was the wrong question. What will I do without my shadow? What will I do with no family and no people, no place to belong? What will I do with my life in the hands of this dangerous man? “Taggle,” she began.

But the cat was so intently keeping watch that he had fallen asleep. He lay on the branch with his dangling feet dream-twitching. Kate laughed. And laughed. And found she couldn’t stop laughing. It tore at her until she doubled up and her eyes streamed. And still she kept laughing, until she threw up with the horror of it.

The physical shock of the sickness calmed her. She washed. Exhausted, she slept. When she woke it was golden afternoon. Linay’s boat was out of sight behind the big willows, but she could hear the river patting its flat sides. She could go back there.

Or she could leave.

Anyone who saw her would take her for a demon. She could not go among people; they would kill her. She could not live on her own; she would die.