Plain Kate

Plain Kate stood frozen, caught between threat and hope.

“It’s a promise from a man who cannot lie,” Linay said. “And it’s all you’ll get. Take it now if you want to live.”

Something feather-touched the back of Kate’s neck. She whipped around, drawing her knife. The creature was right there, close behind her as a shadow.

Kate leapt backward, stumbling. The fog bank billowed and the creature made of fog came forward. The music, the empty music, sluiced onto the deck of the boat. Kate felt it around her, in her, welling up and filling her legs. It was an emptiness that was like warmth; a heaviness that was like floating away. Sleep. “Stop!” she gasped, waving the knife. It went through the fog and left no wound. “Linay!”

“Blood,” he said, sounding calm again, amused. She risked a look at him, reaching out with her eyes the way the drowning reach. He just sat, just watched. “Try the wrist.”

Plain Kate tried to gather herself. Knives; she knew knives. She had nicked herself often enough to know how to draw blood. Breathing hard, she thrust the tip of her knife into her wrist, and with a flick opened a little well. Dark blood welled up. She let it run into her cupped hand.

The rusalka swept toward her—like sleep itself, the thing swept: gray, faceless, huge. The figure flickered like layers of ice, and appeared in little pieces: a long hand, a tumble of hair, one egg-blank eye. Then suddenly she had a face. It was narrow and sad and impossibly beautiful. Plain Kate fell to her knees, as if she’d seen an angel.

Kate wanted to curl up on the deck and cover her face, but she didn’t. She lifted her hand, filled with blood. Nonsensically, she remembered the last time she had lifted her hand like this, for Taggle: One day when the Roamers strayed far from the river, she had poured water from a skin into her cupped hand and held it out. As Kate thought this, the rusalka dipped her head, and drank.

Kate felt something like a mouth close over the hole in her wrist. It sucked blood, or more than blood. Bones. Her own name.

Time went by.

Kate was dying. It felt like being changed into sleep and water.

The a blur of gray came like a cannonball through the fog and thumped into her chest.

Plain Kate fell backward. Taggle was standing on her chest, crying “Katerina! Kate! Kate!” His claws prickled through her clothes. Fur stood in a ridge on his back. “Taggle…” She choked on his name. Groggy and sick, she pushed herself up on one elbow. The rusalka—

—the rusalka was kneeling beside Plain Kate on the deck. She was made of fog and shadow until Kate caught her eye, and then, all at once, she became human. She was young, mischievously sad, a fox in a story. Kate fell in love with her. And then she was gone.

It was like waking up from a dream. Kate sat up and Taggle fell from her chest and tangled himself around her sprawling legs, circling and high stepping, purring as a cat will do when badly hurt. “The thing!” he said. “The thing came while I was not here to challenge it!”

Plain Kate twisted around. Linay, as if he hadn’t moved, was sitting cross-legged on the cabin roof. He gave a fluid, careless shrug. He picked up his fiddle. Kate got up and went below.

¶

Plain Kate lay in the narrow bunk and listened to the skirl of Linay’s fiddle, ringing wild and strange across the water. Taggle paced the edge of the bunk, up and down. His small feet pressed into her like blunted chisels. “Stop that,” she said when she couldn’t stand it anymore. “Lie down.”

The cat sprang over her and started to walk the hand’s space between her body and the boat wall instead. The third or fourth time he made the turn by her face she batted at him. “Taggle! Lie down!”

He stopped, facing away from her, his restless tail switching over her face. “I could go kill you something,” he offered.

“Just sit.”

He turned—stepping on her spleen—and sat. “I am sorry,” he said. “I don’t like it. It is a new word, sorry. It should not be a thing for cats.”

“I suppose not.”

He lay down and fit his narrow chin into her hand. “But I am sorry. Sorry I was not here to kill the thing for you.”

“It’s not a thing.” Kate was remembering the rusalka’s bright face—fear and flicker of flame in the ghostly eyes. “She must have had a name once.”

“Bah,” said the cat. “She’s dead now. Dead things should stay dead. Otherwise they might scratch you from the inside.”

“Bah,” echoed Kate. The music sighed and rippled. She rubbed her cut wrist, and then crooked her arm around Taggle’s soft warmth. The nights were getting colder.

The cat rolled and shaped his spine to her side. “Sleep,” he said. “I’ll keep watch.”

But Plain Kate lay a long time in the darkness—long after the cat had drifted to sleep—listening to the sad music, and thinking.

Linay was a witch, and a Roamer man alone. His sister was a witch, a woman both burned and drowned. How many could there be? Linay, Kate was sure, was Drina’s uncle, the man who had given a piece of his shadow to summon the dead. The man who had gone mad.

twelve

fog