Plain Kate

Kate wanted only to sleep. The heat lulled; her head pounded. But after a while she got up and climbed the ladder. She found the punt pulled up at the river’s edge where some long-ago flood had left a tangled heap of dead trees. She had waited too long: Linay had gone off on one of his foraging missions and left them alone.

Sitting in the bleached and bony wood, with the sun streaming through her, Plain Kate sat and tried to carve. The knife that had once been like another hand to her now sat stiffly on top of the new scars. Her fingers had lost their sureness and strength. But still, she turned the burl wood she’d found in the road over and over under her knife, cutting away its weak-rotted places, looking for the shape in its heart. It was rough work, the only kind her hands could do.

The burl slowly took a shape like something with wings. She thought of two hands pressed wrist to wrist, with palms and fingers spread. Bound hands.

Taggle sat primly on a deadfall branch and glared at her until she gave up on carving and placated him by catching a fish. She cooked; they ate. Time passed quietly.

“When you were with the Roamers,” said Linay’s voice behind her, sudden and soft as a ghost, “did she come?”

Plain Kate refused to jump again. She nodded without looking at him. Yes, the rusalka had come. And the Roamers—the people who had been almost her family—had blamed Kate.

“Who?” said Linay.

Plain Kate didn’t see why she ought to answer. Let him wonder. But then he said: “Not Drina…?”

Drina. Her first friend, her—the word startled her as it came into her head—her sister. “No,” she said. “Not Drina. Wen. Stivo.”

“Ah,” he said, voice flat. And he sat down across from her and speared the fish’s head.

“Can they be saved?” Kate asked. “The sleepers—could I have saved them?”

Linay shrugged. “If the rusalka was roused from her half sleep, the sleepers might awaken too. I don’t know and I don’t much care.” He flipped up the gill flap with a thumbnail and picked out the morsel of meat behind it.

“We want to see this trick of yours,” said Taggle.

“Hmmm,” hummed Linay. “Come closer.”

Plain Kate hesitated, and shifted her foot to be sure of the knife in her boot. She did it subtly, but he saw it. “Oh, honestly.” He nudged her toe with his. “I saved your life. I’m hardly about to hurt you. Hold out your hands.” He mimed it, making a bowl of his own long hands and lifting it.

She looked at him narrowly. In the sun, the burn scar pulled across her scalp. She cupped and raised her hands.

“I haven’t always been a stealer of shadows, you know,” he said. “I was a weather worker, once—and welcome anywhere, welcome as a summer rain. And I still know the moods of wind and water.” He leaned over her, fitting his own hands against the underside of hers, his long fingers lapping her wrists. “You can’t expect a ghost to lick up spilled blood like a—”

“—dog,” supplied Taggle. The cat had stood up and was watching them, fur on end.

“She will take blood only from a body. But what is a body? Just a bowl for life. A bowl of breath.” And he blew a long breath into the cup of her hands. It was warm at first, and slowly it grew cold.

Kate eased her hands open. Inside them—taking their shape—was a bowl of ice. It was small as a bird’s nest, woven like that, and shining in the sun. She lifted it into the light. Delicate feathers of frost furred its edges.

“You see,” he said, smiling. “It hasn’t always been ugly.”

Then he stood up, fast, like a man insulted. “It’s a bowl. You fill it with blood and she won’t know the difference between this and a body. Thus I control her bottomless appetites. Notice that you can’t do it without me.” He turned his back on her and swung up the skillet as if it were a sword. “Kick out the fire and come aboard,” he said. “I want some distance yet today.”

But when she lifted herself over the edge of the boat he was in the hold below, and he didn’t come up at once. She thought she heard him weeping.

¶

So they went along. The country grew lower, and the weather cooler. Kate’s hands healed slowly. Linay grew stronger, and Plain Kate learned why he had been weak.

Every evening she let her blood fill the bowl of ice that lined Linay’s hands. They were big hands, narrow but long-fingered. It caught up with her like sickness, the blood-letting. The first day she didn’t feel different. But on the second the sun made her drowsy. On the third she found herself nodding over her carving. By the fifth a sort of heaviness came over her, and made her knife shake. She sheathed it and asked, “How far to Lov?”

Linay shrugged. The old fluidness was back in his joints; he no longer moved as if his jumping-jack strings had stiffened. “Two weeks? Three? It’s not my country.” He set the pole to the river bottom, pushed them ahead, and added: “But we’re coming to it, mira. I can taste it, like ashes. Lov, at last.”

His voice made her scars ache. She ducked her head and took up the wood again.