Plain Kate

“Are you all right, Katerina?” Taggle peered into her shattered face. When she didn’t answer he shook his head—actually shook it, side to side, a human “no.”

The gesture struck Kate and made her sad. It looked wrong; it looked right. It made what he was visible: not a cat, not human, something new. “Oh, Taggle,” she said. What was he? What was she? What had Linay made them?

Find your shape. Lift your knife.

Plain Kate stopped thinking and carved, her knife knowing things. The gouge she’d made when her knife had slipped suggested the lower lid of an uptilting eye. She roughed it out, put in the other eye, then used the knife tip to sketch the lines of the nose and brow and mouth, and suddenly the oak burl had a face: a woman’s face, narrow and strong and sad, too strange to be beautiful. With only the eyes done it seemed to look at her. And already she knew it: the rusalka’s human face, the face of Linay’s lost sister, Drina’s mother, Lenore.

Find your shape. She was Plain Kate Carver, daughter of Piotr, the girl who knew the secrets inside the wood. The girl who was brave and lifted her knife. The girl who had told her father she would be a master by the time she was twenty.

But instead she was going to die. Because she was going to stay with Linay.

Long enough to find out how to stop him.

fourteen

blood and questions

The next evening they anchored in a place where the fields of barley and rye came right down to the river, the grain growing among the riverside tangle of bloodtwig and basket rush. The grain—as Kate had come to dread—was unharvested, and full of feasting starlings. As the sunset lit, the birds threw themselves into the sky in tongues of dark fire that flashed back and forth across the river. Linay stood up on the roof of the hold, playing his fiddle. The skirling notes wove through the rush of wings.

Plain Kate kept her head bent over the carving, her heart beating faster as the light sank. The fog rose up around her. The fiddle grew quieter and quieter until both it and its player were lost in the thickening darkness. Plain Kate slotted her carving tools one by one into their leather roll. The tool case was a very fine thing, its felt-lined inner pockets soft with long use, its smooth-grained outside stained dark with someone’s sweat. It hadn’t been abandoned; the carver in Kate was sure of that. Someone had died. And then Linay had stolen it and given it to her. And she’d been grateful.

The fog was so thick now that she felt completely alone. Then Taggle came from nowhere, standing regally at her elbow, with his ears pricked and his fine head lifted. They heard Linay jump down onto the deck. He emerged from the fog and stopped in front of them. Wordless, he held out his cupped hands, ready for her blood.

Kate stood up. “I won’t,” she said.

“Oh, won’t you? I believe we had a bargain. Your blood for your shadow.”

“I gave you blood. I never said I’d keep giving it.” In the rye field the birds settled into a silence that struck Kate as ominous. She drew herself up. “I want something else.”

“I want answers,” said Kate. “To three questions.”

“Three questions!” He laughed. “Do you think you’re a fair maid in a tale? Shall I fetch a mirror, Little Stick, to set you straight?”

“Two questions,” she bargained.

Linay stopped laughing. A thicker fog was beginning to pour over the side of the punt. “You would haggle with hell’s boatman,” Linay spat at her, then thinned his voice to a little girl’’: “One coin or two?”

Kate tried a shrug. “Bleed yourself, if you’d rather.”

“I’ll help,” said Taggle.

Linay ignored the cat, and spoke as if to himself. “I am going to need my strength.”

The boar was full of fog now. Plain Kate felt as if they might sink into it and drown.

“One question,” said Linay.

“One a night.”

“Done. Now bleed.”

So she did, letting the blood trickle into the bowl of ice in Linay’s hands. In the twilight, it looked black. As the bowl filled, the fog rose and thickened and began to eddy around them and rub at them like a stray dog. In another moment the rusalka was there, thin as a rib bone but wrapped halfway around them. She leaned for the blood. There was nothing human in her face, nothing lovely—just a bottomless avidity.

Kate backed away.

Linay, though, stayed where he was, and when the rusalka knelt to drink he crouched beside her, as if he wanted to wrap an arm around her shoulders. He was singing something. Kate couldn’t hear what.

She reached down and picked up Taggle. Together they watched the rusalka and Linay kneeling together like a bride and groom. They waited.

The rusalka drank the blood from the bowl, and when she was gone, Linay folded up. He sat on the deck with his knees drawn up and his head resting on his arms.

“Linay?” said Kate. She couldn’t tell whether or not he was weeping.

He fluttered a pale hand without lifting his head. “Yes, yes. Ask your question.”