Plain Kate

Kate turned to face him. They had anchored in a mill-pond, slate-dark in the twilight and lively with swallows. The millrace chattered and the wheel turned, but the grindstones inside were silent and the chimney was cold. Plain Kate knew what she’d find if she went inside: the miller fled, like the rest of the country, before the wall of fog and the rusalka’s gray sleep. A mill, she thought. This country will starve.

“Well?” said Linay.

Kate braced herself. “How do you plan to destroy Lov?”

“Why,” drawled Linay. “With your help, little one. Are you sure you want to know?”

Her scalp prickled. She could feel the rusalka somewhere close, but she was more afraid of the man in front of her. She spread her feet for balance. “How?”

“You’ll die if you try to stop me,” he said.

“Three times, I ask you,” she said. “How.”

Linay chuckled. “Oh, Plain Kate. A little hero. And I took you for the weakest in your town.” He stood suddenly, gliding to his feet. Kate was trembling, but she didn’t wince away. “Would you like to see?” His voice was almost amused, almost gentle. It was like Taggle when he tucked away his claws to make some unlucky thing last longer. “Shall I show you the fate of Lov?”

Fear made her skull push against the inside of her skin. Her lips were numb. Speechless, she nodded.

“Come,” said Linay, and stepped over the side of the boat.

Kate cried out and reached to save him—but he did not sink. Around his feet was a sheen of white on the dark water. Ice. He was standing on ice in the warm, still evening. Linay stepped away from her, toward the mill, and the ice flowed out from him, unrolling like a carpet, like a bridge for a king. The mill wheel clattered and groaned to a stop, jammed with ice, and the stillness tightened in Kate’s throat.

“She’s just a ghost, you know,” he said, his soft voice eddying across the water. He stepped up onto the stone wall between the millrace and the pond and stood there as if on a stage. “Just one more of the shadowless people in this shadowy world. But add a shadow to a ghost—”

And he drew a knife across his wrist.

Blood sputtered and spattered. She could hear it pattering into the black water.

As the blood fell, the rusalka rose up. It was like death happening backward, bones rising and taking on a loose skin. “Sister,” Linay said, and offered the thing his hand. She took it, and stepped onto the wall beside him, dainty. She bent her head toward his bleeding wrist, but he stopped her, putting the back of his hand under her chin and raising her face to his. His whisper carried: “Forgive me.” And he seized her arm and wrenched.

The rusalka twisted like a rope. Strands of her separated and coiled around one another. Her face distorted into a silent scream.

Then something ripped through Kate—cold as a hand on her neck, sudden as a dream about falling. The thing flew across the water toward Linay and Lenore, and Kate recognized it: her shadow.

Linay was chanting something. He was still twisting Lenore’s arm, though she screamed. The shadow followed the ugly curves of his words, insinuating itself into the new rents of the rusalka’s body, a rope braiding itself into another rope.

And suddenly, in the place of the woman-shape made of fog, there was something else. Something huge, something ugly. Linay flung up both hands. The thing screamed like a hawk and opened two wings: one white as a death cap, one clotted in shadow. The wings came together and the whole pond shuddered.

Something hit Kate’s ear and shoulder and smashed to the deck by her feet. It was a swallow, dead. She could hear them falling all over the pond. The shadow-and-white wings smashed open and Kate threw herself downward to get under them. She could feel thick death moving just above her head.

Then Linay dropped his hands again. And the shadow wings closed, folded.

“She is gone for now,” said Linay. He stepped down from the wall and came across the groaning ice.

Taggle sprang up on the gunwale between Kate and the striding man. “Keep your distance!” he hissed.

“But it was her question!” Linay laughed, bitter and wild. “How will I destroy Lov? With the ghost and the shadow. It will take a spell of great power to bind your shadow to the rusalka for more than a moment. But I have worked for years to gather that power. Do not doubt that I can do it. And when I do it—do not doubt that everyone those wings touch will die. The whole city of Lov. And you, Plain Kate—”

But at that instant, Taggle snarled and sprang.

Linay caught the leaping cat with his eyes and a rhyme like a thrown spear. Taggle crashed to the deck and made a high, terrible noise. “Tag!” Kate shouted. She went to her knees beside him. The cat was shaking as if in seizure. She tried to scoop him up but Linay’s hand closed on her wrist. He was back aboard the boat. He jerked her toward him. Kate felt the crush of his strong hand, even as she twisted around to get at Taggle.

“He’ll live,” Linay snapped.

“What did you do to him?” she gasped.