Plain Kate

Linay had been generous. The thought made her uneasy.

Plain Kate took off her haversack and started tucking her tools and carvings into the basket. The last thing she pulled out was the Wheat Maiden objarka. She stopped and looked at it. The woman’s carved face seemed to shiver in her hands, and Kate realized she was shaking.

The objarka was finished and paid for. Fear urged her down the road, but honor made her turn around and look at the dark bulk of the town behind her, the weizi rising like a ship’s mast from a bank of fog.

Plain Kate set the basket on a rock and struggled into the straps. She had just managed to get herself upright when Taggle sprang up onto the basket lid and skidded to a stop by her ear. Kate yelped in surprise and wobbled as the cat shifted and turned, his side rubbing against her neck and his tail flipping around her head.“What are you doing?” she demanded.

“You couldn’t follow?”

“Dogs follow,” he said, in such a horrified tone that she didn’t bother arguing. She felt him sway behind her as she walked, then settle into the movement. They went on in silence for a while, beside the river.

A thick fog slid off the water and over the road and the town. It was like moonlight hanging in the air: a little light everywhere, so that nothing could be seen. It wrapped sounds around her, changing her footfalls and the chuckling of the river into an underwater music. It lulled and rocked her, singing.

Plain Kate felt muddled and strange. She hadn’t slept since the axe. The music seemed real; she could hear a fiddle in it, a voice singing in a language she didn’t know. She thought the river itself was singing, or the moon, or all the ghosts in the world. She shook herself, and out of the night the town’s wall suddenly loomed. Kate stopped with a bump.

“We have been fleeing,” Taggle intoned, “in the wrong direction.”

“Did you hear that?” There was still ghost music, somewhere.

“Yes,” the cat said haughtily, “it’s real. I can talk. You wished for it. And I was saying, this is the town where they were going to kill you.”

“I have to give the objarka to Niki.”

“Hrrmmmm,” he said. “Well. No one is trying to killme.”

But just in case, he wormed his way under the basket lid. Plain Kate felt him settle against her shoulder blades. She squared them and set off into the dark streets.

***

At the bakery, Plain Kate stopped in the doorway. She had meant to leave the Wheat Maiden on the doorstep like a baby—but she had forgotten that bakers rise early.

The half-moon mouth of the oven glowed with the coals ready deep within it. The long-handled peel lay across a table like a pike. Niki the Baker was standing at the dough trough, punching down the dough for white bread—dead pale, sticky stuff. Plain Kate watched the muscles bunching in his big arms. He looked up. “Plain Kate!”

She stood on the doorstep with the night at her back.“I brought…” She held out the objarka. “It’s finished.”

“Come in, come in.” Niki rubbed his sticky hands together, making worms of dough that dropped to the floor. “This has to rise for the morning baking. You needn’t have come so early—too early for anybody but bakers! Set her down, let’s have a look.”

Plain Kate set the objarka down and took a step back. She needed to go, but she couldn’t stop looking at the Wheat Maiden’s face.The truth, she kept thinking.The truth is—

“Plain Kate. Katerina. You’re running away.”

She shrugged.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, you are. Ah, Plain Kate. Where will you go?”

She shrugged again, and Niki sighed.“But it’s wise, little one. Wise. There’s talk.”

She stood, still looking at the objarka. Niki faltered and looked at it too.“It’s very fine, you know, very fine work. You have a way with a knife, that’s sure, a blessed blade. This will be lucky for me, sure. But I’ll miss you.” As if the admission embarrassed him, he started to bustle. “I can give you bread. Two-day-old millet, only a little stale. And I think”—he was rummaging—“there’s some hurry bread, you know, for traveling. I—” He stopped as a thought took him. “You should go with the Roamers.”

Unexpected hope rocked her. Going with other people—even a foreign and despised people—would give her a real chance to survive. “The Roamers?” she echoed.

“Yes, that’s it, Roamers,” said Niki.

They both looked at each other, not sure of how one went about being taken in by outcasts.“I’ve dealings with them, you know, over the horse,” said Niki at last. “So they’ll talk to me, I suppose. They’re down by the sheep meadows.”

He stopped, seeing her face.“No fear,” he said, patting her hand. “Roamers are right enough.”

But he had mistaken her: She was afraid not that the Roamers would take her in, but that they would turn her away.

***