Plain Kate

“Come here,gadje child,” said Rye Baro. Plain Kate stepped toward him, and—guided by Daj’s hand on her shoulder—knelt. The old man pointed to her objarka, and Kate took it off and offered it up to him. He took it, and as Daj had done, studied it in silence. Kate stayed kneeling, her leggings wicking water up fromthe wet ground, her cheek and ear getting hot where they faced the fire. At last, Rye Baro looked down at her. “The matter of witch burning is not our affair,” he said. “It is your trouble and you must not bring it upon us. But your work is fine. Stand up.”

Plain Kate stood up.

“This is your duty, then, child,” said Rye Baro. “To earn a place by your skill, and coins for your clan.” Plain Kate took a step back, staggered by the weight of the wordsyour clan. She almost didn’t hear Rye Baro add: “Have your objarka ready for Toila. And make them burji. Times are bad.”

Burji. While objarka drew good luck, objarka burji scared bad luck away. They had the faces of demons.

Plain Kate had no interest in ugly things, but she answered,“Yes, Rye Baro.”

And back at her own fire she lifted her face into the kiss of the rain.

Only much later did she remember what Behjet had said:My brother’s wife was burned for a witch. And she wondered what Stivo had been seeing in that fire.

***

The Roamervardo went on through wild country. The road looped along the river, and where the banks grew too marshy, back into the woods. There were riders or carters, but only occasionally. In the woods, only fingers of chimney smoke going up into the gray sky told them of other people. On the river, sometimes they saw a boat or one of the small painted barges that made Plain Kate think of Linay, standing and watching her catch the enchanted fish. There was a green one that made her head turn sharply whenever she saw it—but it was always trailing them, and never came near.

Plain Kate greased her boots and bandaged her feet, and soon she could walk like a Roamer born. She helped Drina with the water and the wood, and in the long, wet evenings she carved the objarka burji.

Plain Kate carved fast and learned slowly. She learned to ride a horse, or at least hold on to a horse. She learned to cook goulash: a spicy stew of peppers and whatever meat could be scrounged. She learned to snag a chicken with the flick of a crook. She learned the Roamer language and the ways, which were many and complicated. She learned, for instance, how each camp must have a stream, and each stream must have four buckets, and each bucket was used for something different: the first for drinking and cooking, the second for washing, the third for the animals, the fourth for the latrine. But a woman bleeding must use the fourth bucket even to wash.

She was bewildered much of the time, but Daj called hermira again, and when she asked Drina what it meant, the girl replied,“It means she likes you. It means you’re family.”

Family. It could have kept her walking for a hundred miles. And she did walk far. The country grew rougher and quieter, with deer browsing in the middle of the road. The rain kept falling. Thevardo wheels grew thick with mud, and at night socks were propped up on sticks at the fire like toasting sausages. It was miserable, but secretly Plain Kate was glad. She didn’t have to look at her shadow.

Every once in a while, when the rain broke into gusts of drizzle and sun, she saw it: what was left of her shadow. It moved in ways she did not. It stood in the air where no shadow could stand. It was too long and too thin, and it pointed, sometimes, in the wrong direction. She was losing it, and she was not sure what would happen when it was gone.

Plain Kate lay next to Drina at night, with Taggle in the crook of one arm. She closed her eyes and thevardo seemed to spin. She set her back against Drina’s warm back, and pulled Taggle closer to her, and listened to Daj snore. Often she dreamt she had two wings, and one was frightened, and one was happy.

***

All the time they drew closer to Toila, where the Roamers would decide whether to keep her or abandon her. It depended on her carving.

Plain Kate obeyed Rye Baro and made her objarka as burji as she could stand, ugly enough to scare off even a return of theskara rok. She made a man with a pig snout, a bat-faced thing with comically hinged ears, a face that was nothing but teeth. She made the screaming face of the woman she’d glimpsed burning in the witch fire. She made the impossible face she saw sometimes in dreams, a blankness with eyes of hair. They would sell, she thought. Surely they would sell.

Taggle, meanwhile, made himself popular, killing rats and bringing a rabbit into camp every evening, preening in the praise—silently, thank God, though at night he recounted choice bits to Kate: “Rye Baro says I am a princeling; he split the leg bone for me so that I could eat the marrow. They love me. And I’m sure they’ll keep you too.”

Mira, she thought, and treasured it each time she heard it.They must keep me. Family.