Plain Kate

“My mother—” Drina looked down at her hands, rubbing her thumb against the place on the step corner where the red paint had worn away. “My mother was a witch. I have her power, I think, and I was learning when she—she was going to teach me. But they killed her.”

“They—” said Kate.

“In this city, Lov. It was in theskara rok, the witch’s fever. They were burning witches. They found out she had power and—”

Kate remembered thinking that she knew more about witch-hunting than Drina did. She had been wrong.“They burned her,” she said, so that Drina didn’t have to.

“Yes. No.” Drina sat down and Kate could feel the trembling that came off of her, like water fluttering in a breeze. “They took her. They hurt her until she told them—I don’t know. That she had brought the fever, I think. And then they—they burned her. They tried to burn her. But she had power, real power. She broke free and she ran. She was burning. She threw herself into the river and she drowned.”

“Drina…” said Kate, but could not go on.

“So I’ll help you,” Drina said. “I have power and I want to help you.”

Kate closed her eyes.“Help me,” she said.

***

Late, in the warm darkness of thevardo, Drina and Plain Kate lay whispering. The rain tapped on the canvas roof, and Daj snored a few feet away. Taggle was stretched out between the girls, belly up, one ear under each chin, rumbling in bliss. Plain Kate told Drina about the swarm of fish, the stink of the smokehouse, the axe in the dark. About why she had traded her shadow for a handful of fishhooks.

About the man who had done it, who had pulled her shadow from her like the shell from a shrimp, she said little. In that country, people said that if you spoke of demons, demons came. Linay. Kate didn’t want to say his name.

“Your shadow,” whispered Drina. “But—I’ve seen you. I know it’s always raining, but—I’ve seen you. Are you sure you’ve lost your shadow?”

“He said it would be slow.” Saying it that way made it sound awful, like a slow death. She tried to back away from that. “I’m sure, anyway. I can feel it…like a sack with a hole in it. Spilling.”

“Bleeding?” offered Taggle. “Like when you bite something small around the belly. They leak.”

Kate did not feel much helped by this expert observation.“What will happen to me, Drina? Did your mother teach you—?”

Drina was silent a while. Then she said,“When my mother died—after she died, my uncle—” Behind them, Daj snorted and shifted in her sleep. The two girls tensed, then eased as the snoring started again. Drina continued, her voice the softest of whispers.

“My uncle was a witch too. They were twins, my mother and he, and they were always together; it was like they had one heart between them. I remember, we were camped outside the walls of Lov, by the river. When my mother died, I mean. And he found her, her body, floating there against the water gate. All—all burnt and hurt, he said. They wouldn’t let me see her.

“My father screamed and screamed. But my uncle got so quiet. There’s something wrong, he said, he kept saying, something is wrong with her. And my father hit him. He said of course there’s something wrong, she’s dead! But my uncle—he didn’t want her buried. And when we did bury her, he lay flat on her grave and he wouldn’t eat and he wouldn’t talk.

“And finally he said—she’s not here. She’s not resting, she’s not here. Father threatened to kill him if he didn’t shut up, but he wouldn’t. He said: Don’t bother, I’m going to kill myself. And he was a witch, you know, so it was true. Everything he said was true, one way or another.”

“And—did he?” asked Plain Kate. “Did he kill himself?”

“No. He took his shadow—that’s why I’m telling you this. He made a rope out of his own hair—he cut it all off and made it into a rope. And he soaked it in blood, his blood. And he waited until morning and he made a noose out of that rope, and he threw it down on top of his shadow, on top of the shadow’s heart. And—I saw this, it was real—the shadow got a hole in it, like he had a hole right through him and the sun was shining through. This little piece of shadow came loose, got solid, like a bird. And he picked it up and held it in his hand.

“And then he called her, my mother. He used her name. That was—we never speak the names of the dead. But he called her and he said: ‘Come and tell me where you are!’ ”

Drina’s breath, as she echoed her uncle’s cry, stirred Kate’s hair. Daj shifted again, and both girls froze in silence, listening, as if it had been them who had just summoned the dead.

“She was in the shadowless country,” said Plain Kate. “The land of the dead.”

“But she—something—something came.”

A gust of wind blew branches against thevardo; they scraped like fingernails. Even the cat was silent now.

“He put the shadow on her tongue,” said Drina. “And she spoke. I didn’t hear. He wouldn’t tell me what she said.”