Plain Kate

THREE THE FISH, THE AXE, AND THE BARGAIN

For the next three days Plain Kate sketched and carved in scrap wood, trying to learn how the bow worked. She kept her head down even though it was a lively time: There were Roamers in the market.

Roamers were wanderers; they lived in tents and traveled from town to town, trading, singing for supper, telling fortunes. Begging, sometimes. Stealing, people said. They had skin like polished walnut, eyes like chestnuts, clothes like a carnival. They lived on the edges of things, and tended to be thin.

Most Roamers were not much welcome in Kate’s little town, which lived too close to hunger to take joy in jugglers, too close to fear to like fortune-tellers. This particular clan, though, came once a year and traded in horses, which was so sensible that even Niki the Baker did business with them. He bought a sturdy pony from the two young men, twins, who tended the little herd. “A dull life she’ll have, driving millstone,” he said, “but she’ll not be beaten.”

Linay, as if driven out by the other strangers, had melted away. Plain Kate put his bow down and worked on Niki’s objarka instead. She found her thoughts chasing one another. There had been a time, in that country, when the Maid of the Wheat was a real woman. When she was led into the last standing quarter of the ripe grain and tied there while the fields were set on fire. Her burning spirit kept the godsfed; her blood was plowed into the ground.

Now they had only one God, and the Wheat Maiden was just a talisman. But women still burned. Plain Kate worked to turn the ends of the objarka’s hair into bearded barley, to turn crosshatch cuts into a woven wheat crown that sat against the smooth forehead. She wished Niki had asked for a horse’s face—the horses in the market were full of life; their hooves clattered on the cobbles like good music. Better than Linay’s tambourine,much better. Kate was sad as evening fell, and the dark-skinned men in their bright colors led the horses away.

When it got too dark to work, Plain Kate went down to the docks to catch dinner. Taggle went ahead of her, with his tail curled in anticipation of fish. The fishing boats were just coming in, the great beacon fire was being lit, and the dock was busy. Plain Kate fished as the stars came out, throwing her line into the darkening water.

Plain Kate caught only one bony bitterling in the first hour, but as the fishermen came by with their barrows, things changed. Where her line went in, the river suddenly swarmed with fish, thick as waves in a whirlpool. Taggle dug in claws and leaned down until his nose almost touched the water. His golden eyes were huge; his teeth clicked with excitement.

The fishermen stopped to look.“Would you look at that,” said Big Jan. He loomed over her in the moonlight. “A body could stand on them.” He nudged Taggle’s twitching rear end with his boot.

The cat fell and twisted as he fell, sinking claws deep into the dock and kicking at the water. Plain Kate grabbed him by the scruff and dragged him out. Taggle dripped and yowled and hissed at Big Jan, who laughed.“Fierce beast you’ve got there, girl,” he said. “Don’t you want to see if he can walk on fish?”

“Leave be, Jan,” said the oldest fisherman, whose name was Boyar. “What happens here, Plain Kate? How did you draw the fish?”

“I didn’t!” she exclaimed. “They’ve just…” She had no explanation. “They’ve just come.”

Big Jan sneered and even Old Boyar looked skeptical, but he said,“Fish, then. Don’t turn your back on blessing.” He eased the dripping cat from her arms so that she was free to fish. Taggle squirmed loose and bolted, swiping at Big Jan’s ankle on the way by.

The fishermen stood a moment, watching as Kate cast her line into the swarm, pulling out fish after fish, big trout that flashed white in the moonlight.“It’s an uncanny thing,” said Old Boyar.

“A witchy thing,” muttered Big Jan.

“Ah, leave off, Jan,” said Old Boyar. “Let’s get the catch in.” He walked away and the other men followed.

A little way downstream, an unfamiliar little boat—a small punting barge—lay tied up at the bank. Moonlight caught at it, and Kate saw something move there, something white. Linay was standing on the deck like a ghost on a battlement. She saw him lift his hand in ironic salute, and remembered his threat:Do not doubt that I can twist things…

She believed him. But she was hungry, and she kept the fish.

In the end, Plain Kate caught twenty-seven trout. She traded the fixing of a cracked spar on Old Boyar’s boat for a share of his space in the town smokehouse. One fat fish she stuffed with wild dill and onion and roasted over the market square fire. She ate as much of it as she could and was full for the first time in weeks. But she was uneasy. The lively chatter of the Roamers and the horse buyers was gone, and Linay was back, brooding in the corner of the market like a stork. With him he’d brought foul weather: The sky had slid shut under a lid of low clouds.

Plain Kate had not quite finished the Wheat Maiden objarka when Niki the Baker came to collect it for the new horse’s stall door. She was shamed but he shrugged it off and paid her anyway, then stood, shifting, as if he wanted to say something. Plain Kate was not much good at such things; she didn’t know how to help him find words. “Uncanny,” said Niki at last, poking at the leftover fish that was wrapped up in oilcloth at Kate’s elbow. “ ’Twas uncanny, those fish. You should take care, Plain Kate. People say…” He stopped.

Plain Kate crossed her arms in front of her, her fingers finding the bony knots of her shoulders.“What do they say?”

But Niki just looked away.“Take care, Plain Kate,” he said again.

In the damp heat of the afternoon, as she worked on Linay’s bow, Plain Kate felt that warning like a hand on her neck. She knew she lived mostly by the town’s thin kindness. She could feel just how thin it was, between her and the whispers of the market square. A strange smell, sour and stale, came from the smokehouse, roiling in the foggy heat. Linay’s tambourine rattled and jangled in her head.

Taggle came and presented her with a half-dead bat. Plain Kate hit it with a hammer and hid it in a drawer to eat later. It would not do to eat such things in daylight, not now, with people talking. When she looked up she saw people watching her as if she were already eating it, as if she had the membranous black wings coming out of her mouth. She looked down.

Taggle made a bleat that sounded like“want, want,” and butted at her hand.

“After dark. You can have some when I cook it.” She pegged together the wood for the bow.

The cat flopped down on top of her work.

“You’re in the way.”

“Wrmmm,” Taggle whirred. He rolled to show his belly, pink under his gray fur.

“Thanks for the bat, cat. But you’re still in the way.” She scratched him, then leaned her nose into his soft, warm fur. “Everyone’s watching us, Tag,” she whispered. “I—”

But Taggle flipped to his feet and hissed. Plain Kate looked up. Linay was lounging against the prop of her awning.

“I’ve heard your name in strange tales, Katie girl. They say you witched the fish.” And he sang, “Witch, fish, flinch, kiss—won’t you let me grant your wish?”

“No.”

“Hmmm.” He smiled. “I wonder how much it will take to make you change your mind.” And he sang:

Plain Kate, Kate the Carver

No one’s friend and no one’s daughter

Little Kate might meet her fate

Whittling sticks till it’s too late

Plain Kate stared.“You drew the fish.”

“But you caught them. And it’s about you they whisper.” Linay’s smile was long and narrow. “I tell you true, Plain Kate, I would not want to see you hurt. You know that, don’t you, about us witches: We tell the truth.”

She had heard the tale: that witches could not lie. People said that as the devil gave witches power, God bound their tongues to truth. It did not seem to her a likely story, and she did not trust Linay.

Linay’s tin-gray eyes glittered as he said, “I want you well. But there are other things I want more. And a swarm of fish might be just a beginning. Think on it. Your shadow for a heart’s wish. Is it such a bad bargain?”

“What Iwish,” she said, “is that you would go away.”

And as if answering a command, Taggle slunk around the awning prop, sprang out, swarmed up Linay’s shirt, and attacked his ear. Linay shouted and spun and flailed like a man who’d stepped on a beehive. All his dignity and all his menace gone in a whirl of squeaks and ungainly limbs. Plain Kate laughed. Finally the cat went flying out of the melee and bolted across the square. There was scattered applause.

Linay bowed.“Until tomorrow,” he said to Kate, and sauntered off, bleeding.

When they opened the smokehouse the next day, the fish were bones and ashes. They fell to dust at a touch. Only Plain Kate’s trout were still plump, smoke-yellow and pink, perfect.

The master of the smokehouse summoned her, and she had to go stand before him in the drizzle with her strong hands curled into silent fists. The master was a grand man, his hands fat and many-ringed, his white hair dressed in curls, yellowed with smoke, smelling of fish. His chair was grand too, with arms carved into the form of leaping salmon: her father’s work. She remembered helping him with it, his big calloused hands over her small calloused ones as he taught her the way of wood grain—oh, her hands had been so small, and she had been happy.

“I have decided,” the master said, leaning back in the beautiful chair, dry under his awning, “that your catch will be split among the men whose fish were in the batch. Since, after all, only luck has spared your fish alone.”

Only luck. He was daring her to contradict. No one thought it was luck. She looked at the salmon, so strong she could almost sense the whip of their muscle. There was a little crowd gathered at her back. She thought the salmon were swimming hard against the current of their looks.“That’s fair,” she said at last. “But I didn’t burn the fish.”

“As I say, girl,” he frowned, “only luck.”

“It’s not luck, it’s witchcraft,” she said, and at her back the silence hardened. “The stranger, Linay. He drew the fish.”

Big Jan, behind her, said what Linay had said:“But you caught them.”

“The fish will be split,” the master said. “And that’s enough from you, Kate Carver.”

Plain Kate could feel how it was going to be. Linay was useful; he was powerful. Those that knew he was a witch wanted his protection; those that didn’t would take an easier target. Stranger though he was, people knew that Linay was not someone to cross. He was powerful as a cornered dog. If the town was going to choose someone to blame for the hard times coming, it wouldn’t be Linay.

Plain Kate turned on her heel, swam silently through the knot of people, and went back to her stall. The bow was lying on her countertop. She wanted to smash it, but it was beautiful. It was quiet and strong. She picked it up, and went back to work.

She was watching for Linay, but he still managed to sneak up on her.“Fair maid of the wood,” he said, making her jump. “How goes the work?”

Plain Kate steadied herself and shrugged.“It will be a good bow,” she said. “I am a good carver.”

“Too good, they say.” He tapped her nose. “They call you ‘witch-child’ already, Katie girl.”

“If they do, it’s because of you.”

He caught her words and sang them back at her:

If they do it’s because of you

What they see is because of me

That may be, that may be,

But I see what I say and I say what I see

He smiled at her.“Do you know what happens to witches, Plain Kate? Have you seen the fires?”

The sour smell from the smokehouse suddenly seemed stronger.“Over a few fish?” Plain Kate tried a laugh; it came out tight.

“Well,” said Linay with a bow, “there might be more.”

“Go away. Or I’ll set my cat on you.”

And he went away. But not very far.

The next day there was no catch—or no catch of fish. Old Boyar brought in three boots. Big Jan caught a dead dog. On the next day the nets were wholly empty. The whole week there was no catch, and the grain barges didn’t come, and rain fell like a long fever.

Then Boyar took a punt upriver into the fog banks, and the next day the boat came back drifting. Boyar was lying on the deck like a king of old, not dead but sleeping—an unnatural sleep from which he could not be woken.

Talk in the market turned to muttering. Plain Kate saw Big Jan swat Taggle from his nest atop a coil of rope. The cat was kicked and cursed from every stall.

Kate herself kept to her work. The bow was nearly finished. The Wheat Maiden haunted her. The carved face was smooth and beautiful—but in its narrow sadness and quizzical brow, Kate saw her own reflection.

At night she locked herself in her drawer and lay awake in the hot darkness. Her thoughts chased themselves until Taggle came in through the little door she’d made him. He flopped on her face. Plain Kate cuddled him under her chin like a fiddle, and they both went to sleep.

And so it went, for a week. Then one night someone took an axe to her stall.

Lightning. She thought she’d been hit by lightning. It was that loud.

And cold. Night air got dumped over her as if from a bucket. Something smashed into the blanket by her head. Taggle’s claws raked her throat as he bolted out of his hole.

She was awake now. There were daggers of wood everywhere. Her safe little drawer was a nest of splinters. And again something clapped past her ear. An axe. Kate screamed.

The axe yanked free and came again. Air and light and falling things hit her.

Plain Kate yanked the door lever. The drawer lurched and jammed.

Her stall was shattering. Smashing through a gap came that swinging axe.

She pounded her fists against the drawer above her. Something gave way to her hands. She shoved and scrambled and hit air.

Plain Kate lurched to her feet. The square was quiet, full of fog. Whoever had wielded the axe was gone. A few folk had clustered outside the inn door, drawn by the noise. Linay was sitting up on his white blanket, looking sleepy. Heads hung from windows. The town’s watchmen came pounding through the river arch. And everyone was looking at her. She didn’t feel anything. She didn’t even feel frightened. She had gone so far beyond frightened that it would take a while for fear to catch up with her.

The running watchmen stopped when they saw it was only her. The drinkers from the inn had begun to talk again, and wandered inside. Windows closed. Plain Kate stood alone. Her muscles were so tight that they made her tremble, the way wood trembled when bent almost to breaking.

Her father’s stall—her home—was a jagged, jumbled ruin. Tools and half-finished carvings were scattered across the wet cobbles. One pale deer, still whole, leapt toward the edge of a splintered piece of awning. She lifted it and looked at it for a while.Where shall I put it? she thought.I don’t have anywhere to put it. She took four steps away from the wreck, and set the deer gently on bare stones.

Taggle came back and tangled around her feet, bleating. She stooped, stroked him between his ears, then picked up an awl that had spun out from the shattered heap, a little way. She set the tool down beside the deer. She edged back toward the wreck. She moved one broken drawer. Things tumbled out of it. It made a lot of noise, but Plain Kate said nothing. No one came. She worked without a word, sorting carvings and tools from junk and straw.

After a while, Linay came over from his white blanket and worked beside her, and he too was silent.

Plain Kate knew that the axe had come because of the rumors Linay had twisted into life. Perhaps he had even sent the axe wielder—a nudge, a seemingly innocent word in the right ear. But she took his help because some of the things she had to move were heavy, and because his strange, washed-away face was hollowed as if someone had died. He pulled her parents’ marriage quilt from under the last of the rubble. She saw the axe holes in it, the way the fog moved through them like snakes.

Plain Kate folded the quilt into a mat; she hammered some broken planks into a rough workbench. Day came. Summer thunder cleared the market square. Soaked and cold, Plain Kate worked alone to finish the bow, her hair dripping into her face, stinging her mismatched eyes.

When the bow at last was finished, it was as good as anything she’d ever made. It had no ornament, but its simple lines were beautiful, like one bird against the sky.

And now that it was finished, Kate had no more work to do.

She sat for a while, empty as the empty square, thinking. Then without a word she stood up. She picked up the bow like a sword and went off to find Linay.

The afternoon was damp and clammy. Plain Kate followed the faint sounds of the tambourine around the puddles and the horse droppings, through the river-ward gate of the town. Down by the docks she found Linay sitting on the roof of the hold of a small boat. It was the punt she’d seen him on the night the fish had swarmed: a small, neatly made little barge, painted grass-green. Linay was singing a sad song about river spirits, to entertain the men who were smearing pitch in the chinks. She walked toward him, ignoring the looks that beat on her like rain. Big Jan grabbed her arm. “You’re not welcome here, witch-child.”

Linay stopped singing and stood up.“Her business is with me.” Big Jan was broad like a wild ox, but Linay was skinny like a rabid wolf, and Jan backed down. Linay swept by and caught Kate up in his wake. She trailed him down the dock, then down the road toward the forest.

The rain had stopped. The light was storm-green and the trees were stirring restlessly. The smell of the river was heavy in the air.

Plain Kate held out the bow. Linay took it as if it were a rose, and bowed over it. He looked at her silently. She looked back.

At last Linay moved.“Your four silver.” He pulled coins out of her ear, like a merry juggler—but his eyes were piercing. “Does that finish our business?”

“I’m leaving,” she said. “I need food, things.”

“Hmmmm,” he said, sinuously. “Did you have in mind a trade?”

“For my shadow,” she said. “I want oilcloth. And a sleep roll, and a pack. A packet of fishhooks, a camp hatchet. Ten yards of rope.”

He laughed.“Do you think you can live on the road? In the woods?”

“I’ll get by.”

“You’ll get by, you’ll get by,” he sang. “I’d almost like to see you try.” He drew himself up. “Done.”

Faraway thunder clacked. It sounded like a latch closing.“Done,” she said.

Linay wiped the rain off his face.“The docks. Meet me beside my punt, at the third bell past midnight.” He turned back toward the town.

Plain Kate, empty-handed, went over to the ruins of her father’s stall. She thought about what she could carry and what she must leave. Behind her she heard Linay’s fiddle begin to play: Wild and powerful as a storm, it swept across the rainy twilight.

She took one of her silver coins to the cobbler and bought good boots: deerskin, double stitched and sturdy. She took a second coin and bought a haversack from the tanner, who took her money but spat on the doorstep as she left. She took the third to the butcher to buy jerky, but he would not trade with her at all. She took the last coin to Niki’s bakery to buy hardtack, but by then the light was sinking and the bakery was dark and shut. She went back to where the splintered heap of the stall lay like a dead horse among the puddles of the market square.

Plain Kate packed her best tools in their felt pouches; she packed her one pan; she packed her two striped smocks and extra socks. She coiled her fishing line and twine. She came to her parents’ marriage quilt. It had once smelled of her father, and though it now smelled of sawdust and cats, she remembered how that smell had wrapped her, her first night in the drawer. But she needed a coat, and the quilt was too big. She was practical. She sliced it in half. She cut a hole for her head, pulled it on over her wet hair, and belted it with a bit of rope. The other half lay on the cobbles, soaking up rainwater.

She picked up the piece of the wreckage with the carved stag on it. It was too heavy to take. It served no purpose. She set it back down. It seemed to blur and leap in the half light, and it took Kate a moment to realize that her eyes were tearing. She picked the stag back up. She put it back down.

Taggle was sitting on top of the heaped wood, watching her.“I’ll leave it,” she told him. “I don’t need it.“ Her eyes stung as she said it. She dashed her hand across them, disgusted with herself. The cat chirruped inquiringly. “It’s nothing,” she told him, her throat angry and aching with the effort of not crying. Decisively, she took the carving knife her father had given her—the knife her hand had grown up knowing, the knife that had shaped her—and thrust it into the sheath in her new boot.

“Now we can travel,” she told Taggle. She sat down on her makeshift workbench. “I couldn’t go without my knife. Though I don’t suppose I’ll find much work, living wild.” The wet evening was sinking into darkness. The cat hopped down and ambled over to sniff her ankles.

“What about you?” she asked, lifting him into her lap. “A dog would come without question—but I suppose a cat must make his own choices.” It was foolish to talk to no one, and she stopped. And so she left unspoken her deepest wish: that she did have someone to talk to, that she didn’t have to go alone.

Deep in the night, Plain Kate went down to the river. She carried her haversack on one hip and Taggle in her arms. No cat would follow a wanderer; she realized that now. But she was not ready to give him up, to leave him as she had left the carved deer from her father’s stall, propped up against her workbench in the abandoned square. Not yet; not quite yet. And maybe he would follow her, a little way.

Away from the cressets of the market, under the lid of clouds, it was very dark—and very quiet. She heard the throaty murmur of the river, the plop of a jumping fish. Behind her, someone pulled a shutter. Across the river, a fox barked.

Linay was sitting quietly, watching the black gleam of the river, dangling his legs off the dock like a child. A pierce-work tin lantern sat on the dock beside him, and in its feeble light he looked pale as a moth in the deep of the night. He was eating a meat pie. As Plain Kate came up he held a second pie out to her. She ignored it. He shrugged, licked the gravy from his dagger, and set the pie on the wet wood at her feet.

Taggle’s nose started twitching.

Plain Kate stood over Linay. Taggle had begun twisting in her hands like a strong fish—a fish who wanted meat pie. She would have to put him down soon. “Now what?” she asked.

“Blood,” Linay said. Kate drew back and he laughed. “Oh, mine, Little Knife, don’t worry.”

“Kind,” she said, trying to mock, though her voice felt high and tight. Linay’s dagger looked as if it could gut a deer.

“Blood draws things. And it would be foolish to draw your own shadow to you.” He hesitated a bare second, then picked up his dagger, flipped it round, and drew it fearlessly across his wrist. His white face didn’t flicker, but Plain Kate winced for him as blood welled. Taggle gave a strangledcough, as if she were squeezing him too hard.

Linay leaned over and opened the lantern’s top. He let the blood dribble onto the flame. Plain Kate braced herself for darkness, but instead of dousing the flame, the blood caught fire, burning like oil, brightening the night.

“What—” she started to ask.

“Fire to set loose the spell,” he said absently, watching his blood catch. “You’d be surprised, the things a witch can make burn.”

His absentness and the way the blood ran with flame made the night suddenly eerie. Taggle hissed and Kate backed away.

“Where are you going?” said Linay.

Plain Kate began to babble something—but Linay had risen to his feet silently as a wave. His hand flashed, his wrist flicked. Blood flew and fell over Kate like a net. She leapt back shouting, and Taggle spilled from her arms and howled like a dying thing. Then the air turned to glass.

“Stay,” said Linay, soft, coaxing, into the sudden silence.

Kate couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Taggle lay belly-flat as if his back was broken.

Linay looked at her with his head tilted, smiling softly as a father smiles at a sleeping child.

Plain Kate thought she was dying and that when she died she would remain as a statue, held in place by the stiffness of the air. Linay reached out a hand for her. She was sure she would die when he touched her but she could only watch his hand coming.

And he touched her.

The air was air again. Kate staggered and crashed to the dock. The world spun and sparks shot through her vision. Linay loomed over her, dim and white as a pillar.

“Well,” said the witch. “That’s that.”

“What—” Kate gasped. She coughed, blinked. Taggle shook his head hard.

“I have left your goods at the third big stone around the bend of the road.”

“But—” Kate couldn’t stop him, couldn’t even see him. He was a sort of white shadow above her. She lay panting on the wet wood, her hair hanging over the dock edge, down toward the river.

He looked down at her, his face fuzzy—she thought he looked genuinely sad. “The loss of a shadow is a slow thing,” he said. “You will have a little time before someone notices. Find a place to belong before that happens.” Then he sang:

Go fast, Plain Kate, and travel light

Learn to walk the shadowy night

Without a shadow, flee from light

Become a shadow, truly

He crouched down beside her.“Will you come with me to the stone city?”

“No.” She could hardly get the word out.

“No,” he echoed. “But I will see you again, I think.” He looked over at Taggle. “The pair of you.” And he rose and went, leaving her lying helplessly in the dark, beside the water.

It was a long time before she could sit up, before Taggle could gather himself enough to resume sniffing around the meat pie. Plain Kate leaned forward and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyelids until she saw spots. Something had been taken from her, and though it was supposed to be her shadow, she felt as if it might have been her soul.“What did I do?” she muttered.

Over by the meat pie, Taggle gave a hiss and a hair-ball cough. Plain Kate opened her eyes.“Mussssssicians,” the cat spat. “Do you know what fiddle strings are made of? Bah! I’m glad he’s gone. Let’s eat.”