She said the names of the plants over and over aloud, trying to make a chant of them for easier memory. "Hollyhock and tansy; madder and bedstraw…" But they fell into no comfortable rhythm and did not rhyme.
Thomas knocked at her door. Kira greeted him happily, showed him the robe and threads, and told him of her day with the old dyer.
"I can’t remember all the names," she said in frustration. "But I’m thinking that if in the morning I go back to where my old cott was, maybe my mother’s garden plants, the ones she used for colors, will still be there. And then, seeing them, the names will mean more. I only hope Vandara —"
She paused. She had not told the carver about her enemy, and even saying the name made her apprehensive.
"The woman with the scar?" Thomas asked.
Kira nodded. "Do you know her?"
He shook his head. "But I know who she is," he said. "Everyone does."
He picked up a little skein of the deep crimson. "How did the dyer make this?" he asked curiously.
Kira thought. Madder for red. "Madder," she recalled. "Just the roots."
"Madder," he repeated. Then an idea occurred to him. "I could write the names for you, Kira," he suggested. "It would make the remembering easier."
"You can write? And read?"
Thomas nodded. "I learned when I was young. Boys can, the ones who are chosen. And some of the carving I do has words."
"But I can’t. So even if you were to write the names, I couldn’t read them. And it’s not permitted for girls to learn."
"Still, I could help you in the remembering. If you told them to me and I wrote them, then I could read them to you. I know it would help."
She realized he was probably right. So he brought pen and ink and paper from his quarters, and once again she said the words, those she could recall. In the flickering light, she watched as he carefully wrote them down. She saw how the curves and lines in combinations made the sounds, and that he was then able to say them back to her.
When he read the word hollyhock aloud with his finger on the word, she saw that it was long, with many lines like tall stems. She turned her eyes away quickly so that she would not learn it, would not be guilty of something clearly forbidden to her. But it made her smile, to see it, to see how the pen formed the shapes and the shapes told a story of a name.
Very early in the morning Kira ate quickly and then walked to the place where her mother’s color garden had been. Few people were up and about yet, at sunrise. She half expected to encounter Matt and Branch, but the paths were mostly empty and the village was still quiet. Here and there a tyke cried and she could hear the soft clucking of chickens. But the noisy clangor of daytime life was yet to come.
Approaching, she could see the pen that was already partly built. It had been only a few days, but the women had gathered thorn bushes and circled them around the remains of the cott where Kira had grown up. The encircled ground was still ashes and rubble. Very soon the thorned fence they were building would enclose the area completely; she supposed they would create some kind of gate, and then they would shove their chickens and their tykes inside. There would be sharp wood pieces and jagged fragments of broken pots. Kira sighed, seeing it. The tykes would be scratched and splintered by scraps of her own destroyed past, but there was nothing she could do. She edged quickly past the wreckage and the half-built fence, and found the remains of her mother’s color garden at the edge of the woods.
The vegetable garden was completely stripped, but the flower plot remained though its plants were trampled. Clearly the women, dragging their bushes to build the pen, had simply walked across the area; yet the blossoms continued to bloom and she was awed to see that vibrant life still struggled to thrive despite such destruction.
She named them to herself, those she remembered, and picked what she could, filling the cloth she had brought. Annabella had told her that most of the flowers and leaves could be dried and used later. Some, like bronze fennel, should not. "Use it fresh," Annabella had said of the fennel. You could eat it too. Kira left it where it grew and wondered if the women would know that it could be harvested for food.
A dog barked nearby and now she could hear arguing: a hubby shouting at his wife, a tyke being slapped. The village was waking to its routine. It was time for her to go. This was not her place any more.
Kira gathered the cloth around the plants she had collected and tied the edges together. Then she slung it over her shoulder, picked up her walking stick, and hurried away. On a back path, avoiding the central lane of the village, Kira saw Vandara and averted her eyes. The woman called her name in a smug, taunting voice. "Liking your new life?" she called, and followed the question with a harsh laugh. Quickly Kira turned a corner to escape a confrontation, but the memory of the sarcastic question and the woman’s smirk accompanied her home.
"I’ll need a place to grow a color garden," she told Jamison hesitantly a few days later, "and an airy place for drying the plants. Also a place where a fire can be built, and pots for the dyeing." She thought some more then added, "And water."
He nodded and said that such things could be provided.
He came each evening to her quarters to assess her work and to ask her needs. It seemed strange to Kira that she could make requests and to have them answered.
But Thomas said it had always been so for him, too. The kinds of wood — ash, heartwood, walnut, or curly maple — each had been brought when he asked. And they had given him tools of all sorts, some he had not known of before.
The days, busy ones, tiring ones, began to pass.
One morning as Kira prepared to go to the dyer’s hut, Thomas came to her room.
"Did you hear anything last night?" he asked her uncertainly. "Maybe a sound that woke you?"
Kira thought. "No," she told him. "I slept soundly. Why?"
He seemed puzzled, as if he were trying to remember something. "I thought I heard something, a sound like a child crying. I thought it woke me. But maybe it was a dream. Yes, I guess it was a dream."
He brightened and shrugged off the little mystery. "I’ve made something for you," he told her. "I’ve been doing it in the early mornings," he explained, "before I started my regular work."
"What is your usual work, Thomas?" Kira asked. "Mine’s the robe, of course. But what have they set you to do?"
"The Singer’s staff. It’s very old, and his hands — and the hands of other Singers in the past, I suppose — have worn the carvings down so it must all be recarved. It’s difficult work. But important. The Singer uses the carvings of the staff to find his place, to remind him of the sections in the Song. And there’s a large place at the top that has never been carved. Eventually I’ll be doing that, carving it for the first time, making my own designs." He laughed. "Not my own, really. They’ll tell me what to put there.
"Here." Shyly, Thomas reached into his pocket and handed her the gift. He had made her a small box with a tight fitting lid, its top and sides intricately carved in the pattern of the plants she was beginning to learn and to know. She examined it with delight. She recognized the tall spikes of yarrow and its dense clustered blossoms; around them twined the flopping stems of coreopsis, above a carved base of that plant’s mounded dark and feathery leaves.
She knew instantly what she wanted to place in the exquisite box. The small scrap of decorated cloth that she had carried in her pocket on the day of the trial and that comforted her loneliness when she held it before sleeping, was hidden away in one of the drawers that contained supplies. She no longer carried it with her because she feared losing it during her long walks through the woods and her long days hard at work with the dyer.