“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.”
There was a long pause. The canvas roof of thevardo shone faint as the dark of the moon, and that was the only light.“My uncle summoned my mother’s spirit with just a piece of his own shadow,” said Drina. “A shadow gives a ghost life, I think. Power. With a whole shadow—I think a strong witch could raise the dead.”
“That must be why…” Kate trailed off.
“Why your shadow was taken. But what it means to be without a shadow…I do not know.”
¶
The two girls whispered together deep into the night, slept close together with Taggle between them, then got up and stirred the fires, caught the chickens, and hauled the water. And from that day on they walked side by side.
Plain Kate tried to learn the rules of magic, which were stranger and harder than the rules of living among the Roamers. In truth Drina was not a good teacher. She only half knew things herself, and remembering tore her between the joy of her mother’s memory and the fear of her mother’s fate.
So Kate learned only a little.Magic is an exchange of gifts: That was the first rule. Thus, Drina’s nameless uncle had given up a piece of his shadow to give speech to the dead. And thus, Linay had had to make payment in magic for Kate’s shadow. Thus, the talking cat.
“A bargain,” said the cat, “at any price.”
All great magic requires a great gift. But even small magics asked something, Drina said. And so a witch would put little parts of hetself into a spell—hair, say, or tears.
“Blood,” said Taggle. “It’s always blood.”
Plain Kate narrowed her eyes at him.“What do you know about magic?”
“I,” he intoned, wrapping his tail over his paws and sitting up regally, “am a talking cat.”
“He’s right,” said Drina. “Blood’s the most powerful. Blood and breath. You shape the magic with breath—you sing it. That is why witches can’t lie, my mother said. Power flows along your words. Lying turns that power against you. It’s a real thing. It can kill you.”
“So your uncle…” A question had been growing in Kate’s mind for days, growing as her shadow thinned and twisted. “Did he die? He said he’d kill himself. Did he die, without his shadow?”
“He—” Drina paused. “He went mad. Eventually—the clan spoke death to him. They cast him out. He went alone.”
“But what happened to him?”
“You don’t understand,” said Drina. “We spoke death to him. He died to us. His name was closed. He went alone.”
It was a Roamer thing, but Plain Kate understood it better than Drina thought. Toila was coming. In Toila they would test her, and after that she might well be cast out. When they stopped next, Taggle snuggled his head up under her chin and purred while she clung to him.“Not alone,” he rumbled. “Not alone.”
¶
Thevardo inched on, farther into the wild country. One evening they camped near a charcoal burner’s hut, deep in the woods. It was abandoned: The woodpiles were covered with bird droppings, the black doorway drifted with last year’s leaves. Plain Kate didn’t like the place, but it did mean she and Drina had little work to do—there was a well for water, and wood for burning.
Kate was almost out of cured wood for carving. She rummaged through the woodpile until her arms were smeared with black rot and her face was sticky with spiderwebs. She did not hear Drina behind her. When her shoulder was touched she jumped and knocked her head hard on a branch that stuck out from the pile. She sat down, feeling sick. Taggle sprang down and pressed his nose to hers as she leaned over and tried to get her breath.