¶
The Roamers kept walking and Plain Kate kept carving. The wild country sloped down and the trees thinned out. The Roamers’vardo came back out into the river valley, where Daj said they were less than a week from Toila. The rolling hills were crested with trees, but the valleys cradled scattered farms. It was strange to see buildings after so long, and Plain Kate felt uneasy. There were so many who might see her sickly shadow.
The braids Drina had put in her hair tugged at her scalp. She could feel the river pulling at her shadow, or her shadow pulling her toward the river. It felt like waking from a nightmare and drifting to sleep again, knowing it is still there, waiting, just under sleep’s thin surface—something grasping and hungry.
So she slept thinly, drowsing over her knife and making strange things while half awake. She was doing that in the twilight, leaning against a stump in someone’s fallow field, when she came to herself and found Drina by her side.
“I don’t want your help,” Plain Kate blurted.
Drina reacted as if struck, jerking back. Plain Kate, still waking, reached after her.“No, wait, Drina—I only mean…” She put down her knife and scrubbed at her eyes. “Your father said—”
“My father—” Drina began, fiercely, angrily—but just then Ciri came toddling up to them. He was the young prince of the Roamers, a boy of two, the favorite of the dozen naked and cheerful children who chased chickens and snuck rides on horses in Roamers’ camps. Just now he had Taggle in aheadlock.
“Help,” croaked the cat.
Drina shed her anger and pulled boy and cat into her lap.“Ciri, Ciri,” she said, and dropped into the Roamer language, a liquid coaxing in which Plain Kate caught only the wordcat. Ciri unfolded his elbows, and Taggle spilled out, bug-eyed.
Plain Kate picked him up and scratched his ruff.“Thank you for not killing him.” By this time she knew how to flatter a cat: praise of ferocity and civility both.
Taggle preened.“He’s a kitten.” He arranged his dignity around him with a few carefully placed licks. “Else I would have laid such a crosshatch of scratches on him he’d have scales like a fish.”
“Cat!” burbled Ciri, reaching.
Taggle allowed himself to be patted roughly and then grabbed by the ear, but flicked Ciri a yellow look.“I do have my limits.”
“Talk!” chirped Ciri. “Cat talk cat.”
Kate glanced at Drina, who answered,“It will be just a story. He’s always telling stories. Don’t worry, Plain Kate.” She staggered up with Ciri in her arms. “A few more days, Plain Kate. There’s a place near Toila where we always stop. We’ll have our own tent there. Darkness and quiet.” She swung the little boy up pig-a-back. “Come,mira, let’s find yourdajena.” She looked round at Kate one more time. “Don’t be frightened.”
But Kate was frightened.All great magic requires a great gift… He made a rope of hair and soaked it in his own blood… And what Linay had said:Blood draws things. It would be foolish to draw your own shadow to you.
“Blood,” she said.
“Sausages, I think,” said Taggle, sniffing. “Get me one, would you?” But he climbed into Kate’s lap and let her bury her nose in his soft fur and wiry muscle.
¶
A few days shy of Toila, the hills spread into a broad lowland. Oak and fir gave way to willow and alder, and then to fields and gardens. Under the glares of the farmers and herders, the Roamers went carefully, the fivevardo staying in a line like beads on a string. But the next day the mood grew merrier.“We will stop tonight with Pan Oksar,” Drina explained. “He’sgadje, but a friend to us. He keeps horses.” She was almost skipping. “We’ll stay with him.”
There’s a place near Toila where we always stop, Drina had said. This would be that place. A spell of blood and hair.“How long—” Plain Kate began.
“Long enough to let the mud set on the wheels,” said Daj, from the back step of the creaking, lumberingvardo.
“A week or so, and then it’s a few more days to Toila.”
“Can we—” Drina began, but Daj cut her off.
“Yes,mira, you two can share a bender tent, if you like.”
Drina’s face lit up. She gave Kate’s arm a quick squeeze, and the blue star scarf that hid the spell-braids a significant glance. But then two little boys herding geese started to jeer the Roamers and toss rocks at the horses, and in the hubbub the two girls got pulled apart. They had no chance to speak before reaching the red-painted gates of Pan Oksar’s farm.
To Kate, Pan Oksar’s farm seemed impossibly prosperous, almost a small town. There were separate houses for animals and people, an orchard and a garden, a house just for the hens. Through the green spaces wandered horses. Round everything was a hedge of red roses tall as a building, thick as a city wall. The Roamers came through the gate singing, and the people of the household all tumbled out to meet them.
They spoke a language Kate did not know, and their dress was strange to her.“No one likes them, because their ways are different,” Drina explained. “Just like the Roamers—no one likes us either. So we have to like each other.”
The Roamers stopped thevardo just inside the hedge, with arching roses brushing the canvas roofs. And, for the first time since Plain Kate had joined them, they started pitching tents: one per married couple, one for the bachelor Behjet and the widowed Stivo, one for Daj and the smallest children—and one for the “maidens,” as Behjet called them: Drina and Kate.
“What of me?” groused Daj’s husband, Wen. “I don’t want to sleep with all these squirming puppies!” Plain Kate remembered seeing Daj and Wen hold hands and kiss in the shadows between the men’s fire and the women’s, and guessed the true source of his disappointment. He was still casting glances at Daj when Behjet and Stivo took him in.
Plain Kate was not much impressed with bender tents. They were made with just a few willow saplings stripped into poles, then bent and thrust into the ground at both ends. A sheet of canvas went round the poles, and some rope secured the whole thing—though not very well. They were muggy and mud-floored. Plain Kate, who had slept for years in a drawer, would have preferred to sleep in thevardo. But Drina spread her arms to touch both walls, as if she’d been given a palace.
“With my mother’s people, I stayed in the maidens’ tent. But here there are no other maidens—everyone’s married. So they made me mind the little ones.” She set about stacking a small fire in the middle of the space. “I am glad you’ve come, Plain Kate.”
Kate found her throat tightening. She wanted to answer—I am glad too—but it suddenly seemed an impossibly hard thing to say. “Is this the place?” she asked. “To do the spell?”
Drina sobered—mostly. A delighted smile was still teasing around the edges of her face, like tendrils of hair curling out from under a scarf. “While we have walls, yes. So that no one stops us.”
The way she said it made Kate wonder if perhaps someone should.
¶
But of course no one did. They had stopped, Plain Kate learned, to breed the horses, a project that required both laughter and serious talk, and took everyone’s attention. There was human business too: trading of news and goods, songs and stories. Pan Oksar’s farm was a bustling, happy place, even in the mud and endless rain. So it was that when Drina lit the fire in the center of their tent, turning the walls golden and the little space cozy with flickering light, for the first time that Plain Kate could remember, they were quite alone, and likely to stay that way.
Drina leaned forward, nursing the newborn flames with twigs and splinters. Smoke and flares of light swirled across her dark face.
The same light rippled through Kate and she felt herself waver like water. She put a hand in Taggle’s warm, solid fur. “So,” said the cat. “You’re cooking something?”