She was patient with them, and took care of them every moment, and against all odds all three lived. The black cat grew wild and fearless and went to live on one of the pole barges that plied the shallow, twisting Narwe River. The white cat grew crafty and fat, and went to live on mice and milk with the cowherd girl. The gray tom grew long and narrow, and stayed with Plain Kate.
He was dandy with one ear cocked, a gleam on his claw and a glint in his eye. He sauntered through the market square and tattered, admired and cursed: a highwayman, a gentleman thief. His name was Taggle, for the three kittens had been Raggle, Taggle, and Bone.
Plain Kate grew too: skinnier and stronger, but not much taller. The years were thin. But against all odds, and with the cat by her side, she too lived.
The guild man kept the shop, but Kate was the better carver. He took most of the work, because no one could afford to defy the guilds for small matters. Kate made most of the objarka, the charmed charms that drew the luck. Luck in that place was a matter of life and death, and that made the guilds worth defying.
Plain Kate’s own objarka was a cat curled up asleep. She had made it herself, from a burl of walnut that her father had given her. Burl wood, with its tight whorls, was the hardest wood to carve, but she had carved it. Slowly and patiently she followed its flowing lines, looking for the wood’s truth. When she was finished, the curling wood grain suggested lanky strength at rest.
“Kate, My Star,” her father had said, “this could be a masterpiece.” He meant the piece an apprentice makes when the apprenticeship is finished, to gain admission to the guild. The little objarka was not big enough for a masterpiece, but, her father said, it was good enough. “Look at it,” he said. “It is telling you about yourself.”
But he would not tell her what it said.
Plain Kate gave the cat objarka to her father, and he wore it always, around his neck on a leather thong. It was almost black now, shiny with the oil of his skin. She wore it inside her own shirt, over her heart. But if it was telling her something, she could not hear it.
After a while she stopped listening and simply tried to live. She made a hinged front for her drawer, so that she could lock herself in. She put ragged hems in her father’s striped smocks when her dresses wore out. She carved when there was light. When there was no light she fished, and caught trout with her wooden fireflies. Taggle brought her mice and rats, birds and bats. She learned to suck the meat from the smallest bone. She got by.
The kinder folk of the market square gave her what they could not selclass="underline" bruised apples, carrots with strange legs. The crueler gave her curses; they spat and whispered. She was lonely, though she didn’t know it. Folk said she had a long shadow.
But every night Taggle came to wrap himself around her as she slept in the lowest drawer.
And so it went for cold days and hot, wet days and dusty, and long, hungry winters.
Then one summer day, change and magic came loping and waltzing into her life, wearing white, and in that moment nothing seemed dark.
two
the stranger
The stranger was white. His hair was white-gray like bleached wood, his eyes white-silver like tin, his skin was white as if he were a day dead.
Albino was the scholar’s word for it—but witch-white was what they said in Plain Kate’s country. It was unlucky, and perhaps, Plain Kate thought, it was what kept him wandering. She felt a surge of sympathy for the man: It was far too easy to lose your place in a town or farmhold, to be forced onto the roads. A chance turn of skin color was more than enough.
But the man was no starveling beggar, she could see that. He was thin but strong, and he moved through the market like a lord. Across the square from Plain Kate’s stall, he flipped open a blanket and spread out an array of tin trinkets. He sat down on the blanket edge with a tambourine on his knee.
Kate was working just then on an objarka for Niki the Baker—a mask in the form of the Wheat Maiden, to hang on the stall door of the new horse he was planning to buy. It was a good-sized piece, and it would earn her a few weeks without hunger. As she carved, she listened. The stranger played the tambourine as she’d never heard it played: not just bangsand jiggles, but music, lively as a quick stream, bright as birdsong, the sort of music that made you tap a toe. The music drew people to his blanket. He tipped his chin up and smiled at one and all, chattering like a baby bird—but he listened like an empty well.
The stranger puzzled Plain Kate. The trinkets he was selling wouldn’t keep him fed. There must be more than that. As evening gathered, Niki the Baker came by to check on his carving. Niki was a big man, soft as bread dough and as kind, and one of the few people in the town of whom Kate might ask an unguarded question. She jerked her chin toward the stranger. “Who’s that one? What’s he selling?”
“That one?” Niki snorted. “Useless frippery. Useless.” The baker hated things that were useless, from lapdogs to wedding cakes. “You watch him, Plain Kate. That one might steal everything that’s not nailed down, and some things that are nailed only loosely.” Without comment he set down a pair of rolls that were too stale to sell, and without comment Plain Kate took them and bit into one. It was a regular thing between them.
The roll was hard as an uncooked turnip.“Easy on that,” Niki said, watching her eat. “It might be the last for a bit—flour’s low.”
She nodded and wrapped the other roll up to tuck away. Niki looked at the bundle with his sad-dog eyes.“It’s bad, bad,” he sighed. “The wheat barges are overdue at least a week. No grain and no news. Something’s amiss upriver.” He crooked his two middle fingers into a sign against witchcraft.
A hungry time. Plain Kate felt cold in the warm evening. Theskara rok had begun this way.
¶
Plain Kate listened to Niki and watched the stranger. He wasn’t selling much: a few toys and tin charms Kate could have made better in wood. Three days of music put three lonely kopeks into his begging bowl. What he seemed to be selling mostly was talk. When Plain Kate came back from fishing, his blanket was still spread, white in the thickening twilight, alone in the evening-empty market.
Plain Kate was thinking of witches. How in bad times people were more eager to buy her objarka, but also more inclined to take a step back, to crook their fingers at her when they thought she wasn’t looking, or when they were sure she was. How they wanted the witchcraft to protect them, but how they looked too for a witch to blame. It didn’t matter that there was no magic in her blade; people saw it there. They saw witchcraft in her skill, witch marks in her mismatched eyes, her bad luck, her long shadow.
The stranger was selling things in the shadows. All sorts came: from the ragged charcoal man to the wife of the lord justice, men and women, young and old. They came in ones and twos, shying from the others, looking around them. He sold them glass vials that twisted the firelight from the market’s cressets, sold them herbs and feathers knotted with string.
Charms, Kate thought. Charms against empty wombs, indifferent loves. Against hunger, sickness. Against the rumor of something worse that came off the river. The stranger was selling the witchcraft that people craved to protect them. But he would likely be gone when they began to look for someone to blame.
Plain Kate watched for four days and thought. On the fourth day a sudden silence made her look up, startled as if the river had stopped running. The stranger had set down his tambourine. He stood and stretched and sauntered toward her.
She watched him come. He moved like a jumping jack that strung too loosely, so that he seemed about to turn a flip or clatter into a pile of bones and string. His zupan’s loose skirts swirled around his knees and its undone sleeves swung as he walked. Every man in Kate’s country wore such a coat, but on this man it hung like a costume. Kate wondered if he was foreign. His strange, witch-pale skin and hair made it hard to tell. The white coat bleached him further, made him look like a painting that had half washed away.