“Who?” said Linay.
Plain Kate didn’t see why she ought to answer. Let him wonder. But then he said: “Not Drina…?”
Drina. Her first friend, her—the word startled her as it came into her head—her sister. “No,” she said. “Not Drina. Wen. Stivo.”
“Ah,” he said, voice flat. And he sat down across from her and speared the fish’s head.
“Can they be saved?” Kate asked. “The sleepers—could I have saved them?”
Linay shrugged.“If the rusalka was roused from her half sleep, the sleepers might awaken too. I don’t know and I don’t much care.” He flipped up the gill flap with a thumbnail and picked out the morsel of meat behind it.
“We want to see this trick of yours,” said Taggle.
“Hmmm,” hummed Linay. “Come closer.”
Plain Kate hesitated, and shifted her foot to be sure of the knife in her boot. She did it subtly, but he saw it.“Oh, honestly.” He nudged her toe with his. “I saved your life. I’m hardly about to hurt you. Hold out your hands.” He mimed it, making a bowl of his own long hands and lifting it.
She looked at him narrowly. In the sun, the burn scar pulled across her scalp. She cupped and raised her hands.
“I haven’t always been a stealer of shadows, you know,” he said. “I was a weather worker, once—and welcome anywhere, welcome as a summer rain. And I still know the moods of wind and water.” He leaned over her, fitting his own hands against the underside of hers, his long fingers lappingher wrists. “You can’t expect a ghost to lick up spilled blood like a—”
“—dog,” supplied Taggle. The cat had stood up and was watching them, fur on end.
“She will take blood only from a body. But what is a body? Just a bowl for life. A bowl of breath.” And he blew a long breath into the cup of her hands. It was warm at first, and slowly it grew cold.
Kate eased her hands open. Inside them—taking their shape—was a bowl of ice. It was small as a bird’s nest, woven like that, and shining in the sun. She lifted it into the light. Delicate feathers of frost furred its edges.
“You see,” he said, smiling. “It hasn’t always been ugly.”
Then he stood up, fast, like a man insulted.“It’s a bowl. You fill it with blood and she won’t know the difference between this and a body. Thus I control her bottomless appetites. Notice that you can’t do it without me.” He turned his back on her and swung up the skillet as if it were a sword. “Kick out the fire and come aboard,” he said. “I want some distance yet today.”
But when she lifted herself over the edge of the boat he was in the hold below, and he didn’t come up at once. She thought she heard him weeping.
¶
So they went along. The country grew lower, and the weather cooler. Kate’s hands healed slowly. Linay grew stronger, and Plain Kate learned why he had been weak.
Every evening she let her blood fill the bowl of ice that lined Linay’s hands. They were big hands, narrow but long-fingered. It caught up with her like sickness, the bloodletting. The first day she didn’t feel different. But on the second the sun made her drowsy. On the third she found herself nodding over her carving. By the fifth a sort of heaviness came over her, and made her knife shake. She sheathed it and asked, “How far to Lov?”
Linay shrugged. The old fluidness was back in his joints; he no longer moved as if his jumping-jack strings had stiffened.“Two weeks? Three? It’s not my country.” He set the pole to the river bottom, pushed them ahead, and added: “But we’re coming to it,mira. I can taste it, like ashes. Lov, at last.”
His voice made her scars ache. She ducked her head and took up the wood again.
Days passed. Linay brought back from his wanderings leather leggings and a farm boy’s smock, and she folded the long linen dress away, gladly. The next day he gave her a roll of hand tools: a rasp, a chisel, three kinds of gouges, an awl, and a carving knife. Kate, whose old knife was as much a part of her as her name, put the new knife away, but she used the other tools gratefully.
“No cat would do this,” said Taggle. “Fight.”
“I am fighting,” she answered. But slowly it stopped being true.
She tried to stop herself from feeling the surge of tenderness that came to her when he worked to heal her hands: the liquid song that had once set her father’s smashed fingers, the crooked sunburned part of Linay’s white hair as he bent his fair head.He is dangerous, she told herself.He does not love me. I do not trust him. I am only going to Lov to get back my shadow.
He does not love me. I do not belong here.
thirteen
shadow
Adrift in a green barge on the tea-colored, slow-flowing Narwe, Plain Kate carved and bled.
She sat on the pole man’s seat, knife in hand, drowsy in the sun. The burl wood wings were almost finished, full of long, strange twists of wood grain, less like feathers now than like long hair spread in water. They had an uneasy beauty. But the lump between the wings would not show her its face. She had cut away the rough and rotten wood and found a smooth knot, like an acorn. Was it a sharp chin and a high forehead? An owl’s beak and flaring ears? Its blank curve told her nothing. She sat with her knife above it and did not know what to do. If the thing was a mirror, then her heart was blank.
She tried to summon up her father’s voice:Be brave. Trust the wood. Lift your knife.
Kate touched the knife to the smooth curve, took a shallow stroke. The blade hit a knot and shot from her hand, skittering across the deck. Kate stood and fetched the knife. She thought about throwing the carving into the river, and maybe following it in.
Taggle was leaning out from the prow like a figurehead, his whiskers quivering close to the water. Kate glanced: Catfish stirred in the willow roots, slowly working their white mouths. Taggle was staring at them, cross-eyed with desire.
“I’m going to lie down,” she told him.
“Fish, fissssshhh,” he answered.
She eased down the ladder into the warm dim hold—and saw Linay.
He was kneeling beside the bunk. On top of the quilts was the box made from the ruins of her father’s stall. Linay had one hand stretched above it, and blood was dripping from one fingertip, into the box.
“Don’t come closer,” he said.
She came closer.
From a few steps away she could see inside the box. It was empty, but it held darkness as a bowl might hold water. The clotting shadow inside seemed to bubble around the blood, like fish after bread crumbs.
She stopped coming closer.
And Linay closed the lid.
“My shadow,” Kate whispered.
“All things need to eat.” Linay shrugged and lifted his pricked finger to his mouth, sucking away the blood. “Tears are better than blood, but some days one just can’t weep. And the shadow must be fed or it will wither to ribs and eyeholes—useless.”
“Useless,” she said softly, “for what? Why do you need it?”
“To raise the dead and spread the fire.” He answered her as if sunk into his own dreams. Then he roused and looked daggers at her. “You’re sharp, Plain Kate. Be careful, or you’ll find yourself cut. If you love your life, do not open that box.”
And he stalked out.
Plain Kate stood looking at the closed box. She put her hand on the carved hart and let its antlers prick the tight new skin on her palm. It was her father’s carving; it was as familiar to her as her own breath. Did something stir? Behind the thin wood, as if behind the surface of a mirror, did something press its hand to hers?
Her heart gave a little lurch as if at a hero’s hurt in a story. “Yes,” something answered her. “Mine.”
Tears, Linay had said. If she wept, would it come to her? She could almost have wept, wounded by the new hope.
¶
The next day, when Linay went foraging in the abandoned country, Kate climbed back aboard the barge. She went below and sat on the edge of the bunk, looking at the box. Taggle climbed into her lap.“Hello,” he said, then rolled over and peered up at her appealingly. “I am fond of you and present my throat for scratching.”