“We draw it. Like a bear on a chain.” Kate sat up and Taggle sprang to his feet. Across the fire, Linay was sitting on a stone, skinning a rabbit. “I’m a weather witch remember? The moods of wind and water.” He thrust a sharpened stick through the rabbit like a man who knew swords. “That fog is hungry.”
“You,” said Kate. “You made the fog and the rain. All of it. Through the whole country.”
There was horror in her voice, but Linay bowed modestly as if it had been awe.“It is no small work, I admit. I’d be ashamed to tell you the dark things I’ve done for such power. Your shadow is only the latest—and almost the last. I have been preparing this journey for years.”
“But—” She couldn’t begin to tell him what she was thinking. He’d made the fog and rain, the crops failing in the wet, the damp fear she’d seen growing like a mold in the Toila market. Even Taggle’s ears were edging back as it sank in.
But then, Taggle was still a cat.“I’ve beenwet,” he snarled. “My paws were damp formonths.”
Linay shrugged one marionette shoulder.“The fog is the rusalka’s home. She needs it as a frog needs water. It is half her skin. Even the blood-spell would not bring her without this fog.” And he sang:
Foggy little oxbows
Forest pools where no one goes
Lost links of the river dreaming dreams
“Without me she’d be trapped in some lonely place where the fog never lifts. With me, she can travel. All the way to Lov.”
Plain Kate pictured it. The wall of fog was creeping up the river, just faster than a man could walk. In it, the rusalka. Anyone she found, she would take—take like Stivo, take like Wen. This was the dark story they were telling in Toila. By now it was a horror. The countryside was emptying in front of it like a forest emptying in front of a fire.
And she had been helping him. Giving him blood for the drawing spell. For weeks. Kate shook—and turned sideways and was sick.
Linay raised an eyebrow and propped the impaled rabbit up over the fire.
Plain Kate felt gray and cold. Waiting for the Roamers to burn her had been no worse than this.“Why?” she said. “Why are you taking her to Lov?”
“Oh,” he sang. “I have reasons. I have plans and schemes.” He ripped a leg from the roasting rabbit and threw it, bloody, to Taggle—who leapt back. “Come and eat your dinner.”
¶
Plain Kate carved. She carved to keep from shaking. She carved to think.
“Are you all right, Katerina?” Taggle peered into her shattered face. When she didn’t answer he shook his head—actually shook it, side to side, a human “no.”
The gesture struck Kate and made her sad. It looked wrong; it looked right. It made what he was visible: not a cat, not human, something new.“Oh, Taggle,” she said. What was he? What was she? What had Linay made them?
Find your shape. Lift your knife.
Plain Kate stopped thinking and carved, her knife knowing things. The gouge she’d made when her knife had slipped suggested the lower lid of an uptilting eye. She roughed it out, put in the other eye, then used the knife tip to sketch the lines of the nose and brow and mouth, and suddenly the oak burl had a face: a woman’s face, narrow and strong and sad, too strange to be beautiful. With only the eyes done it seemed to look at her. And already she knew it: the rusalka’s human face, the face of Linay’s lost sister, Drina’s mother, Lenore.
Find your shape. She was Plain Kate Carver, daughter of Piotr, the girl who knew the secrets inside the wood. The girl who was brave and lifted her knife. The girl who had told her father she would be a master by the time she was twenty.
But instead she was going to die. Because she was going to stay with Linay.
Long enough to find out how to stop him.
fourteen
blood and questions
The next evening they anchored in a place where the fields of barley and rye came right down to the river, the grain growing among the riverside tangle of bloodtwig and basket rush. The grain—as Kate had come to dread—was unharvested, and full of feasting starlings. As the sunset lit, the birds threw themselves into the sky in tongues of dark fire that flashed back and forth across the river. Linay stood up on the roof of the hold, playing his fiddle. The skirling notes wove through the rush of wings.
Plain Kate kept her head bent over the carving, her heart beating faster as the light sank. The fog rose up around her. The fiddle grew quieter and quieter until both it and its player were lost in the thickening darkness. Plain Kate slotted her carving tools one by one into their leather roll. The tool case was a very fine thing, its felt-lined inner pockets soft with long use, its smooth-grained outside stained dark with someone’s sweat. It hadn’t been abandoned; the carver in Kate was sure of that. Someone had died. And then Linay had stolen it and given it to her. And she’d been grateful.
The fog was so thick now that she felt completely alone. Then Taggle came from nowhere, standing regally at her elbow, with his ears pricked and his fine head lifted. They heard Linay jump down onto the deck. He emerged from the fog and stopped in front of them. Wordless, he held out his cupped hands, ready for her blood.
Kate stood up.“I won’t,” she said.
“Oh, won’t you? I believe we had a bargain. Your blood for your shadow.”
“I gave you blood. I never said I’d keep giving it.” In the rye field the birds settled into a silence that struck Kate as ominous. She drew herself up. “I want something else.”
“I want answers,” said Kate. “To three questions.”
“Three questions!” He laughed. “Do you think you’re a fair maid in a tale? Shall I fetch a mirror, Little Stick, to set you straight?”
“Two questions,” she bargained.
Linay stopped laughing. A thicker fog was beginning to pour over the side of the punt.“You would haggle with hell’s boatman,” Linay spat at her, then thinned his voice to a little girl’’: “One coin or two?”
Kate tried a shrug.“Bleed yourself, if you’d rather.”
“I’ll help,” said Taggle.
Linay ignored the cat, and spoke as if to himself.“I am going to need my strength.”
The boar was full of fog now. Plain Kate felt as if they might sink into it and drown.
“One question,” said Linay.
“One a night.”
“Done. Now bleed.”
So she did, letting the blood trickle into the bowl of ice in Linay’s hands. In the twilight, it looked black. As the bowl filled, the fog rose and thickened and began to eddy around them and rub at them like a stray dog. In another moment the rusalka was there, thin as a rib bone but wrapped halfway around them. She leaned for the blood. There was nothing humanin her face, nothing lovely—just a bottomless avidity.
Kate backed away.
Linay, though, stayed where he was, and when the rusalka knelt to drink he crouched beside her, as if he wanted to wrap an arm around her shoulders. He was singing something. Kate couldn’t hear what.
She reached down and picked up Taggle. Together they watched the rusalka and Linay kneeling together like a bride and groom. They waited.
The rusalka drank the blood from the bowl, and when she was gone, Linay folded up. He sat on the deck with his knees drawn up and his head resting on his arms.
“Linay?” said Kate. She couldn’t tell whether or not he was weeping.
He fluttered a pale hand without lifting his head.“Yes, yes. Ask your question.”
“Why—” she asked softly. She found, to her surprise, that she didn’t want to hurt him. “Why are you taking her—Lenore—to Lov?”
“She died there.” His bent head made his voice soft. “In theskara rok. She was tending the sick.” He laughed, barely louder than the river. “By the Black Lady, they would hardly have needed to kill her—she had spent so much of herself in healing magic. But they did. They killed her. They took her for a witch, they tortured her, and they killed her. The people of Lov.”