Something hit Kate’s ear and shoulder and smashed to the deck by her feet. It was a swallow, dead. She could hear them falling all over the pond. The shadow-and-white wings smashed open and Kate threw herself downward to get under them. She could feel thick death moving just above her head.
Then Linay dropped his hands again. And the shadow wings closed, folded.
“She is gone for now,” said Linay. He stepped down from the wall and came across the groaning ice.
Taggle sprang up on the gunwale between Kate and the striding man.“Keep your distance!” he hissed.
“But it was her question!” Linay laughed, bitter and wild. “How will I destroy Lov? With the ghost and the shadow. It will take a spell of great power to bind your shadow to the rusalka for more than a moment. But I have worked for years to gather that power. Do not doubt that I can do it. And when I do it—do not doubt that everyone those wings touch will die. The whole city of Lov. And you, Plain Kate—”
But at that instant, Taggle snarled and sprang.
Linay caught the leaping cat with his eyes and a rhyme like a thrown spear. Taggle crashed to the deck and made a high, terrible noise.“Tag!” Kate shouted. She went to her knees beside him. The cat was shaking as if in seizure. She tried to scoop him up but Linay’s hand closed on her wrist. He was back aboard the boat. He jerked her toward him. Kate felt the crush of his strong hand, even as she twisted around to get at Taggle.
“He’ll live,” Linay snapped.
“What did you do to him?” she gasped.
“I am still answering your question,” he hissed at her, “and you will listen to me.” He scooped up the dead bird from the decking. It was falling apart in his hands, crumbling like termite-rotted wood. “This is why I need a shadow. This is the fate of Lov. The city that tried to burn my sister. She will have her revenge and thus her fate will be undone. The gray wing will kill everyone in that city, from the bell ringer in the church tower to the orphan huddled in the lowest cellar. This is what I will do with your shadow.”
“I won’t help you,” she gasped; he was breaking her wrist. “I’ll kill myself.”
He laughed.“Your shadow is bought and paid for, and your death will not remit that payment. You can go shadowless into the shadowless world, and your death will only be one last dark thing on my long dark road. It will hurt me but I do not care. It is all but over.”
He released her. Kate staggered back. Her wrist pounded.“Go to bed,” he said. “I have the blood I need.”
Kate picked up Taggle and leapt into the hold, not bothering with the ladder. Her ankles jammed and she welcomed the clean pain that cleared her eyes of tears. She ran to the box that had held her shadow and wrenched the lid open. She was ready to die if she could take her shadow with her. But the box was empty, holding only splinters and air. It was gone. Her shadow was gone.
She sat on the bunk edge with Taggle limp on her lap. She waited in shaking silence, until silence fell on the deck above. Then she tied the carving of Lenore to her hip, stole Linay’s socks, took the unconscious cat in her arms, and lowered herself over the side of the boat, into the river.
fifteen
the abandoned country
Stumbling down the road to Lov, Plain Kate dripped and shivered. Taggle was slumped in her arms like a little child, sleeping. He had slept through her huddled wait in the boat, slept through her wade to the shore, slept through the slap and sting of alder branches as she fought her way up the bank. She tried not to be terrified for him.He’ll live, Linay had said, and that made it true.
The night was white-blind with fog, and Kate staggered over every stone and stumbled in every puddle, but she pushed on as fast as she could.
Apart from the sleeping cat, she was almost empty-handed. The carving of Lenore banged at her hip. Her haversack held only stolen socks, a few apples, and a barley loaf. It was not much, not enough to live long. But in the abandoned country, it should be easy to find what she needed.
Except her shadow.
In Lov I’ll set your shadow loose, Linay had promised her.
Set it loose, she should have asked, to do what? She could still see the swallow, limp as a glove, falling into clots of dust and feathers, broken as last year’s leaves. The whole city.
And she had made it possible. Her blood. Her shadow.
The moon came out, a broken thing tangled in the birch branches. The road to Lov appeared before Kate, stretching into the distance. She walked along it until she found her eyes closing and her arm, where she held Taggle, growing stiff and numb. At last she found herself walking off the road. She eased the cat off her shoulder, muttering,“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Why? What for?” said Taggle. “Did I miss something? Was there food?”
And she dropped him in her joy.
¶
For three days and two nights, Kate and Taggle walked the road to Lov. They hurried when they could, and dozed when they had to, hiding in tangles of bloodtwig and heartsease at the edge of the road. When Kate couldn’t sleep, she hunched up, shivering as if fevered, and freed Lenore’s face from the burl wood. The twisting lines of the grain flowed across the carving’s features like tongues of fire. She was rushing down the road to beat Linay to Lov, but she had no idea how to stop him.
Kate carried Taggle the first day, and the second, while waves of shivering broke over him, subsided, and broke. On the third day he walked. They went as fast as they could, and following them came a line of fog and rain, solid as a wall, slow as an army.
The sleeping death had not come yet, but the flight before it had created its own devastation: The road was rutted and littered with broken wheels, abandoned boxes, the bodies of horses driven too hard whose eyes buzzed with flies. The wheat fields were trampled with the remains of hasty camps. Yet they met no one. The farmsteads they passed were empty and sometimes burned. Outside one farmstead three women dangled dead from the branch that overhung the road, signs against witchcraft slashed into their hands. Kate closed her eyes and ducked under their black feet and hurried on.
On the evening of the fourth day, the road swung away from the river and they found themselves walking in a tunnel of willows. And through them, across the river, Kate glimpsed something white. Big. Moving. It was just a glimpse but Plain Kate stopped short, squinting. On her shoulder, Taggle stirred awake. Kate put a hand up to touch him and edged forward. Her throat was tight, as if it had seen and recognized something her eyes had not.
The river bent, the tunnel ended, and Kate looked back along the bank.
On the other side of the river, something looked back at her. Just a horse, a big white cart horse. It was picketed outside a single Roamervardo, red.“It’s Cream,” said Kate.
“Cream?” Taggle sprang down. “Cream?” He tangled himself with her feet, purring. “Cream, yes, please, how kind, what a thoughtful human…”
“No, the horse. It’s Drina’s horse, it’s Cream.”
“Oh.” Taggle sniffed and flicked his ears. “I knew that.”
Kate kept walking with Taggle beside her prancing grandly in his embarrassment. The horse Cream whinnied to them from her circle of mud, but no one stirred from thevardo and Kate didn’t stop. The sun came down under the clouds and red light ran over the river like fire. Kate glanced back again, watching as thevardo got smaller. Her hands were clenched. Her pulse beat at the underside of her scars.
Onevardo, one horse. A horse left at picket so long she’d eaten the grass down to dirt. Cream stomped and screamed to them again.
Kate stopped, turned around.“Something’s wrong.”
“Even if it is Cream, it might not be Drina,” said Taggle. Kate tried to remember when the cat had become the voice of caution and reason. “It could be anyone.”
“Stivo,” she murmured.
“He said Stivo was dead.”
And Kate remembered that it was Behjet—soft-voiced, softhearted Behjet—who, wearing Stivo’s face, had set her on fire.