But she never reached it.
At the raged shore between the cut and uncut wheat, there was a splash of poppies. Something dark lay in them like a log. She would sit down on that, she thought, staggering, and—
She saw that the log was a body. A half-grown lad with wheat-bright hair lay sprawled there with his scythe stuck in the ground beside him. Kate toppled to her knees.
Taggle sniffed the lad’s face. “He’s alive. He had fish to eat…but…Katerina. I smell the thing. The thing has done this to him.”
Kate took the boy’s limp hand, shook the rough-clad shoulder. The lad didn’t stir, didn’t even sigh in his sleep.Like Wen, she thought.Like Stivo and like Wen. She shut her eyes and tried to get up, but fell forward instead. She might have passed out. Time stopped, blankly.
When it moved again, Taggle was butting at her hand. She could feel the lump on his skull where the axe had hit him, a gnarled spot under his soft fur.“There are more of them,” he hissed. His fur was on end. “The thing. More sleepers. The thing has been here.”
“The white shadow.” Plain Kate gagged and spit out the sourness in her mouth. “The thing that killed Wen and Stivo.” She looked at the limp, sleeping lad, then yanked the scythe out of the earth, and, leaning on it, staggered to her feet. She stood panting.
Taggle was looking at the sky, a ridge of fur standing up from his spine. Plain Kate looked up too, her skin beginning to goose-bump with a slow-dawning fear. It was dimming toward evening. A fog twined off the river, snaking over the road. It would be night in an hour or two; the fog would come; the white creature would come with it. It had killed Stivo with one touch. She had no defense.“We have to go back,” she said.
So they went back. Exhausted, Kate went stumbling and limping, hauling her burl, leaning on the scythe, until its smooth handle rubbed through her scars. She arrived at Linay’s boat in purple twilight, both hands bloody, stooping like the angel of death.
Linay raised his eyebrows.“That was a long bath.”
Taggle bit him. Kate collapsed at his feet.
ELEVEN
A GHOST IN THE RIVER
“That cat of yours really is something of a bother.” Linay was perched on the edge of the bunk; Kate saw him blurred then silhouetted as she struggled to get her eyes open. She was awake again and confused again. It took her a moment to put the boy in the poppies and the bear cage and the willow pool and the violin bow and the axe in the darkness all together, and in the right order. They swirled around Linay. They were all his fault, and there he was sitting beside her, dressing a wound on his wrist, whistling. “He’s bitten nearly to the bone, look!” He held up one—scratched—finger.
It was day again, and either dawn or sunset. The light at the hatch was soft and birds were singing.
“Sit up, then, fair maid. You should be able to manage that. Though perhaps you ought not strike out on pilgrimage again.” He reached for her hand and pulled her up. Her own hands were bandaged, softly and well, in clean linen.
Linay flexed his hand closed, then mimed his fingers rippling over the violin’s fret. His bitten finger seemed stiff. “It will make a merry mess of my fingering.” He looked at her, smiling but humorless, implacable as snow. “You’re lucky I do not hurt him.”
Plain Kate went cold. She could hear Taggle on the deck, yowling. And Linay sang softly, giving words to the cat’s song:
Oh bats, oh bats, oh snacks with wings—
Come and hear how Taggle sings!
Oh squirm, oh squeak, my wriggly bats—
You’ll make a gift for lady cats!
“I would be sorry to hurt him, Plain Kate. Truly I would.”
“What do you want?” she asked.
“Blood,” he said lightly. Then, as if remembering he’d said that once before, he added, “Yours this time, Kate, my girl. I’ve given most of what I can spare.”
She was sitting in his reach, backed into the corner of the bunk. He was between her and the hatch. It was getting dark. She lifted her chin—and felt her new scars tug. “If you want blood you should have killed me in my sleep.”
Taggle’s yowls faded as he struck out to hunt and make kittens. Linay was still smiling. “But that’s not how magic works, fair maiden. Magic is”—he spread his bony hands grandly—“an exchange of gifts. A shadow for a heart’s wish, for instance.”
Kate narrowed her eyes.“What do you need blood for?”
Linay looked at her. The looking seemed to go deep.“Perhaps I’ll show you,” he said.
They went out onto the deck. It was cool and clear, just past sunset, and the evening star was opening its eye and the crickets were getting louder. They had gone farther into the hill country, where the river split like braided hair around shouldering, wooded islands. Alee of one of these, the boat rocked at anchor.
There was a fog bank not far behind them.
“So,” she said. Linay said nothing. Kate looked around. Taggle was nowhere in sight. She could hear him in the distance, singing his courting song. Bats swarmed in the pale sky, and swallows darted above the river, and she thought of him. Linay sat down on the roof of the cabin. Standing, she was as tall as he was seated on the low roof. She could see the sunburn, pink in the part of his white hair. It made him look almost human.
Looking out toward the gathering fog, he asked,“Have you ever been hungry?”
She shrugged.
“Of course you have,” he muttered. “Of course.”
“What do you want, Linay?” It was the first time she’d said his name. It tasted powerful.
“The dead, you know, are hungry. Those that do not rest. They are hungry all the time and cannot even eat grass.” He was halfway to singing again. He seemed to stop himself. “They have mouths the size of needles’ eyes and stomachs the size of mountains. It is a terrible fate.”
“I know that,” she said. “Everyone knows that.” Though in truth the way he had said it was making her skin prickle.
He stopped talking again. His silence swelled up between them like insect song in the summer night.“My sister,” he said at last, his voice little and broken. He swallowed and tried again. “My sister is one of them. One of the hungry dead.”
“I saw her.” Kate guessed, knew it, all at once, and her hair stood up with the realization. “A white woman. A—”
“Rusalka,” he said, lingering over the bitter taste of the word. “The ghost of a woman drowned. Of a witch wrongly driven into the river. Such creatures are called rusalka. There are not many. True witchcraft is a rare gift, and thegadje prefer fire when they kill us.”
He saidgadje the way Stivo had, and Kate saw that, beneath the way he wore his own witch-white skin like a mask, Linay had the narrow bones, full mouth, and uptilted eyes of a Roamer. A Roamer man, alone.
He stood up.“You have seen her before?”
She nodded.
“You will see her again.” He brushed past her, and stood at the edge of the boat, looking down into the water. Plain Kate turned and looked too. There was a skim of fog wavering there: The edge of the fog bank was catching up to them. “Soon,” said Linay. He unwrapped his bandaged arm; it was covered with long, deep cuts. Plain Kate stared. Suddenly there was a knife in Linay’s other hand. It flashed and Kate jerked away, but the knife was gone, swept back into some hidden pocket in Linay’s swirling coat.
Linay had cut himself. He held out his arm and blood ran down it and dripped off his fingertips. The night was very still, and they could hear the tiny sound of the blood drops falling into the river.
Linay sagged and sat down on the cabin’s roof as if his knees had given way. “She’ll come. Blood calls. She’ll come.”