And indeed she didn’t put herself forward; she continued to make only common, everyday pieces, and kept her prices low. But by the end of the year, there was a line at her door, and the poor reluctantly began to resell her older wares, because they could get too much money for them. Eventually she stopped taking advance orders: instead she made what she had clay to make and once a week opened her shop to sell whatever she had. Everything sold to the bare shelves.
The masters eyed her work uneasily. Hiron’s statue at the Sea Gate was a marvel of the most delicate sculptural work; there was not a surface without ornament, and at its unveiling, a noble visitor from Wilsara over-the-sea had said—no one doubted it—that its song was as rich and complex and beautiful as the ten-thousand-voiced Great Chorus of the Temple of Thunder in that great city. For the last six years everyone had been striving to imitate and elaborate on his style. Kath’s work seemed like a joke when one of her squat cups was put next to one of the grandmaster’s triumphant fragile pieces, but if you looked at it too long, you began to feel the terrible sneaking suspicion that you liked the cup better.
Barely a month after she was let into the guild, the first few rebellious journeymen, mostly young men who liked to gather in taverns and argue loudly about art, began to imitate her style instead, and talk of the virtue of simplicity. While the fashion ought to have changed at some point, it was too soon, and too far. But no one knew what to do about it. A small group of the masters decided to go and speak to Kath and point out to her the hubris of setting up her own school, but the attempt foundered helplessly on the shoals of her solidity: her house full of yelling small children going in and out of the street playing, an untidy stack of her own pottery worth more than a chestful of jewels sitting dirty in the washtub, and Kath herself apologetically serving them tea with her own hands, because she explained the one maid was sick. It was impossible to accuse her of grandiose ambition, even as the masters held their mismatched cups as carefully as live birds, staring down at them and forgetting to drink until the tea was cold.
“So they’ve been to peck at you, have they?” Grovin said, that evening. He ate dinner at their house now. Kath had brought him home with her after she had learned he ate a dinner bought from a stall alone every night, disregarding his protests: he hated children, he hated women, he hated her cooking, and he hated company. He wasn’t lying, he really hated all of those things, but whenever Kath threw a piece she liked very much, she kept it for home use—“That’s your inheritance, so watch you don’t break them,” she told the children—and he did like great pottery, so after the first time eating off a blue-glazed plate that swelled from a faint shallow out to a thin edge, with small scalloped indentations all around the rim, he kept coming, and ate with his head bent over and staring down at whatever piece Kath was feeding him from that night, wincing and sullen at the noise around him.
“They don’t mean any harm,” Kath said. “I don’t know what to say to them, though. I do what I like myself, that’s all I know how to do. I couldn’t do anything like Master Hiron’s work without making a mash of it. But I told them so, and that I tell anyone who asks me as much, and they only looked glum.”
Grovin knew the clay-shaper masters a great deal better than Kath did, and he knew perfectly well they did mean harm, by which he meant putting worse pottery into the world. “They’ll make trouble for you,” he said, but as it happened, he made the trouble, and worse.
Two days after the clay masters came to see Kath, the right-hand statue at the Gate of Morning began to hum softly, its voice going deeper and deeper until it was only just barely audible, a tickle of unease at the back of the listener’s head. The clouds were already gathering over the sea, and the ships in the harbor were reefing their sails by the time the left-hand statue took up the song. Hiron’s statue at the Sea Gate sang very frequently, but usually in a few thin, reedy voices; that night it was in full chorus, and even in the rain, some people had come out to hear it, although not quite as many as there should have been.
By the second night, no one was in the streets, or anywhere but huddled in the deepest cellars they could get to, and the seven voices of the statues could no longer be heard over the general howling of the wind. But when the ferocity was over, and everyone came blinking out into the washed-clean streets, a path of total destruction as wide as three streets had been inscribed across the city, as though some god had come out of the sea and walked straight through to the Gate of Death, the holy gate, and the statue there, less than a hundred years old, had been obliterated.
“Oh, shut up, you cowards, you all know it’s got to be her!” Grovin shouted down impatiently, after the masters had all spent the first hour of their discussion very carefully not saying Kath’s name. The kiln-masters were allowed to come and sit in the gallery during the deliberations for a new grandmaster.
So were the journeymen clay-shapers, and after Grovin’s shout, all of them burst out into clamoring, either in support or violent opposition. Four fist fights broke out in the gallery and one on the floor. But that was exceptionally modest; there had been twelve, during the debate over Hiron’s appointment. Even the ones who didn’t want to name Kath—the very ones who had gone to lecture her, the previous week—had the uneasy sense that they had better. It seemed too pointed a message from the gods.
“But I can’t,” she said bewildered to Grovin, when he told her, smugly, afterwards. He stared at her speechlessly, and she stared back in equal incomprehension. “What would happen to the children? Anyway, I don’t want to die just to work in bone clay. That’s a thing for a fool young man to do, or a fool old one, not a sensible woman!”
“Your work will live forever while your children are dry in their tombs!”
“Unless my statue breaks after a hundred years,” Kath said tartly, “and I’d rather live on in my children’s hearts than a face of stone.”
Grovin spent an outraged hour straight shouting at her, then stormed out finally in a rage and went straight to the Gate of Death, and the temple of the goddess outside it, which had just escaped the general devastation. It was very large and grand and mostly deserted; everyone wanted to bribe Death, but few wanted to court her. There was only one priest, who listened to Grovin’s furious tirade and asked mildly, “What do you want?”
“I want her to make the statue!” Grovin said.
The priest nodded. “You ask for her death, then.”
Grovin did hesitate for several moments. But then he said, “She’s going to die anyway. Everyone does. But her work could live.”
“All things come to the goddess in the end,” the priest said. “But if you want to speed things up, you have to make fair return. A life, for a death.”
Grovin hesitated again, but to do him what small justice he deserved, not as long as the first time. “Very well,” he said, proudly and grandly, and three days later, the pains started in Kath’s belly. The priest at the temple of Forgin—the god of surgeons and their tools, a favorite of ironsmiths—palpated her stomach and shook his head. “The mass is large enough to feel. A year, perhaps.”
Kath walked out with Grovin and went home in silence, stricken. He didn’t precisely feel guilty; he was still full of his own righteous sacrifice. But he did wait several hours, until after the children were in their beds and Kath had sat by them all for a long time. Only then, when she came back to the table and mechanically made the evening tea, he finally said, “Well, you’ll do it now.”