“Is Daj your mother?”
“Oh, no!” Drina laughed. “She’s too old! I just call her that. Everyone does. It’s respect.”
“Call her…?” Kate was lost.
“Daj. Oh, you don’t speak the tongue. You’ll have to learn a little. Daj means ‘mother.’ But she’s not, she just looks after me, because my mother is dead.”
“So’s mine.” Plain Kate was glad of it, for the first time. It gave her something in common with this cheerful, well-loved girl.
“Oh!” Drina stopped swinging her pail and stood there, skirt-deep in the soaked grass. She looked legless, like a chess piece. “Do you miss her?”
“No. She died when I was born.”
“Oh,” said Drina, and started walking again.
“I miss my father, though.” Plain Kate was trying to keep the flow of talk going. “He died four years ago, in the skara rok. He got the witch’s fever.”
And Drina—cheerful, smiling Drina—snapped at her, almost snarled: “Don’t call it that!”
Plain Kate felt her shoulders tighten and come forward as if to protect her heart. “Don’t call it—skara rok?”
“Don’t call it ‘witch’s fever.’ Witches don’t make fevers or sicken cows or kill crops or any of that.”
“I didn’t say they did. But witch’s—I mean, the sickness. Everyone calls it that.”
“I know.” Drina’s voice was softer now. They had reached the river at the inner side of a broad curve where a slope of clay and pebbles eased into the water. Drina walked on the margin, placing her feet delicately as a heron and watching her prints fill with water. “But it’s—with the skara rok, people look for someone to blame. Ugly people. Outsiders. Witch-whites. Roamers.”
Carvers, thought Kate. She thought she knew more about being hunted and blamed than Drina did, but she did not say so.
The winding river Narwe was turning again; there was a huge stone a pace or two into the channel, and jammed against it a wall of tangled trunks and limbs, remnants of some old flood, cut across their way. Drina blew through her lips in frustration. “Nothing here!”
“What are you looking for?”
“Sand. Clean sand, to scour the pots.”
The anger that Drina had shown a moment ago had slid from her completely and easily, like water off of oiled wood. That sort of generosity was a new thing to Plain Kate; she didn’t know how to take it. But she said, “There’s sand just alee of this fall.” She pointed past the snarl of bleached wood. “That’s what I use.”
“I guess even a town girl has to scrub pots,” said Drina, swinging up over the timbers, staining her legs with moss.
Plain Kate climbed carefully up behind her. “I’ve only got one pot. I use the sand to smooth wood. For carving. That’s who I am, a carver.”
The drizzle had broken into patches as they walked. As Drina scooped up the pale sand, Kate found herself standing in the smudge of shadow cast by the deadfall. She had never before noticed the way shadows gave things weight, made them look heavy and real and connected to the ground. Without hers…
She edged into the light.
Her shadow looked strange and thinned. It seemed not cast against the ground, but floating above it, like a fog. What Linay had said was true: No one would notice this, at first. It was just an uneasy little change, like the half-felt movement of a boat that slowly induces a great sickness.
“Got it!” Drina’s voice came from her elbow, suddenly. She scrambled up the bank toward the field, and Kate followed. At the meadow wall, Drina stopped. “If we go back now, we’ll have to pluck chickens.” She snuck Kate a sly, friendly look. “Let’s go see if Behjet needs help.”
“I asked him already,” said Plain Kate, then regretted it as Drina’s face fell.
Drina rubbed a bare foot against the other leg, smearing mud. “Well. Let’s go see the horses, anyway. Just for a moment.” She swung up onto the wall and walked along the loose, wobbly stones, easy and graceful. “Come on!” Plain Kate walked beside her, though Drina’s feet were level with Kate’s shoulders. Even if she could have walked the wall—and it looked like an acrobat’s trick—Kate would not have dared. It could attract attention.