“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 the gadje prefer fire when they kill us.”
He said gadje 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.”