The stranger was white. His hair was white-gray like bleached wood, his eyes white-silver like tin, his skin was white as if he were a day dead.
Albino was the scholar’s word for it—but witch-white was what they said in Plain Kate’s country. It was unlucky, and perhaps, Plain Kate thought, it was what kept him wandering. She felt a surge of sympathy for the man: It was far too easy to lose your place in a town or farmhold, to be forced onto the roads. A chance turn of skin color was more than enough.
But the man was no starveling beggar, she could see that. He was thin but strong, and he moved through the market like a lord. Across the square from Plain Kate’s stall, he flipped open a blanket and spread out an array of tin trinkets. He sat down on the blanket edge with a tambourine on his knee.
Kate was working just then on an objarka for Niki the Baker—a mask in the form of the Wheat Maiden, to hang on the stall door of the new horse he was planning to buy. It was a good-sized piece, and it would earn her a few weeks without hunger. As she carved, she listened. The stranger played the tambourine as she’d never heard it played: not just bangs and jiggles, but music, lively as a quick stream, bright as birdsong, the sort of music that made you tap a toe. The music drew people to his blanket. He tipped his chin up and smiled at one and all, chattering like a baby bird—but he listened like an empty well.
The stranger puzzled Plain Kate. The trinkets he was selling wouldn’t keep him fed. There must be more than that. As evening gathered, Niki the Baker came by to check on his carving. Niki was a big man, soft as bread dough and as kind, and one of the few people in the town of whom Kate might ask an unguarded question. She jerked her chin toward the stranger. “Who’s that one? What’s he selling?”
“That one?” Niki snorted. “Useless frippery. Useless.” The baker hated things that were useless, from lapdogs to wedding cakes. “You watch him, Plain Kate. That one might steal everything that’s not nailed down, and some things that are nailed only loosely.” Without comment he set down a pair of rolls that were too stale to sell, and without comment Plain Kate took them and bit into one. It was a regular thing between them.
The roll was hard as an uncooked turnip. “Easy on that,” Niki said, watching her eat. “It might be the last for a bit—flour’s low.”
She nodded and wrapped the other roll up to tuck away. Niki looked at the bundle with his sad-dog eyes. “It’s bad, bad,” he sighed. “The wheat barges are overdue at least a week. No grain and no news. Something’s amiss upriver.” He crooked his two middle fingers into a sign against witchcraft.
A hungry time. Plain Kate felt cold in the warm evening. The skara rok had begun this way.
?
Plain Kate listened to Niki and watched the stranger. He wasn’t selling much: a few toys and tin charms Kate could have made better in wood. Three days of music put three lonely kopeks into his begging bowl. What he seemed to be selling mostly was talk. When Plain Kate came back from fishing, his blanket was still spread, white in the thickening twilight, alone in the evening-empty market.
Plain Kate was thinking of witches. How in bad times people were more eager to buy her objarka, but also more inclined to take a step back, to crook their fingers at her when they thought she wasn’t looking, or when they were sure she was. How they wanted the witchcraft to protect them, but how they looked too for a witch to blame. It didn’t matter that there was no magic in her blade; people saw it there. They saw witchcraft in her skill, witch marks in her mismatched eyes, her bad luck, her long shadow.
The stranger was selling things in the shadows. All sorts came: from the ragged charcoal man to the wife of the lord justice, men and women, young and old. They came in ones and twos, shying from the others, looking around them. He sold them glass vials that twisted the firelight from the market’s cressets, sold them herbs and feathers knotted with string.
Charms, Kate thought. Charms against empty wombs, indifferent loves. Against hunger, sickness. Against the rumor of something worse that came off the river. The stranger was selling the witchcraft that people craved to protect them. But he would likely be gone when they began to look for someone to blame.
Plain Kate watched for four days and thought. On the fourth day a sudden silence made her look up, startled as if the river had stopped running. The stranger had set down his tambourine. He stood and stretched and sauntered toward her.