“Hmmm,” hummed Linay. “Come closer.”
Plain Kate hesitated, and shifted her foot to be sure of the knife in her boot. She did it subtly, but he saw it. “Oh, honestly.” He nudged her toe with his. “I saved your life. I’m hardly about to hurt you. Hold out your hands.” He mimed it, making a bowl of his own long hands and lifting it.
She looked at him narrowly. In the sun, the burn scar pulled across her scalp. She cupped and raised her hands.
“I haven’t always been a stealer of shadows, you know,” he said. “I was a weather worker, once—and welcome anywhere, welcome as a summer rain. And I still know the moods of wind and water.” He leaned over her, fitting his own hands against the underside of hers, his long fingers lapping her wrists. “You can’t expect a ghost to lick up spilled blood like a—”
“—dog,” supplied Taggle. The cat had stood up and was watching them, fur on end.
“She will take blood only from a body. But what is a body? Just a bowl for life. A bowl of breath.” And he blew a long breath into the cup of her hands. It was warm at first, and slowly it grew cold.
Kate eased her hands open. Inside them—taking their shape—was a bowl of ice. It was small as a bird’s nest, woven like that, and shining in the sun. She lifted it into the light. Delicate feathers of frost furred its edges.
“You see,” he said, smiling. “It hasn’t always been ugly.”
Then he stood up, fast, like a man insulted. “It’s a bowl. You fill it with blood and she won’t know the difference between this and a body. Thus I control her bottomless appetites. Notice that you can’t do it without me.” He turned his back on her and swung up the skillet as if it were a sword. “Kick out the fire and come aboard,” he said. “I want some distance yet today.”
But when she lifted herself over the edge of the boat he was in the hold below, and he didn’t come up at once. She thought she heard him weeping.
?
So they went along. The country grew lower, and the weather cooler. Kate’s hands healed slowly. Linay grew stronger, and Plain Kate learned why he had been weak.
Every evening she let her blood fill the bowl of ice that lined Linay’s hands. They were big hands, narrow but long-fingered. It caught up with her like sickness, the blood-letting. The first day she didn’t feel different. But on the second the sun made her drowsy. On the third she found herself nodding over her carving. By the fifth a sort of heaviness came over her, and made her knife shake. She sheathed it and asked, “How far to Lov?”
Linay shrugged. The old fluidness was back in his joints; he no longer moved as if his jumping-jack strings had stiffened. “Two weeks? Three? It’s not my country.” He set the pole to the river bottom, pushed them ahead, and added: “But we’re coming to it, mira. I can taste it, like ashes. Lov, at last.”
His voice made her scars ache. She ducked her head and took up the wood again.
Days passed. Linay brought back from his wanderings leather leggings and a farm boy’s smock, and she folded the long linen dress away, gladly. The next day he gave her a roll of hand tools: a rasp, a chisel, three kinds of gouges, an awl, and a carving knife. Kate, whose old knife was as much a part of her as her name, put the new knife away, but she used the other tools gratefully.
“No cat would do this,” said Taggle. “Fight.”
“I am fighting,” she answered. But slowly it stopped being true.
She tried to stop herself from feeling the surge of tenderness that came to her when he worked to heal her hands: the liquid song that had once set her father’s smashed fingers, the crooked sunburned part of Linay’s white hair as he bent his fair head. He is dangerous, she told herself. He does not love me. I do not trust him. I am only going to Lov to get back my shadow.
He does not love me. I do not belong here.
thirteen
shadow
Adrift in a green barge on the tea-colored, slow-flowing Narwe, Plain Kate carved and bled.
She sat on the pole man’s seat, knife in hand, drowsy in the sun. The burl wood wings were almost finished, full of long, strange twists of wood grain, less like feathers now than like long hair spread in water. They had an uneasy beauty. But the lump between the wings would not show her its face. She had cut away the rough and rotten wood and found a smooth knot, like an acorn. Was it a sharp chin and a high forehead? An owl’s beak and flaring ears? Its blank curve told her nothing. She sat with her knife above it and did not know what to do. If the thing was a mirror, then her heart was blank.
She tried to summon up her father’s voice: Be brave. Trust the wood. Lift your knife.