She wished she had Taggle’s claws, to swipe him. “Leave me alone, Linay.”
He sat transfixed—hurt, she thought. Then he stood. “We will rest here the day,” he said, his back to her, tending the fire. “And I will bleed tonight. But tomorrow we must again travel.” He walked off into the willow trees and out of sight.
?
Plain Kate slept, and woke feeling stronger, and warmer for Taggle’s chin fitting neatly in her hand. Still, the sun was slipping away. Upriver, she could see a wall of weather: fog and cloud. A cold draft was blowing it toward them; she could smell its dampness. She sighed: more rain. “It’s as if it’s following us,” she muttered, ruffling Taggle’s fur.
“We draw it. Like a bear on a chain.” Kate sat up and Taggle sprang to his feet. Across the fire, Linay was sitting on a stone, skinning a rabbit. “I’m a weather witch remember? The moods of wind and water.” He thrust a sharpened stick through the rabbit like a man who knew swords. “That fog is hungry.”
“You,” said Kate. “You made the fog and the rain. All of it. Through the whole country.”
There was horror in her voice, but Linay bowed modestly as if it had been awe. “It is no small work, I admit. I’d be ashamed to tell you the dark things I’ve done for such power. Your shadow is only the latest—and almost the last. I have been preparing this journey for years.”
“But—” She couldn’t begin to tell him what she was thinking. He’d made the fog and rain, the crops failing in the wet, the damp fear she’d seen growing like a mold in the Toila market. Even Taggle’s ears were edging back as it sank in.
But then, Taggle was still a cat. “I’ve been wet,” he snarled. “My paws were damp for months.”
Linay shrugged one marionette shoulder. “The fog is the rusalka’s home. She needs it as a frog needs water. It is half her skin. Even the blood-spell would not bring her without this fog.” And he sang:
Foggy little oxbows
Forest pools where no one goes
Lost links of the river dreaming dreams
“Without me she’d be trapped in some lonely place where the fog never lifts. With me, she can travel. All the way to Lov.”
Plain Kate pictured it. The wall of fog was creeping up the river, just faster than a man could walk. In it, the rusalka. Anyone she found, she would take—take like Stivo, take like Wen. This was the dark story they were telling in Toila. By now it was a horror. The countryside was emptying in front of it like a forest emptying in front of a fire.
And she had been helping him. Giving him blood for the drawing spell. For weeks. Kate shook—and turned sideways and was sick.
Linay raised an eyebrow and propped the impaled rabbit up over the fire.
Plain Kate felt gray and cold. Waiting for the Roamers to burn her had been no worse than this. “Why?” she said. “Why are you taking her to Lov?”
“Oh,” he sang. “I have reasons. I have plans and schemes.” He ripped a leg from the roasting rabbit and threw it, bloody, to Taggle—who leapt back. “Come and eat your dinner.”
?
Plain Kate carved. She carved to keep from shaking. She carved to think.
“Are you all right, Katerina?” Taggle peered into her shattered face. When she didn’t answer he shook his head—actually shook it, side to side, a human “no.”
The gesture struck Kate and made her sad. It looked wrong; it looked right. It made what he was visible: not a cat, not human, something new. “Oh, Taggle,” she said. What was he? What was she? What had Linay made them?
Find your shape. Lift your knife.
Plain Kate stopped thinking and carved, her knife knowing things. The gouge she’d made when her knife had slipped suggested the lower lid of an uptilting eye. She roughed it out, put in the other eye, then used the knife tip to sketch the lines of the nose and brow and mouth, and suddenly the oak burl had a face: a woman’s face, narrow and strong and sad, too strange to be beautiful. With only the eyes done it seemed to look at her. And already she knew it: the rusalka’s human face, the face of Linay’s lost sister, Drina’s mother, Lenore.
Find your shape. She was Plain Kate Carver, daughter of Piotr, the girl who knew the secrets inside the wood. The girl who was brave and lifted her knife. The girl who had told her father she would be a master by the time she was twenty.
But instead she was going to die. Because she was going to stay with Linay.
Long enough to find out how to stop him.
fourteen
blood and questions