He released her. Kate staggered back. Her wrist pounded. “Go to bed,” he said. “I have the blood I need.”
Kate picked up Taggle and leapt into the hold, not bothering with the ladder. Her ankles jammed and she welcomed the clean pain that cleared her eyes of tears. She ran to the box that had held her shadow and wrenched the lid open. She was ready to die if she could take her shadow with her. But the box was empty, holding only splinters and air. It was gone. Her shadow was gone.
She sat on the bunk edge with Taggle limp on her lap. She waited in shaking silence, until silence fell on the deck above. Then she tied the carving of Lenore to her hip, stole Linay’s socks, took the unconscious cat in her arms, and lowered herself over the side of the boat, into the river.
fifteen
the abandoned country
Stumbling down the road to Lov, Plain Kate dripped and shivered. Taggle was slumped in her arms like a little child, sleeping. He had slept through her huddled wait in the boat, slept through her wade to the shore, slept through the slap and sting of alder branches as she fought her way up the bank. She tried not to be terrified for him. He’ll live, Linay had said, and that made it true.
The night was white-blind with fog, and Kate staggered over every stone and stumbled in every puddle, but she pushed on as fast as she could.
Apart from the sleeping cat, she was almost empty-handed. The carving of Lenore banged at her hip. Her haversack held only stolen socks, a few apples, and a barley loaf. It was not much, not enough to live long. But in the abandoned country, it should be easy to find what she needed.
Except her shadow.
In Lov I’ll set your shadow loose, Linay had promised her.
Set it loose, she should have asked, to do what? She could still see the swallow, limp as a glove, falling into clots of dust and feathers, broken as last year’s leaves. The whole city.
And she had made it possible. Her blood. Her shadow.
The moon came out, a broken thing tangled in the birch branches. The road to Lov appeared before Kate, stretching into the distance. She walked along it until she found her eyes closing and her arm, where she held Taggle, growing stiff and numb. At last she found herself walking off the road. She eased the cat off her shoulder, muttering, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Why? What for?” said Taggle. “Did I miss something? Was there food?”
And she dropped him in her joy.
?
For three days and two nights, Kate and Taggle walked the road to Lov. They hurried when they could, and dozed when they had to, hiding in tangles of bloodtwig and heartsease at the edge of the road. When Kate couldn’t sleep, she hunched up, shivering as if fevered, and freed Lenore’s face from the burl wood. The twisting lines of the grain flowed across the carving’s features like tongues of fire. She was rushing down the road to beat Linay to Lov, but she had no idea how to stop him.
Kate carried Taggle the first day, and the second, while waves of shivering broke over him, subsided, and broke. On the third day he walked. They went as fast as they could, and following them came a line of fog and rain, solid as a wall, slow as an army.
The sleeping death had not come yet, but the flight before it had created its own devastation: The road was rutted and littered with broken wheels, abandoned boxes, the bodies of horses driven too hard whose eyes buzzed with flies. The wheat fields were trampled with the remains of hasty camps. Yet they met no one. The farmsteads they passed were empty and sometimes burned. Outside one farmstead three women dangled dead from the branch that overhung the road, signs against witchcraft slashed into their hands. Kate closed her eyes and ducked under their black feet and hurried on.
On the evening of the fourth day, the road swung away from the river and they found themselves walking in a tunnel of willows. And through them, across the river, Kate glimpsed something white. Big. Moving. It was just a glimpse but Plain Kate stopped short, squinting. On her shoulder, Taggle stirred awake. Kate put a hand up to touch him and edged forward. Her throat was tight, as if it had seen and recognized something her eyes had not.
The river bent, the tunnel ended, and Kate looked back along the bank.
On the other side of the river, something looked back at her. Just a horse, a big white cart horse. It was picketed outside a single Roamer vardo, red. “It’s Cream,” said Kate.
“Cream?” Taggle sprang down. “Cream?” He tangled himself with her feet, purring. “Cream, yes, please, how kind, what a thoughtful human…”
“No, the horse. It’s Drina’s horse, it’s Cream.”