“I have decided,” the master said, leaning back in the beautiful chair, dry under his awning, “that your catch will be split among the men whose fish were in the batch. Since, after all, only luck has spared your fish alone.”
Only luck. He was daring her to contradict. No one thought it was luck. She looked at the salmon, so strong she could almost sense the whip of their muscle. There was a little crowd gathered at her back. She thought the salmon were swimming hard against the current of their looks. “That’s fair,” she said at last. “But I didn’t burn the fish.”
“As I say, girl,” he frowned, “only luck.”
“It’s not luck, it’s witchcraft,” she said, and at her back the silence hardened. “The stranger, Linay. He drew the fish.”
Big Jan, behind her, said what Linay had said: “But you caught them.”
“The fish will be split,” the master said. “And that’s enough from you, Kate Carver.”
Plain Kate could feel how it was going to be. Linay was useful; he was powerful. Those that knew he was a witch wanted his protection; those that didn’t would take an easier target. Stranger though he was, people knew that Linay was not someone to cross. He was powerful as a cornered dog. If the town was going to choose someone to blame for the hard times coming, it wouldn’t be Linay.
Plain Kate turned on her heel, swam silently through the knot of people, and went back to her stall. The bow was lying on her countertop. She wanted to smash it, but it was beautiful. It was quiet and strong. She picked it up, and went back to work.
She was watching for Linay, but he still managed to sneak up on her. “Fair maid of the wood,” he said, making her jump. “How goes the work?”
Plain Kate steadied herself and shrugged. “It will be a good bow,” she said. “I am a good carver.”
“Too good, they say.” He tapped her nose. “They call you ‘witch-child’ already, Katie girl.”
“If they do, it’s because of you.”
He caught her words and sang them back at her:
If they do it’s because of you
What they see is because of me
That may be, that may be,
But I see what I say and I say what I see
He smiled at her. “Do you know what happens to witches, Plain Kate? Have you seen the fires?”
The sour smell from the smokehouse suddenly seemed stronger. “Over a few fish?” Plain Kate tried a laugh; it came out tight.
“Well,” said Linay with a bow, “there might be more.”
“Go away. Or I’ll set my cat on you.”
And he went away. But not very far.
?
The next day there was no catch—or no catch of fish. Old Boyar brought in three boots. Big Jan caught a dead dog. On the next day the nets were wholly empty. The whole week there was no catch, and the grain barges didn’t come, and rain fell like a long fever.
Then Boyar took a punt upriver into the fog banks, and the next day the boat came back drifting. Boyar was lying on the deck like a king of old, not dead but sleeping—an unnatural sleep from which he could not be woken.
Talk in the market turned to muttering. Plain Kate saw Big Jan swat Taggle from his nest atop a coil of rope. The cat was kicked and cursed from every stall.
Kate herself kept to her work. The bow was nearly finished. The Wheat Maiden haunted her. The carved face was smooth and beautiful—but in its narrow sadness and quizzical brow, Kate saw her own reflection.
At night she locked herself in her drawer and lay awake in the hot darkness. Her thoughts chased themselves until Taggle came in through the little door she’d made him. He flopped on her face. Plain Kate cuddled him under her chin like a fiddle, and they both went to sleep.
And so it went, for a week. Then one night someone took an axe to her stall.
?
Lightning. She thought she’d been hit by lightning. It was that loud.
And cold. Night air got dumped over her as if from a bucket. Something smashed into the blanket by her head. Taggle’s claws raked her throat as he bolted out of his hole.
She was awake now. There were daggers of wood everywhere. Her safe little drawer was a nest of splinters. And again something clapped past her ear. An axe. Kate screamed.
The axe yanked free and came again. Air and light and falling things hit her.
Plain Kate yanked the door lever. The drawer lurched and jammed.
Her stall was shattering. Smashing through a gap came that swinging axe.
She pounded her fists against the drawer above her. Something gave way to her hands. She shoved and scrambled and hit air.