“I’m right here,” she said. “Papa, I’m right here.” She kept saying it for a long time.
¶
The year of the hot summer, sickness, and starvation came to be called theskara rok, the bad time. It had emptied their purse. Plain Kate took what money they had left and bought Piotr Carver a decent burial. Then she went back to the shop and spent a month carving a grave marker for him. She would make one and cast it to the fire, make another and still not find peace.
“People think we are witches because we show them the truth.” She could see her father’s face, feel his hands on hers. A carving had just snapped apart when her knife found some hidden flaw in the wood. “You will learn to know where the knots are and how the grain flows, even deep inside the wood where no one can see it. You will show people the truth: the truth in the wood. But sometimes, in your carving, people will see another truth. A truth about you. About themselves.” His hands were warm on hers, sturdy as his smile. “And that is magic,” he said. “You will know it when you feel it.”
She wanted the grave marker to show the truth: that Piotr Carver had been a wonderful carver, and she had loved him. But the only thing it said was that her father was dead.
At last she could not leave the grave unmarked anymore. So she finished the marker, and placed it.
And when that was done she had nothing more to do. She stood by his lathe like a girl under a spell. Her hands hung empty at her sides.
And then the wood guild sent another carver to take the shop.
His name was Chuny and he wasn’t half the carver she was, but he had a warrant from the guild. Plain Kate had nowhere to go. She’d been born in that shop. She’d been a baby watching the light shift through the rose screen. She’d been a chubby-fisted toddler putting wood shavings in the pottage. But now the guild warrantgave Chuny claim over the shop and its fittings, its tools, even the wood Kate and her father had cured but not carved.
Master Chuny stood watching her pack. There was very little she was allowed to take. A bit of food: apples and oats, a jar of oil. Her own three dresses. Her father’s smocks and leggings. His leather carpenter’s apron. There were two bowls, with porridge dried like parched earth at the bottom of the one that had been her father’s. Two spoons. The red marriage quilt from the big carved bed, which smelled like her father and like sickness. Her own small hand tools: knives and chisels and awls and gouges.
“The carving things stay with the shop,” said Chuny, still watching.
Plain Kate was slotting the tools into the pockets of her own leather apron.“He gave them to me,” she whispered. She did not look up; the hair around her face hid her strange eyes and the tears in them from the man watching her. She raised her voice: “These are mine. My father gave them to me.”
An apprentice’s tools—” Chuny began. The rule was that an apprentice’s tools belonged to his master, and through the master to the guild.
“I was not his apprentice.” She looked up and she was not crying anymore. “I am going. Do you want to search my bags?”
“I—” Chuny began, then shook his head. His fingers were twined in the rose screen; it hurt to see his hands there. Kate and her father had had an old joke where they would smell the carved roses, but even outside the joke Piotr would never have closed his hands round a blossom, as Chuny was doing now.
She tore her eyes away.“I am going to the market,” she said. “I am going to live in our stall.”
“Live in it?” he echoed, shocked.
“The bottom drawer will be big enough.”
The stall too belonged to the guild. Plain Kate raised her witch’s eyes, daring Chuny to make that claim. He looked back, then looked at his shoes, and didn’t. Kate picked up her bags.
“They, uh,” he said, “tell me you can carve a little. I would—when you are of age, that is, if I still need an apprentice—”
She was insulted by the awkward half kindness.“You have nothing to teach me,” she said. “And I don’t have the fee.”
“Go then,” he said, angry.
So she did, with her head held high.
¶
In the market, she put down her bags and looked at the square with new eyes. The tall and narrow shops seemed leering to her, the streets crooked. Underfoot, cobble-backs rose like islands from the packed and dirty snow. Above it all the weizi towered, sending a long sunset shadow across the gray roofs of Samilae and toward the black wall of the hills beyond.
Her father’s stall was sitting in that shadow: a big box cabinet with many drawers, large and deep on the bottom and little on top. The front was carved to show a deer hunt: a stag leaping into a patch of wood, hounds and riders at its heels. Plain Kate had always thought before that it looked as if the stag was going to get away. Tonight it looked different; one of the riders had nocked an arrow, his aim true. The poor beast was dead and just didn’t know it.
The cold grew bitter as the sun fell; her breath swirled around her. She pulled open the big bottom drawer. She put the quilt in it, and pushed it as much closed as she could and still get in. Then she rolled in through the gap and lay down.
The wood was hard despite the quilt; the air was stale. She couldn’t see, but the drawer walls pressed her shoulders, and the sense of the wood above pressed from inches away.A coffin, she thought, and pushed the thought away. It came back.This is my coffin.
With no standing in the wood guild, she could carve but she couldn’t sell, not without telling all who asked that there was a guild shop not a hundred steps away. An apprentice’s fee was the price of a matched team of horses, a fortune she couldn’t imagine earning. A dowry was beside the point for a skinny girl with witch’s eyes. She was going to starve. It was just a matter of time.
But she wasn’t hungry yet. She lay still and listened. The drawer grew brighter as her eyes grew used to darkness, then darker as the world darkened. Finally she couldn’t see anything. As the night grew still each sound got sharper, and each sounded like it was coming for her. Boots. The bark of a dog. Like a knife through the darkness, the bell of a watchman calling the hour.
The night grew quieter and quieter. Her eyes ached from seeing nothing. Her ears strained after little sounds. She heard the river singing to itself. She heard the wind snuffling at the gap where she’d entered the drawer. And finally, littler than any of those things, she heard something crying.
The small cry came from somewhere close. Plain Kate’s first thought was that it was a ghost, that its next whisper would be “Katerina, Star of My Heart.” But she was not the sort for ghosts, so she lay listening, afraid but brave. She moved her head from side to side to track the sound, and decided that the crying was coming from one of the drawers above.
So she climbed out of the drawer and looked.
In the smallest drawer of her father’s stall, among the lace-fine carvings packed in straw, she found them: kittens. They were mouse-little, with their eyes still sealed closed and their ears tucked flat. There was no cat. It was almost dawn and frost furred everything. The market square was as still as the inside of a bell after the ringing has stopped. The straw nest was getting cold.
Plain Kate stood for a while and watched the kittens stagger about. Then she scooped them up and squeezed herself back into the drawer.
And that was the beginning of her new life.
There were three kittens: a white cat, a black cat, and a gangly gray tom. Their mother never came back. The next morning Plain Kate traded the cowherd girl the mending of a milk stool for a squirt of milk, and the promise of more each morning. She watered the milk and let the kittens suck on the twisted end of a rag. She kept them in the felt-lined pockets of her leather apron, under her coat during the day, and beside her at night in the warm, closed darkness of the drawer. Day by day, their dark eyes opened and their ears untucked and their voices grew louder.