Wood Angel

Skara Role: Part 3

     After two days and three nights, somewhere in the grey hour before dawn, she fell asleep. She woke still sitting on the chair by the bedside, her forehead resting on her father's hand. 

'Katerina,' he rasped. 

     'You're here,' she stuttered, lifting her head. 'I am here,Father, right here.' 

     'Not you,' he said, breaking her heart. 'Your mother.' 

     There was a screen in the shape of climbing roses between their room and the front of the shop. Light was piercing through it, the long slanting yellow of dawn.Her father was staring into it, his eyes runny and blind. 'Look.' 

     Plain Kate turned for a moment to look, then turned back, afraid of what she might see if she let herself. 'Father,'she said. 'Papa.' 

     'Katerina,' he said again. 'She is in the light. She's here. Katerina, you're here!'

     'Don't go,' said Plain Kate, and clutched his hand to her cheek. 'Papa!' He looked at her. 'Katerina, Star of My Heart.' He breathed in. He breathed out. And he stopped breathing.

     '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 the skara rok, the bad time. It had emptied their purse. Plain Kate took what money they had left and bought Poitr 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 into 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 that 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 Poitr Carver had been a wonderful carver, and she had loved him. But the only thing it said was that her father was dead.

     But 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 warrant gave 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.