Gathering Blue - Lois Lowry [34]
Pretending didn't keep you safe.
"I heard it growl," Kira said in a low voice.
"Name the threads," Annabella commanded.
Kira sighed. "Yarrow," she said and set some pale yellow next to the deep brown. The dyer nodded.
She examined a brighter yellow in the light. "Tansy," she decided finally, and the dyer nodded again.
"It growled," Kira said once more.
"There be no beasts," the dyer repeated firmly.
Kira continued to sort and name the threads. "Madder," she said, stroking the deep red, one of her favorites. She picked up a pale lavender near it and frowned. "I don't know this one. It's pretty."
"Elderberry," the old woman told her. "But it don't stay fast. It don't linger."
Kira folded the lavender threads in her hand. "Annabella," she said finally, "it growled. It did."
"Then it be human, playing at beast," Annabella told her in a firm and certain voice. "Meaning to keep you scairt of the woods. There be no beasts."
Together, siowly, they sorted and named the threads.
Later, walking home through a silent forest with no frightening sounds from the thick bushes on either side of the path, Kira wondered what human would have stalked her, and why.
"Thomas," Kira asked as they ate together, "have you ever seen a beast?"
"Not alive."
"You've seen a dead one, then?"
"We all have. When the hunters bring them in. The other night, remember? They brought them in after the hunt. There was a huge pile over by the butcher's yard."
Kira wrinkled her nose, remembering. "What a smell," she said. "But, Thomas —"
He waited for her question. Tonight for dinner they had been brought meat in a thick sauce. Beside it on the plate were some small roasted potatoes.
Kira pointed at the meat on her own plate. "This is what the hunters brought. It's hare, I think."
He nodded, agreeing.
"Everything the hunters brought in was like this. Wild rabbit. Some birds. There wasn't anything, well, anything very large."
"There were deer. I saw two at the butcher's."
"But deer are gentle, frightened things. The hunters bring nothing with claws or fangs. They never catch anything that could be called a beast."
Thomas shuddered. "Lucky. A beast could kill."
Kira thought of her father. Taken by beasts.
"Annabella says there be none," she confided.
"Be none?" Thomas looked puzzled.
"That's the way she said it. 'There be no beasts.'"
"She speaks like Matt?" Thomas had not met the old dyer.
Kira nodded. "A bit. Perhaps she grew up in the Fen."
They ate in silence for a moment. Finally Kira asked again. "So you've never seen a real beast?"
"No," Thomas acknowledged.
"But probably you know someone who has."
He thought for a moment and then shook his head. "Do you?" he asked.
Kira looked at the table. It had always been hard to talk of it, even to her mother. "My father was taken by beasts," she told him.
"You saw it?" His voice was shocked.
"No. I was not yet born."
"Your mother saw?"
She tried to remember her mother's telling. "No. She didn't. He went on the hunt. Everyone says that he was a fine hunter. But he didn't return. They came to my mother with the news, that he'd been attacked and taken by beasts on the hunt."
She looked at him, puzzled. "Yet Annabella says there be none."
"How could she know?" Thomas asked skeptically.
"She's four syllables, Thomas. Those who live to four syllables know all there is."
Thomas nodded in agreement, then yawned. He had been working hard all day. His tools still lay on the worktable: small chisels with which he had been meticulously recarving, reshaping the worn, smooth places on the elaborate staff that the Singer used. It was painstaking work that allowed for no error. Thomas had told her that often his head ached and he had to stop again and again to rest his eyes.
"I'll go so you can rest," Kira told him. "I must put away my own work before bed."
She returned to her room at the other end of the corridor and folded the robe that still lay on her table. She had worked on the stitchery throughout the afternoon, after her return from the forest. She