Gathering Blue - Lois Lowry [44]
"Everyone in the Fen would know of such a tyke."
Kira nodded, agreeing. "She said — how did she put it?" She tried to remember Marlena's description. "She said that the tyke seemed to have knowledges."
"Knowledges?"
"That was the word she used."
"What did she mean?"
"She said that the tyke seemed to have knowledge of things that hadn't happened yet. That the people in the Fen thought it was magic. She sounded a little frightened when she talked of it. And, Thomas?"
"What?" he asked.
Kira hesitated. "It made me think of what happens sometimes with my cloth. This small one." Kira opened the box he had made for her and held out the fabric scrap, reminding him. "I told you how it seems to speak to me.
"And I remember that you told me that you have a piece of wood that seems to do the same —"
"Yes. From when I was just a tyke, just beginning to carve. The one on the shelf. I've shown it to you."
"Could it be the same thing?" Kira asked cautiously. "Could it be what Marlena called knowledges?"
Thomas looked at her, and at the cloth that lay motionless in her hand. He frowned. "But why?" he asked at last.
Kira didn't know the answer. "Maybe it is something that artists have," she said, liking the sound of the word she had just learned. "A special kind of magic knowledge."
Thomas nodded and shrugged. "Well, it doesn't matter much, does it? We each have a good life now. Better tools than we did before. Good food. Work to do."
"But the tyke below? She sobs and sobs. And they won't let her out of the room." Kira remembered her promise. "Thomas, I told her I'd come back. And that I'd help her."
He looked dubious. "I don't think the guardians would like that."
Kira again remembered the severity she had heard in Jamison's voice. She remembered the slamming of the door. "No, I don't think they would," she agreed. "But at night. I'll creep down then, when they think we're all asleep. Except —" Her face fell.
"Except what?"
"It's locked. There's no way I can get in."
"Yes you can," Thomas told her.
"How?"
"I have a key," he said.
It was true. Back in his room, he showed her. "It was a long time ago," he explained. "But here I was, locked in, with all these fine tools. So I carved a key. It really was quite easy. The lock on the door is a simple one.
"And," he added, fingering the intricately carved wooden key, "it fits all the doors. All the locks are the same. I know because I tried them. I used to go out at night and roam the hallways, opening doors. All the rooms were empty then."
Kira shook her head. "You were really mischievous, weren't you?"
Thomas grinned. "I told you. Just like Matt."
"Tonight," Kira said, suddenly serious. "Will you come with me?"
Thomas nodded. "All right," he agreed. "Tonight."
16
Evening came. Kira, in Thomas's room, looked down through the window at the squalor of the village and listened to its chaotic din as workers in the various sheds finished their last chores. Down the lane she could see how the butcher threw a container of water over the stone doorstep of his hut, a useless gesture toward cleaning away the clotted filth. Nearer, she watched the women leaving the weaving shed where she had worked as helper for so much of her childhood.
Kira wondered, smiling, whether Matt had been there during the workday that had just ended. Assigned to cleaning-up chores, he had probably been underfoot with his mates, making trouble and stealing food from the women's lunches. From her place at the window, she couldn't see any sign of him or of his dog. She hadn't seen them all day.
She waited there with Thomas until long past dark, until the tenders had taken their food trays away. At last the entire building was still and the clamor from the village had subsided as well.
"Thomas," Kira suggested, "take your little piece of wood. The special one. I have my scrap with me."
"All right, but why?"
"I don't know exactly. I feel that we should."
Thomas got the small carved piece from its high shelf, and put it into his pocket. In his other pocket was the