Gathering Blue - Lois Lowry [63]
"She's a cruel woman, though," Kira's father said. "You say she turned on you? And there was a trial?"
"Yes, but I was allowed to stay. I was even given an honored place. I had a defender, a guardian named Jamison. And now he looks after me, Father, and supervises my work. I know he'll find a place for you!"
Happily Kira squeezed her father's hand, thinking of the future they would have together. But it was as if the air in the room shifted. Lines in her father's face tightened. The hand that she held stiffened and withdrew from hers.
"Your defender. Jamison?" Her father touched his own scarred face again. "Yes, he tried to find a place for me before. Jamison is the one who tried to kill me."
23
Alone in the dim pre-dawn moonlight of not-yet morning, Kira went down to the dyer's garden that had been so carefully created for her. There, gently patting earth around the moist roots, she planted the woad. "'Gather fresh leaves from first year's growth of woad.'" She repeated the words that Annabella had said. "'And soft rainwater; that makes the blue.'" She carried water from a container in the shed, and soaked the soil around the fragile plants. It would be a long time until the first year's growth. She would not be here to gather those leaves.
When the plants were watered, she sat alone, knees to chin, and rocked herself back and forth as the sun began to rise, a faint pink stain creeping up the eastern rim of the sky. The village was still silent. She tried to put it all together in her mind, to make some sense of it.
But there was no sense, no meaning at all.
Her mother's death: a sudden violent, isolated illness. Such things were rare. Usually illness struck the village and many were taken.
Perhaps her mother had been poisoned?
But why?
Because they wanted Kira.
Why?
So that they could capture her gift: her skill with the threads.
And Thomas? His parents too? And Jo's?
Why?
So that all their gifts would be captive.
Despairing, Kira stared through the early dawn at the garden. The plants glimmered and shifted in the breeze, some of them still in autumn-start bloom. Now, finally, woad had been added to give her the blue she had yearned for. But someone else would harvest the first leaves.
Somewhere nearby, her father slept, gathering strength to return with his newfound daughter to the village where healing people lived in harmony. Together he and Kira would steal away and leave the only world she had ever known. She looked forward to the journey. She would not miss the squalor and noise they would leave behind.
She would long for Matt and his mischief, she thought sadly. And Thomas, so serious and dedicated; she would miss him, too.
And Jo. She smiled at the thought of the little singer who had waved so proudly to the crowd at the Gathering.
Thinking of Jo, Kira remembered something. In the confusion and excitement of her father's arrival, it had disappeared from her mind. Now the awareness and the horror came back, and she gasped.
The muted clanking sound that had puzzled her during the celebration! She could almost hear it again in her mind, a dragging of metal. She had glimpsed its cause at the beginning of the second half of the Song. Then at the conclusion, after the Singer had acknowledged the people's applause, after Jo had scampered happily down from the stage, he moved toward the steps to descend and walk down the aisle. He lifted the robe slightly at the top of the steps, and from her seat at the edge of the stage Kira saw his feet. They were bare and grotesquely misshapen.
His ankles were thickly scarred, more damaged than her father's face. They were caked and scabbed with dried blood. Fresh, bright blood trickled in narrow rivulets across his feet. It all came from the raw, festering skin — infected and dripping — around the metal cuffs with which he was bound. Between the thick ankle cuffs, dragging heavily as he made his way slowly from the stage, was a chain.
He lowered the robe then, and she saw nothing more. Perhaps, she thought, she had imagined it? But watching him as he moved,