Gathering Blue

Chapter 7 opens with breakfast the next morning, which is “a treat” (75) for Kira, including an egg, bread, and “warm cereal swimming in cream” (75). Still confused about how to use the bathroom facilities, she decides to dress and go down to the stream to do her business. On her way out, she meets Thomas for the first time. He shows her his room, which is a mirror image of her own, but with carving supplies and a window that looks out onto the town square. Thomas tells her that the people who bring her food are “tenders” and that the guardians will be checking on her and her work every day. He then tells her how he came to live at the Council Edifice as a carver: he was very young when his parents were both killed by lightning. The guardians knew of his talent for carving and took him in. 

When the bell rings, Kira expresses her concern about where she should be, as she is used to using the bells as a guide for when she should be at work. Thomas tells her that there “are no real rules” and that she can “do whatever [she] want[s]” so long as she gets her work done. He is on his way to visit his aunt and new cousin, taking a toy he has carved as a gift for the new child. He then asks a tender to show Kira how to use the bathroom facilities and promises to meet Kira for lunch.

Later, after Kira and Thomas eat lunch together, Jamison comes to see her.  He checks to make sure she is comfortable and provided for and they talk about her work on the Singer’s robe. She is tasked with both repairing and restoring it, and she will be the one to embroider the future into the robe. When they look at her supplies together, Kira realizes that none of the thread is dyed and that she is expected to make her own colors. Jamison tells her that she must go to Annabella’s home, in the woods, and learn about the dyes—that she has until “autumn-start […] several months away” (84) to get the robe ready for the next presentation of the Ruin Song. Kira notices a new “edge, an urgency, to his voice that had not been there before” (75). 

Chapter 8 opens the next day, when Matt convinces Kira that he and Branch should accompany her to Annabella’s house in the woods for protection, or in case she gets lost. Annabella’s is an hour’s walk away down a path in the woods that Jamison has assured her is safe. On the walk, Matt tells her about his parents—that his father is gone, he doesn’t know where, and that his mother hits him, as most parents do in the Fen. Kira thanks him for saving her mother’s pendant, noting that it was a gift from her father to her mother. Matt does not understand the word “gift,” laughing that they don’t have gifts in the Fen.

When they arrive at Annabella’s, she is hanging dyed threads to dry, which Matt describes as having “her crookedy hands full of rainbow” (89). Annabella greets Kira with the remark that she is like her mother. Kira is surprised that Annabella already knows who she is, that Katrina has died, and that Kira is to repair and restore the Singer’s robe. Annabella promises to send home dyed thread with her so that she can get started on repairing the robe, and then begins instructing her on which plants can be used to produce which colors. She tells Kira that she must come every day to learn “all the plants, all the colors” (93) and “[w]hen to sadden with the iron pot. How to bloom the colors. How to bleed” (93). She also shows her a “large kettle of dark water, too huge for cooking food” (94) full of “old piss”—the “mordant” (94) used to bring “the hue to life and [set] it firm” (94). Before they leave for the day, Annabella quizzes Kira on what she has learned, and then Kira asks about making blue dye. Annabella shakes her head: “Others do, but they be far away” (96), she says. Then she sends them on their way, muttering to herself that she “ne’er could make it” (96) but that “some have blue yonder” (96).

Chapter 9 opens that evening, after Kira has returned from Annabella’s. She is examining the Singer’s Robe, which “contained only a few tiny spots of ancient blue, faded almost to white” (97). Thomas arrives, and they talk about her day. He offers to write down the names of the plants for her, to help her remember; even though she cannot read, he can read them to her. She agrees, even though she is worried about doing something forbidden to girls. When she sees the word “hollyhock,” she turns away “so that she would not learn it” (99), but is secretly pleased to “see how the pen formed the shapes and the shapes told a story of a name” (99).

The next morning, Kira goes back to her mother’s garden to look for the plants Katrina used for dying. She sees that their old vegetable garden has been “completely stripped” (100) but that the flower garden is still intact, if trampled. She gathers some plants she can dry and use for dyes. On her return, she passes Vandara who taunts her about her new life.

A few days go by, and one morning Thomas comes in to ask her if she heard anything the night before—he thought he heard a child crying. She did not, so he shrugs it off and they talk about his work on the Singer’s staff, which the Singer uses “to find his place, to remind him of the sections in the Song” (103). Like the robe, there is a blank space on the staff that Thomas will eventually have to carve with the scenes of the future. Then Thomas gives Kira a present, a “small box with a tight fitting lid, its top and sides intricately carved in the pattern of the plants she was beginning to learn and know” (103). She puts her scrap of cloth in the box, and they talk about how it “speaks to” (104) Kira and how it seems to her “almost to have life” (104). Thomas says that he keeps a similar piece of carving he made when he was young, and that sometimes he feels the knowledge in his fingers that he used to have then. Kira is alarmed to learn that her finger-knowledge might go away but says nothing to Thomas.

That afternoon, she begins work on the robe. “The work was painstakingly slow” (107), but it goes well. After she finishes, her fingers aching, she goes to see Thomas. Through his window, they see men preparing for a hunt. Kira watches Matt slip in amid the chaotic preparations and steal a spear. Worried that he will hurt himself, and made even more anxious when the scrap of cloth in her pocket emits a sense of “tension, danger, and warning” (110), she convinces Thomas to help her stop him.

Chapter 10 opens with Kira and Matt pushing through the crowd of boasting, brutish men to find Matt. One man grabs Kira as “a trophy” (112), but she pushes him off with her walking stick. When they find Matt, he has swamp grass stuck to his armpits and chest, pretending to have a “manly pelt” (113). They take his spear away and haul him and Branch back to the Council Edifice, where Thomas bathes them both. Once Matt is clean, after a long and vigorously opposed scrubbing in Thomas’s bathtub, they all sit down to eat together. After dinner, Matt grabs for Kira’s necklace. She refuses to give it to him, but since he wants a “gift,” she gives him a bar of soap to take home with him.

After Matt leaves, Kira tries to explain to Thomas how her scrap of embroidered cloth speaks to her, saying that it “creates a feeling” in her hand when she holds it. Thomas shows her the bit of wood he carved as a child, noting that it seemed to “carve itself” (117), just like Kira’s scrap of cloth seemed to embroider itself. The wood speaks to Thomas like the cloth speaks to Kira.

Chapter 11 opens with Kira arriving, trembling, at Annabella’s house. Matt and Branch have not accompanied her on this trip, and she was frightened by growling she heard in the bushes beside the path to Annabella’s. She is convinced that a “beast” is stalking her, but Annabella laughs at her fears and continues to instruct her on how to make dyes. They go inside for calming tea and to test Kira on her recognition of colors and their plant sources, while Kira continues to insist that she was stalked by a beast. Annabella laughs again, telling her, “There be no beasts” (122), and that anything growling at Kira from the bushes must “be human, playing at beast” (123). When Kira returns home, the woods are silent.

At dinner, Kira tells Thomas what Annabella said about there being no beasts. Neither has ever seen a beast, and they cannot think of anyone they know who has. They are both exhausted from the painstaking work they do all day, so Kira returns to her room, takes a bath, and gets into bed, thinking about the beast that supposedly killed her father. If there are no beasts, what happened to him, she wonders. Her scrap of cloth seems to tell her something about her father as she falls asleep, but she does not recall it in the morning.