Gathering Blue

As Chapter 13 opens, the group is headed down the hallway, with Thomas in the lead. Thomas turns a corner and jumps back. The group freezes, and they hear a knock, the sound of a door being opened and then Jamison’s voice. Jamison’s voice is mingled with that of a child, who cries briefly and then begins to sing: “Its clear, high voice soared. No words. Just the voice, almost instrumentlike in its clarity. It rose, leveled at a high note, and hovered there for a long moment” (137). The singing stops and the child starts crying again, Jamison responds harshly and leaves, slamming the door behind him. 

As the group stands in the hallway, Matt whispers to Kira that he knows the girl whose voice they heard. She’s from the Fen, and her name is Jo. They decide to go back to Kira’s room, where they talk more about Jo, who was popular in the Fen. Her singing made everyone happy. Matt tells them that Jo’s parents have died: her mother took sick, and her father stabbed himself in the heart while holding vigil over her body in the Field. Kira can’t believe that a father would kill himself and leave his daughter behind, but Matt is more practical, suggesting that maybe he didn’t like his daughter. Matt says he thought she had gone to another family, and Kira agrees that that is normally what happens to orphans. “Unless,” Thomas says, “they sing” (140).

Later that day, after Matt and Branch have left and Kira and Thomas have returned to their work, Jamison visits Kira to check on her progress. He asks about her walk to Annabella’s, and whether it’s difficult for her with her leg. She says it’s not, but mentions that she feels afraid of beasts on the path. Jamison reassures her, and she tells him what Annabella said about there being no beasts. Jamison is upset, his face “a mixture of astonishment and anger” (143). He dismisses Annabella’s claim, saying that “[h]er mind is beginning to wander” (143), which Kira finds less than believable, given how much complex information she is able to convey about the plants and procedures involved in making and using dyes. Kira asks Jamison if he has ever seen any beasts. He answers without hesitation that the “woods are filled with them” (143) and that seeing Kira’s father “taken by beasts […] was a hideous thing” (143).

Jamison prepares to leave, telling Kira again that her work is fine and patting her hand. When she puts her hand into her pocket, seeking comfort from her scrap of cloth, it seems “to withdraw from her touch, almost as if it were trying to warn her of something” (144). And though the rain continues to fall, she thinks she can hear the little girl crying on the floor below hers.

Chapter 14 opens the next morning with Kira waking early to walk to Annabella’s. She passes the weaving shed, and a woman named Marlena calls out to her, telling her that she is missed there and that the children working there now are “[h]orrid lazy!” (146). Matt is there with Branch, hiding from Marlena, whose lunch he stole the day before. Kira asks Marlena about the little girl Jo. Marlena only recalls that Jo sang “[l]ike a bird” (146) and that she had been orphaned and “tooken off” (146–147). Then she tells Kira that it was said that Jo “receive[d] the songs by magic” (147) and that she “had knowledges of things that wasn’t even happened yet” (147).

Kira says goodbye to Marlena and meets Matt further down the path, where he tries to convince her that she shouldn’t go to Annabella’s. Kira asks him why, and he tells her that Annabella has been taken to the Field. She’s dead. Kira doesn’t know what to do and decides to look for Jamison. She asks Matt to tell Thomas what she is doing, and Matt tells her that he saw Jamison with the “draggers” when they “tooken the old dyer to the Field” (150).

Kira looks for Jamison in the Council Edifice, and finds herself on the first floor, in the same spot she stood with Thomas and Matt the day before. She listens and hears nothing and then goes to the door and listens again. She tries the doorknob. It’s locked, so she knocks. Jo whimpers in response, she is scared and crying for her mother. Kira thinks about the children penned in by their mothers at the site of her old cott and thinks that they’re better off than Jo, because they’re not locked in alone. Kira promises to come back and tells her not to tell anyone that she was there. When she returns to her own room, Jamison is there to tell her that Annabella has died.