Gathering Blue

Chapter 16 begins that evening, while Kira and Thomas wait for night to fall so they can visit Jo, this time with a key to open her door. Kira watches through Thomas’s window as the work day comes to a close, wondering where Matt is since she can’t see him at the weaving shed and hasn’t seen him all day.

As they prepare to visit Jo, Kira tells Thomas to take his bit of wood. She’ll take her scrap of cloth as well, which she relies on to tell her if there is any danger coming. Thomas’s key works and Kira gently wakes Jo and comforts her while she asks again for her mother. Then Jo tells them that the guardians are making her learn new songs and that it makes her head hurt. They devise a plan for Jo to signal them if she needs help. She should climb to the top of her bureau and knock on the ceiling with her hairbrush. Kira puts Jo back to bed, kissing her forehead, just like her own and Jo’s mother used to do.

Kira and Thomas leave Jo and go back to their own rooms. As she gets ready to go to sleep, Kira thinks about the three of them, how they are all artists and have “some value that she could not comprehend” (170–171). From her bed, she sees the “folded covered shape on top of her worktable: the Singer’s robe” (171), and it brings about the revelation that “although her door was unlocked, she was not really free. Her life was limited to these things and this work” (171). She thinks about how the same is true for Thomas and Jo, and for the first time she cries with the desire to leave the comforts of the Council and go back to a life where she is free to create what she wants.

Chapter 17 begins the next afternoon, when Kira requests that Thomas accompany her to the Fen to look for Matt, whom she hasn’t seen for two days, and to try to find out more about Jo. As they walk past the weaving shed, the women call to Kira, and she asks about Matt, but they haven’t seen him either. Then Kira hears a growl coming from “a cluster of women near the butcher’s” (175). The growler turns out to be Vandara. They pass a group of boys who also haven’t seen Matt in two days. 

As they walk toward the Fen, the landscape changes. They cross a “foul-smelling stream” (177) and pass poisonous oleander to arrive at a community of “small cotts, close together” (177) with “trees thick overhead, and festering with dampness and an odor of ill health” (177). Kira wonders aloud why people have to live like this, and Thomas replies that it’s just how it is. But Kira thinks about the threaded pictures on the Singer’s robe and knows that it hasn’t always been like this. She suggests to Thomas that, since they will be the ones to fill in the blank spaces on the robe and the staff, that perhaps they can make a change. Thomas doesn’t understand what she means, so they walk on.

They convince a woman to tell them where Matt lives by giving her an apple Thomas saved from his lunch. They find Matt’s house, but his mother doesn’t know where he is either. As they turn to leave, Matt’s younger brother comes out to tell them where Matt is, for a price. Kira gives him her hair tie, and he tells them that he went in search of a gift for his friends. Kira tells him that they are the friends Matt was talking about, and he tells her that Matt went to find her “some blue!” (184).

As they walk home, Kira and Thomas talk about where Matt could have gone and whether he was taken by the Council as well. But Thomas observes that Matt has no skills and would therefore be of no worth to the Council. Kira’s response is to remind Thomas of Matt’s ability to make them smile.