Thought I'd repost this, which was lost when the blog was scrambled. It continues directly from the first page of Plain Kate.
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There were three kittens: a calico, a tabby, and a wee white tom. Their mother never came. The next morning Plain Kate traded the mending of a milk stool for a squirt of milk, and the promise of more each morning. She watered the milk and let the kittens suck on the twisted end of a rag. She gave them the leather and felt pouch meant for her second-best awls. She kept them under her smock in the day, and beside her at night in the warm, closed darkness of the drawer. Day by day, their dark eyes opened and their ears untucked and their voices grew louder.
The calico grew wild and fearless and went to live on the river docks. The tabby grew to a crafty and fat, and went to live on mice and milk with the cow-herd girl. The wee white tom grew long and narrow, and stayed with Plain Kate. He was a dandy with one ear cocked, a gleam on his claws and a glint in his eye. He sauntered through the market square elegant and tattered, admired and cursed--a highway man, a gentleman thief. His name was Taggle, for the three kittens had been Raggle, Taggle, and Bone.
Plain Kate grew, too: skinnier, stronger, but not much taller. The years were thin. The Guild man had most of the work, but Kate was the better carver. She made simple things for the poor, who paid her in potatoes, and bridal headdresses and door seals for the rich, who paid her in thin coins stamped with the eye of the king. She carved when there was light. When there was no light she fished, and the trout rose to her wooden dragonflies. Taggle brought her mice and rats, birds and bats. She learned to get the meat from the smallest bone. She got by.
The kinder folk of the market square gave her what they could not sell: bruised apples, carrots with strange legs. The crueler gave her curses. The frightened and some of the old thought she was a witch, and gave her odd looks and offerings of olives and spice. She was lonely, though she didn't know it. Every night Taggle came to wrap himself around her as she slept in the trundle drawer.
And so it went for cold days and hot, wet days and dusty, and long, hungry winters.
Then one summer day change and magic came loping and waltzing into her life, wearing a dozen colors, and in that moment none of them seemed dark.
