Gathering Blue

It’s the day after Kira learned of Annabella’s death. She is standing in her quarters with Thomas, looking out her window at the workers who are building a dyeing-place for her. The workers have moved many of the plants and pots in Annabella’s cottage to the Edifice. Kira tells Thomas that she’s afraid she won’t be able to remember how to weave without Annabella’s help, but Thomas assures her that she will.

Kira thinks about her conversation with Jamison yesterday. Jamison told her that Annabella had died peacefully in her sleep; she may have died because she’d completed Kira’s education. Since she died without any sickness, Jamison says, there’s no need to burn her cott. Kira agrees, but tells Jamison that she’ll need to watch her spirit leave her body for the next four days. Jamison refuses to allow this, since the Gathering is approaching quickly. As Kira thinks about all of this, she wonders who found Annabella dead—how did they know to look in her cottage in the first place?

As Kira and Thomas stare down from the window, Kira tells Thomas that she needs to tell him something. Thomas takes a moment before he looks away from the sights of construction below—Kira thinks that this is typical of boys. Kira tells Thomas that she found the door to Jo’s room yesterday, and discovered that it was locked. This doesn’t surprise Thomas. When he was brought to the Edifice as a one-syllable tyke, he was locked in his room, too. When Kira suggests that he was being held captive, Thomas says that he thinks he was locked in his room for his own safety. Kira tells Thomas that Jo was crying for her mother. Again, Thomas doesn’t find this unusual—when he was brought to the Edifice, it took him a long time to accept that his parents were dead.

Thomas realizes that the three of them—Kira, Thomas, and Jo—are “artists.” Thomas has seen this word in books. As he understands it, it means someone who creates beauty. Kira points out that all three “artists” are orphans. She also tells Thomas about Marlena, who remembers that Jo’ had a mysterious “knowledge” of the future. She points out that she and Thomas have similar forms of “knowledge”: Kira’s cloth seems to speak to her, and Thomas’s carving speaks to him. Perhaps this is a special kind of magic knowledge, Kira suggests, that all artists have.

Thomas doesn’t know what to make of Kira’s theory of artistic knowledge. He shrugs and tells her that it doesn’t matter, since both he and Kira have good lives: food, work, etc. Kira is unwilling to forget about Jo, and tells Thomas that she plans to help Jo. At first, Thomas tells Kira that the guardians won’t like it if she helps Jo, but then he offers to help her by providing her with a key he carved. The key can open any lock in the Edifice, he tells her. Thomas agrees to come with Kira and help Jo that night.