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Fear was always a part of life for the people. Because of fear, they made shelter and found food and grew things. For the same reason, weapons were stored, waiting. There was fear of cold, of sickness and hunger. There was fear of beasts.
This quotation comes early in Gathering Blue, in Chapter 1 before Kira has even left the side of her mother’s body in the Field of Leaving. In it, Kira situates her own fear in the wider context of the fear that structures her world and the lives of the people around her. Kira credits every aspect of village life to fear, from generative acts like building and growing, to the violence of weapons and the danger of beasts, indicating the central role that fear will play throughout the rest of the narrative. Just as fear frames and defines the contours of Kira’s world, it also frames Gathering Blue, immediately establishing itself as the predominant motivating force behind its characters’ actions. This quote also accomplishes quite a bit of worldbuilding in a very small space, alerting the reader to the precarity of life as Kira knows it, and the dire struggles for survival that foreground the society in which she lives. And yet, over the course of the novel, Kira will find reasons beyond fear for her own actions, differentiating herself from the other villagers and leading her community in a new, better direction.
Now, without instruction or practice, without hesitancy, her fingers felt the way to twist and weave and stitch the special threads together to create designs rich and explosive with color. She did not understand how the knowledge had come to her. But it was there, in her fingertips, and now they trembled slightly with eagerness to start
In this quote from the end of Chapter 2, while she is sitting near the remains of her cott anticipating her trial the next morning, Kira allows herself to feel some excitement about the creativity that has recently taken hold of her. Though she doesn’t know the source of her rapidly growing artistic talent, she looks forward to the possibility of continuing to explore it, a plan in stark contrast with her other, much more utilitarian concerns. Even as Kira thinks about her ability to create explosively colorful designs, she is unsure of where she will live the following day, or even if she will be permitted to live at all. That she ends her night by comforting herself with the possibility of making more art in the future conveys the vital importance of creativity beyond simply “diversion,” as Kira had described her threadings in Chapter 1. This is an early indicator of Kira’s eventual revelation that creativity is no less essential to life than the bare necessities of survival, and of the outsized role art will play in her plan for healing the village.
A sudden vision slid into Kira’s mind. The robe. The robe told how it had always been; and what Thomas had said was not true. There had been times—oh, such long ago times—when people’s lives had been golden and green. Why could there not be such times again?
Though Kira has already noticed the cycles of ruin and regrowth that repeat in the story embroidered on the Singer’s robe, this moment in Chapter 17 is when she first links those cycles explicitly to her own place in history. As Kira’s foil, Thomas represents the artist who can’t see beyond the status quo—possibly because he simply does not know any other way of life, and possibly because he hasn’t ever thought to question what he does know. Kira’s realization that there could be “golden and green” times again only comes in response to Thomas’s incorrect statement that it had always been just as it is. This shows that Kira has grown beyond the need to take her society’s common knowledge at face value, and that she can synthesize her dissent into concrete new observations. Finally, this quote points to Kira’s revelation that stories are more than abstractions and can be applied to the present and even the future. She has almost reached the conclusion that will allow her to resolve Gathering Blue’s central conflict and take control of her village’s future.
The three of them—the new little Singer who would one day take the chained Singer’s place; Thomas the Carver, who with his meticulous tools wrote the history of the world; and she herself, the one who colored that history—they were the artists who could create the future.
This quote from Chapter 23 is the climax of Gathering Blue, the turning point when Kira realizes what she needs to do to free the village from fear and thereby resolve the novel’s conflict. In one pivotal moment, she puts together everything she has learned over the course of her journey about the mysterious power of art and creativity, the tangible influence that storytelling can wield, and the danger of doing nothing in the face of injustice and stagnation. Above all, Kira finally understands how she can transform her discoveries into concrete movement forward, and what her responsibility is as an artist with the ability to shape the future—either as the Council of Guardians wants it to be, or as she believes it should be. Gathering Blue ends before Kira begins to weave her vision of the future into the Singer’s robe because her journey is already complete. All of Gathering Blue’s loose ends are tied up as soon as Kira determines to use her art in the service of liberating her community and, hopefully, leading humanity out of ruin and into its next era of growth and rebirth.
