payment page
Summary
Chapters 1-2
Chapter 1
Kira, the protagonist of Gathering Blue, sits in the Field of Leaving with the dead body of her mother, Katrina. It’s been four days since Katrina’s death from an unnamed illness, and according to custom, Kira can now return to the village. Kira knows that the other villagers have already burned her cott, the home where she lived with her mother. She considers rebuilding the cott herself, but it will be difficult because she was born with a painfully twisted leg. Kira remembers when her mother told her the story of her birth and how the village guardians came to take her away because of her leg, which they described as flawed. It was the custom for disabled infants to be left to die in the Field of Leaving, but Katrina had fought to keep Kira and had succeeded. Katrina also told Kira about her father, Christopher, who died several months before Kira’s birth, taken by beasts while out on a hunt.
Kira makes her way back toward the village with the help of her walking stick. It isn’t long before she encounters her friend Matt, a “tyke” around eight or nine years old. His name is one syllable, which means that he is very young. Matt informs Kira that her cott has been burned, as Kira suspected. Kira offers to tell Matt stories in exchange for his help rebuilding. He tells Kira that while she was away, he overheard a group of women in the village planning to take the space where her cott formerly stood and send her to the Field of Leaving to die. He says the leader of the group is a woman named Vandara.
Chapter 2
Kira decides to pretend she doesn’t know anything about what Matt just told her. When she arrives at the space where her cott used to be, she is just in time to catch a woman stealing carrots from her garden. Kira eats some of the remaining vegetables herself, recalling how important vegetables were to her and her mother without a man in the family to go on hunts.
Kira notices a stack of stripped saplings nearby. When she moves to pick one up, Vandara appears. Vandara is a tall, strong woman with a distinctive scar running from her chin to her shoulder, which Kira has heard came from a battle with a forest creature.
Kira tells Vandara she has returned to rebuild her cott, but Vandara claims to own the space now. Several more women join Vandara to tell Kira they will use the area to build a pen for their tykes. The confrontation escalates when Kira resists. Vandara picks up a rock to threaten Kira, and the other women follow her lead. Standing as tall as she can, Kira reminds the women that villagers must take any potentially fatal conflict to the Council of Guardians. Otherwise, the person who causes a death will be put to death in return. Finally, Vandara drops her rock and agrees to be Kira’s accuser in front of the Council. After the women leave, Kira stays the night in the location of her former home. She plans to build a new threading frame if she is allowed to stay. Recently, she reflects, her threading skills have drastically improved, thanks to a burst of creativity and knowledge that she can’t explain.
Analysis
Rather than reveal everything about Gathering Blue’s setting up front, Chapters 1 and 2 establish the strangeness of Kira’s unnamed village using nothing but a series of tantalizing clues. For example, Kira’s use of the words “cott,” “tyke,” and “hubby,” as well as the convention of adding a syllable to a person’s name as they age, are both contextual indicators that Gathering Blue takes place in an unfamiliar world. Though neither of these examples is particularly essential to the plot in and of itself, they both subtly lay a foundation for more dramatic worldbuilding, such as future descriptions of the many customs and rituals that govern the society in which Kira lives. Those rituals may be extreme and in some cases disturbing, but they are still believable, in part because of smaller, less consequential quirks that give the world of the novel color, personality, and a sense of unfamiliarity.
In its opening pages, Gathering Blue uses Kira’s physical location in the Field of Leaving to accentuate and deepen her characterization as an outsider. The society that Gathering Blue describes is one in which anything that prevents a person from slotting into their prescribed role is considered highly undesirable. In fact, the villagers consider it merciful to send weak people or those with disabilities or illness into the Field to die, rather than allow them to suffer the pain of being unable to work as expected. In this exaggeratedly pragmatic world that prioritizes a narrow definition of usefulness and strength above all else, the physically disabled Kira is an oddity. Her misshapen leg has defined her life since birth, largely because of the alienation she experiences within her community as a result of it. The constant presence of Kira’s mother meant that she was never truly alone, despite her position as an outcast. Now, however, Kira is both alienated and alone for the first time in her life, a status that the distant, desolate, and even foul-smelling Field of Leaving echoes and reinforces. It is only appropriate that as a marginalized individual, Kira begin her story on the literal margins of her village.
In a village with such starkly utilitarian values, the role of creativity and the arts is left an open question in Gathering Blue’s early chapters, just as Kira’s own future is in question. As Kira walks down the path from the Field of Leaving into her village, nothing she observes has any purpose beyond meeting the barest of necessities. She even considers the games children play together as being nothing more than preparation for adult life. And yet, despite describing her own embroidery as nothing more than a diversion, Kira’s natural talent for weaving and the joy that it brings her is never far from her mind. Kira’s affinity for art is yet another quality that sets her apart from the community. Rather than having a desirable skillset that she knows will guarantee work and therefore a stable position in the village, she can only hope that her art will be judged valuable enough to allow her to make a living.
To survive in a hostile world that rejects her, Kira has had to learn to turn weakness into strength, and that is what enables her to convince Vandara and the other women not to kill her when she faces them in Chapter 2. Kira is well aware that fear is the dominant force that shapes the contours of her own life and the lives of everyone in her community. Among other things, the villagers fear beasts, disease, hunger, and even each other, and those fears drive their actions. Kira’s own fears of physical violence and losing her home drive her to think quickly of ways to save herself, and when she succeeds, it is because she uses the other women’s fear to her advantage. They are just as afraid of dying as Kira is, so when she invokes the rule about village conflicts that may result in a death, the women hear it as a veiled threat and drop their weapons. In the process, Kira has also made the community’s strict, often cruel rules work in her favor. By the time Kira confronts Vandara and the other women, it has already been established that customs and rituals define how Gathering Blue’s society operates, from Kira’s prescribed period of sitting with her mother’s body, to the practice of leaving disabled infants to die. It adds another layer of triumph to Kira’s success that when she does get Vandara to back down, it is because she has quoted from the same set of rules so often used against her.
