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Summary
Chapters 9-11
Chapter 9
Back in her quarters, Kira examines the Singer’s robe for any remaining signs of blue, but it has faded nearly to white. She tells Thomas of her day with Annabella, and shares that she is having difficulty remembering everything she learned. Girls aren’t allowed to read and write, so Thomas offers to write down what Kira can recall, saying he can read it to her if she forgets.. The next day, Kira returns to the former site of her cott to gather plants from her mother’s garden for dyeing. Vandara taunts Kira on her way back to the Council Edifice. Soon after, Kira tells Jamison she will need a color garden of her own, and she is surprised to learn that her requests will be fulfilled.
One morning, Thomas visits Kira in her room to ask if she heard the sound of a child crying the previous night, then decides it must have been a dream. He gives her a carved wooden box as a gift, and Kira puts her scrap of cloth in it. Sheepishly, she tells Thomas about how the scrap seems to communicate with her, and he says he has a small piece of wood he carved as a child that does the same for him. Thomas also tells Kira about his own assigned task to re-carve and complete the Singer’s staff. Days pass as Kira works diligently to repair and restore the Singer’s robe in preparation for the annual Gathering. Over dinner one night, Thomas and Kira watch through Kira’s window as the men of the village prepare outside for a hunt. Kira is alarmed to see Matt with the hunters, and her scrap of cloth feels like it is sending her a warning. She convinces Thomas to help her stop Matt from trying to go on the hunt.
Chapter 10
Kira and Thomas make their way through the crowd of jostling men. One man grabs at Kira, but she manages to fight him off with her walking stick. When she and Thomas find Matt, he’s pretending to be older, calling himself the two-syllable name “Mattie,” and has put swamp grass on his chest and under his arms to look like body hair. Amused and exasperated, Kira and Thomas drag Matt and Branch back to the Edifice to force them to take a bath. Afterward, Kira explains to Thomas how her scrap of woven cloth seems able to comfort, warn, or reassure her. To her surprise, he says his special bit of carved wood does just the same.
Chapter 11
Kira arrives at Annabella’s hut, terrified and shaken. She explains to Annabella that she heard a beast following her while on the path through the woods, but Annabella only laughs and continues with their dyeing lessons. Confused, Kira repeatedly tells Annabella how frightened she was on the journey to her hut, hoping for a more compassionate reaction than laughter. In response, Annabella shocks Kira by stating that there are no beasts. When Kira insists that she heard the beast growl as it followed her, Annabella tells her it must have been someone pretending to be a beast so Kira would remain afraid of the woods. Back in the Edifice, Kira asks Thomas if he has ever seen a beast, and he replies that he has not. Trusting the wisdom that comes with Annabella’s four-syllable age, Kira falls asleep wondering how her father could have been taken by beasts if there aren’t any in the woods.
Analysis
The characters in Kira’s world usually convey information to one another through word-of-mouth and oral tradition, but Thomas’s offer to take notes for Kira highlights the problems with this method. Kira struggles to remember what Annabella has told her about which plants can make which colors of dye, and even though she can’t read herself, it’s easy for Thomas to convince her that having a written record will help solidify her newfound knowledge. This suggests one possible reason for the village’s rule against girls learning to read: the all-male Council of Guardians can more easily defend its knowledge, and therefore its power, if half of the population it governs has no way to check the accuracy of information. In addition to the rumors and stories that the villagers pass among themselves to educate and inform each other, the village’s governing body also uses its own system of oral tradition to organize the community. Although the Council itself has access to the written word, it only allows villagers to learn about the Ruin through annual performances of the Ruin Song. Thomas’s note-taking for Kira is a small gesture, but it stands in for a much larger asymmetry of knowledge and power that exerts influence over the whole of society in Gathering Blue.
Like the contrasting stories of the dog Branch and the weaver Camilla in Chapter 5, the color garden in Chapter 9 also reflects Kira’s circumstances back to her, though this time in a positive light. The women of the village trampled Katrina’s garden for dyeing while they were building their pen for tykes, but the plants are still alive, their flowers having managed to bloom. This flourishing parallels Kira’s own survival in a hostile environment. It goes beyond the simple metaphor of survival, too, because the color garden does not have a practical purpose. Rather than healing herbs or nourishing vegetables, the color garden only contains plants used to make dyes, and dyes have no use beyond decoration. As an artist, and a disabled one at that, Kira has repeatedly been told that she herself has no practical use in the village, according to its customs. However, Kira has found ways to survive and even to thrive, just like the plants in her mother’s garden, demonstrating not just the possibility of resilience, but also that resilience is made possible by art.
In Chapter 11, when Annabella tells Kira that “there be no beasts,” she introduces serious doubt into Kira’s understanding of the world for the first time in her life. It is difficult to overstate the influence of beasts on Kira’s life. They are responsible for her father’s death. She was told that her mother narrowly saved her from being left in the Field for beasts to take. Finally, fear of beasts grips the village at large on a daily basis. Kira has never had any reason to doubt that beasts are an ever-present danger lurking just outside the village’s boundaries, but she also trusts in the hierarchy and wisdom that comes with Annabella’s four-syllable name and age. Annabella’s claim that there aren’t any beasts is at direct odds with Kira’s entire worldview, but she can’t reject it out-of-hand because Annabella has knowledge only accessible to the rare villagers who survive to be elderly. Unlike the knowledge of the Council of Guardians or of men and boys who know how to read, however, Annabella’s knowledge has accumulated for her naturally over time, and that gives it a unique power of its own.
