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Summary
Chapters 21-23
Chapter 21
Horrified by what she has just seen, Kira prepares to tell Thomas about it as soon as the Gathering is over. But when they get to Kira’s room, Matt is waiting outside the door with news that his large gift is inside. Kira and Thomas enter the room and a three-syllable man wearing a blue shirt is sitting in Kira’s chair. He is blind and has jagged scars across his face, which disturbs Kira because she has never seen a blind person. Matt shows her that they brought a bag full of woad to plant in Kira’s dyeing garden so she can make blue. As Kira and Thomas talk to the man, he reveals that he is familiar with the village and its customs, then says his presence must remain a secret. Kira tells the man her name and asks who he is, but he doesn’t answer right away. When he finally does speak, he pulls a stone pendant matching Katrina’s out of his shirt and informs Kira that he is her father, Christopher.
Chapter 22
Before Matt helps Christopher hide for the night, Christopher tells Kira about his past. In contrast with the story Kira has always known, Christopher says that men attacked him, not beasts. Echoing Annabella, Christopher adds that there are no beasts. Realizing Christopher can’t see her twisted leg, Kira tells him about her disability and he is shocked and impressed that Katrina successfully defied the Council to save her. Christopher continues his story, telling Kira about waking up in the Field of Leaving, his attackers having left him for dead. That night, strangers rescued him, carrying him many days through the woods and nursing him back to health. Since then, Christopher has lived in the community of the people who healed him, a community filled with other people whose villages abandoned them and left them to die. He describes a kinder, gentler village than the one Kira has always known, and says that he plans to bring Kira back with him. Kira starts to explain that she doesn’t need to leave because she has a special role and even has a friend on the Council of Guardians. When she says her defender’s name is Jamison, Christopher’s mood changes. He says Jamison is the man who tried to kill him.
Chapter 23
The final chapter of Gathering Blue begins with Kira watering the newly planted woad plants in her dyer’s garden. She sits and watches the sunset while she pieces together everything she has learned. She comes to the unsettling conclusion that the Council probably poisoned her mother, and Thomas and Jo’s parents as well, to capture their artistic gifts. She reflects that someone else will be harvesting the woad that she has just planted, and of how much she will miss Matt and Jo. Then, suddenly, she remembers what she had seen at the end of the Gathering. It was the Singer’s scarred, bleeding, misshapen, and shackled feet, leaving trails of blood on the stage when he walked. In a sudden burst of clarity, Kira understands the power that she, Thomas, and Jo possess to truly create a new future.
That night, Matt prepares to take Christopher home, leaving Kira behind in the village. She promises to follow when she can, and says that someday their two villages will know each other. As a parting gift, Christopher gives Kira the unraveled blue thread from the shirt he was wearing when he arrived. Kira watches Christopher, Matt, and Branch start off down the path. The blue threads in her hand seem to quiver with life.
Analysis
Over the course of Gathering Blue, Kira has slowly learned that the only way to guarantee the truth of something is to see it for herself, which is why her father’s presence is necessary to disprove the existence of beasts once and for all. Because Christopher was supposedly taken by beasts, his absence has always been inextricably linked in Kira’s mind with the beasts’ existence. Her father is not there, so the beasts must be. As a result, ever since Annabella first inspired Kira to doubt the existence of beasts back in Chapter 11, Kira has wondered not only about the beasts themselves, but also by extension about other possibilities for the fate of her father. Christopher’s appearance in Chapter 21 as Matt’s second gift to Kira answers all her questions in one fell swoop. The fact that Jamison is the one who attacked Christopher also immediately confirms the myth of the beasts as an intentional lie rather than simply misinformation. To control the movements and behavior of the villagers, the Council needed to make them fear life outside the village, just as Annabella told Kira that the growling she heard in the woods was only a person trying to keep her afraid. Now that Kira knows that Christopher has been alive and safe all this time, she no longer needs to fear the unknown beyond the village’s borders. She is free to seek the peace that Christopher tells her is possible.
Kira’s realization that the Council has intentionally disabled the Singer, which she remembers in Chapter 23, carries with it an extra layer of disbelief and bafflement because the rules of the village unequivocally require the disposal of disabled and ill inhabitants. As Kira knows all too well, it is the custom in her village to abandon people with injuries or illnesses that have an impact on their so-called usefulness to the community. That Kira’s mother managed to convince the Council to make an exception for Kira at birth is such an extreme anomaly that it has shaped every aspect of Kira’s life since. As Kira discovers when she sees the Singer’s feet, the Singer is also disabled, his feet misshapen, festering, swollen, and so bloody that he leaves a trail on the stage behind him. But unlike Kira, the Singer was not born with a disability. Instead, the shackles around his ankles have caused him grievous injuries that, if he were not the Singer, would surely lead to his disposal in the Field of Leaving. In addition to the shock at seeing something so grotesque, and the horror at learning of the Singer’s physical captivity, Kira experiences the sudden devastation of realizing once and for all that everything she thought she knew about the world is wrong. The Council has unmercifully injured the Singer in the service of jealously guarding his creativity. Now that Kira is aware of the lies that govern life in the village, she is no longer afraid of working to dismantle them.
The association between the color blue and tranquility, which Kira first introduced in Chapter 12, is essential to answering the questions that Gathering Blue’s final chapters leave open. Chapter 23 ends with Kira’s conviction that she will be able to use her threading to point the future in a better direction, but she gives no details as to how she will do so. It is clear, however, that blue will play a pivotal role, which hints at specifics about the future Kira hopes to create. Kira thinks of blue as the color of calm, and in Chapter 8, Annabella first suggests that blue is also the color of elsewhere. When Matt brings Kira blue in Chapter 20, he confirms that blue, and therefore peace and calm, is accessible outside the confines of the village. As Christopher and Matt set off to return to Christopher’s home at the end of Chapter 23, Kira states that the two villages will know each other someday, which is perhaps the most significant clue about what she plans to weave in the blank space on the Singer’s robe. Now that Kira has blue, she can depict the peaceful future she envisions, a future that will undoubtedly see her village reaching out toward other communities that already embody the gentle tranquility of blue.
