payment page
Kira, a young woman with a natural talent for weaving, has just lost her mother, Katrina, to an illness. For the past four days, Kira has been sitting with her mother’s body in the Field of Leaving, where the villagers take their dead, sick, and disabled for disposal. Kira is apprehensive about her return to the village. Her father, Christopher, was taken by beasts before her birth, and now that her mother is also gone, Kira is alone. She is also an exception. She was born with a twisted leg that makes it painful and difficult for her to walk, but her mother successfully fought to keep her, going against village rules. Kira worries about how the other villagers will treat her without her mother’s support. On her way back into the village, Kira encounters Matt, her friend from the dismal Fen region, whose one-syllable name indicates that he is still a young tyke. Matt tells Kira that Vandara, a strong and aggressive woman in the village, is planning to repurpose the land where Kira’s cott once stood into a pen for tykes.
When Vandara confronts Kira and tries to cast her out of the village, Kira refuses to hand over her space, and they take their case to the Council of Guardians. With the calm and reassuring Jamison as Kira’s Council-appointed defender, the twelve guardians rule that Kira’s new role in the village will be to repair, restore, and complete the robe that the Singer wears while performing the Ruin Song at each annual Gathering. Matt helps Kira move into her luxurious quarters in the Council Edifice, and Kira begins acclimating to her new life. Thomas the Carver, a boy with exceptional woodcarving skills, lives across the hall from Kira and they become friends. Kira already knows how to weave thanks to a combination of her mother’s lessons and her own innate creativity, but she needs to learn how to dye threads as well. Thus, Jamison introduces her to Annabella, an elderly dyer who lives deep in the woods. Annabella teaches Kira how to make various shades of red, yellow, brown, and green, but she can’t make blue. She says there are people who have woad, the plant from which the color blue is derived, but they live outside the village.
As the days go by, Kira continues her lessons in the woods with Annabella and her work repairing the robe. She discovers all she has in common with Thomas, from the deaths of their parents to the small works of their art that they treat like talismans. At one point, Thomas confides that he had heard the sound of a child crying the night before, but they decide it must have been a dream. On her way to Annabella’s hut soon after, Kira is certain that a beast pursued her through the woods. Not only does Annabella assure her that the woods are safe, but she says there aren’t any beasts whatsoever. For the first time in Kira’s life, she wonders what could have happened to her father if he wasn’t taken by beasts. Then Thomas tells Kira that he heard crying again, so Kira, Thomas, and Matt set out one night to explore the floor below them in the Edifice. The sound turns out to be coming from a child in the room below Thomas’s. Upon hearing her voice, Matt remembers her from the Fen and tells Kira that she is Jo, an orphaned tyke who can sing.
The next time Jamison comes to check on Kira’s work, she asks him if he has ever seen a beast. He reminds her that he was on the hunt with Christopher when beasts took him. When Kira tells him that Annabella said there were no beasts, he is shocked and angry. The next morning, Matt tells Kira that Annabella is dead and that Jamison was with the draggers who took her to the Field of Leaving. Kira visits Jo in her room at night, first talking to her through the keyhole and eventually using a wooden key that Thomas had carved when he was younger to unlock the door. In the meantime, Matt has been missing for a few days, so Kira and Thomas visit the Fen and learn that Matt, who has an abusive mother, is on a journey to find a gift for them. Back in the Edifice, Jamison tells Kira that she will need to begin filling in the blank space on the Singer’s robe with scenes of the future as soon as this year’s Gathering ends. Kira is overwhelmed to learn that such difficult work will begin so soon.
The village prepares for the Gathering, and when it is finally time for the performance of the Ruin Song, Kira, Thomas, and Jo are given seats of honor at the front of the great hall. Matt sneaks in during the performance carrying a scrap of blue cloth, a present for Kira. During the Gathering’s intermission, Matt explains that he walked in the direction Annabella had pointed into the woods, traveling for several days until he reached another village where many people with disabilities like Kira’s lived quietly and peacefully. As the Gathering comes to a close, Kira sees something that horrifies her, and prepares to tell Thomas. However, she forgets all about it when she sees the second part of Matt’s present, a sack of woad plants and a blind man wearing a blue shirt. The man, Christopher, is Kira’s father. He tells her that Jamison, not beasts, attacked him and that she should join him in his village.
At first Kira is inclined to follow Christopher, but then she remembers what she saw on the stage as the Gathering ended. The Singer’s feet were misshapen, bleeding, and covered in festering wounds from being shackled together. Kira realizes she can’t leave Jo behind to suffer the same fate, and that instead she must stay in the village and weave a better future into the Singer’s robe. She will use blue from the woad she planted, as well as the handful of blue thread Christopher leaves her after unraveling his shirt. As Matt and Christopher prepare to go back to the other village, Kira promises that someday their villages will meet.
