by J. V. Jones
“You two. Up. Now.”
Effie was immediately awake. Tull Buckler stood above the bed. Her skirt was hiked up and he was looking at her bare legs.
Effie scrambled to her feet. She and Chedd were supposed to be on pump duty. How long had they been asleep?
Chedd didn’t move so Buckler grabbed his shoulder and shook it. “I said up.”
A queer noise, like the sound of air escaping from a waterskin, came from Chedd’s mouth. Buckler went to grab him again.
“You leave him alone,” Effie screamed, thrusting herself between Chedd and Buckler. “He isn’t well.”
Buckler’s brown-black eyes appraised her. With no effort at all, he pushed her out of the way. “Up,” he said to Chedd.
Chedd moaned.
“He’s sick.” Effie put herself right back in the same place. “His cut got infected.”
Buckler pushed her away again. This time he touched Chedd’s neck. Swearing softly to himself, he checked Chedd’s forehead and temples. After that he just stood and breathed for a moment and Effie felt a bit sorry for him.
“Stay here,” he told her. “I’ll be back with the healer.”
Effie watched him leave and then got back on the bed with Chedd, spooning against his back. He was burning up. “Chedd,” she said in a soft voice she hadn’t used on anyone else except the Shankshounds. “Where’s my Chedd?”
Chedd didn’t reply but he moved a bit.
“There you go, there you go,” she told him.
His shirt and tunic were soaked and as she pressed against him she could feel the front of her dress getting wet. Her teeth started chattering, though she wasn’t cold, not a bit. “Chedd,” she said into the soft skin and baby hair at the back of his neck. “Please don’t be sick.”
Crazily, improbably she fell asleep. The next thing she knew hands were upon her, peeling her like an apple skin from Chedd. She was placed on her feet and so she stood. She was surprised at the effort it took to do this.
Three people had entered the room: Buckler, Rufus Rime, and the woman who must be the healer. She was old, which seemed a good thing, with striking white hair and an austerely beautiful face. As the two men took up position by the wall, she examined Chedd. First she laid a hand on his forehead, then she used both thumbs to test for something at the points where Chedd’s neck connected to his jaw. Next she stripped back his shirt and tunic and put her ear against his chest. The last thing she did was probe the skin around Chedd’s chin wound, pressing lightly to test for give. During all this her expression remained the same, impassive. Effie took this a good sign. With Laida Moon, Blackhail’s healer, you knew straightaway if you were a goner.
When she was finished with Chedd, the healer turned her attention on Effie. “Do you have any open wounds?” she asked in a voice that could only be described as queenly.
Effie shook her head.
“May I?”
The meaning of this question failed Effie. Her lips flapped.
“May I examine you?”
The flapping lips managed a “yes” and Effie found herself in receipt of a near identical examination to Chedd’s. When the bit where the body was listened to came around, the healer turned Effie’s back to the room before baring Effie’s chest. It tickled. The healer smelled of water locust and mint. Effie thought of the jokes she could share with Chedd about receiving an earful.
Finished, the healer said to Effie, “You are well. You can leave.”
Effie glanced at Chedd. His body was jerking slightly as he breathed. “I don’t want to leave.”
“I’m not giving you a choice.” The healer made eye contact with Tull Buckler, who immediately started toward Effie.
Effie backed against the door. “I’m going.” She opened the door and stepped into the hallway. Three pairs of eyes watched her. Buckler rested a knuckle-ringed hand on his knife. Effie looked past him to Chedd. “But I’m coming back.”
She slammed the door before anyone could say anything. She was breathing hard and couldn’t think.
“I should have been called sooner.”
The healer’s queenly voice passed through the cane-and-alder door, muffled but still audible. Effie froze. She heard footsteps and then rustling. Rufus Rime said something but she couldn’t make it out. Suddenly the door swung open with force.
Effie ran. Buckler pounded after her, but fell back once she reached the top of the stairs and began descending. He probably figured he’d scared her enough. Effie kept running, taking the stairs two at a time. She dashed past the Flood Door and down more stairs. Her brain still wasn’t working and she didn’t know where to go. If she’d been at Blackhail it would have been easy: she would have gone to the dog cote and holed up with the Shankshounds. Old Scratch wouldn’t have been there, because Old Scratch was dead, but the others would have come and jumped on her, piling on her legs, chest and lap until she was squashed by seventeen stone of dog.
Unable to decide what to do, Effie went outside. She had a bad feeling in her chest next to the place where her lore used to sit, and she didn’t want to think why. Old Scratch, Clewis Reed, Druss Ganlow, Da, Raif, Drey: people and dogs she was close to ended up gone or dead.
The sun was setting over the marsh and the Stillwater was steaming. A luntwoman was lighting torches along the landing and fishermen and marshmen were tying up boats. One man was bringing a crop of bulrush heads ashore; Effie didn’t know why. She needed to be alone but didn’t want to take out a boat so she walked around the exterior of the roundhouse, moving clockwise from south to north. Some of the planks on this side were soft and rotting. Others had gone completely, lost to the lake. Effie watched her feet. The island the roundhouse was built on sloped sharply here and the water looked deep.
One of the benefits of walking to the west of the roundhouse was the sunset. It was orange and green and you could feel it on your face. Effie spotted a kingfisher diving into the water. It emerged a few seconds later in a different place, but she couldn’t make out whether or not it had caught a fish so she turned to consult with Chedd.
You could really get used to someone.
Effie jumped onto a lower platform that abutted the Grayhouse’s northern wall. Fewer boats were tied up here and no lanterns had been lit. Effie thought she was alone until she spied a movement by the clinker wall. Someone was hunkered down against the base of the roundhouse, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet. As Effie drew closer she was saw it was a little girl and as she drew closer still she recognized the child’s red hair and freckles. It was the girl she and Chedd had wanted to speak to all those nights ago after pump duty. They’d been so busy since then they had clean forgotten she existed.
The girl watched Effie approach. She was about six or seven, small for her age and thin. Her thick copper-colored hair looked more substantial than she did.
“Aren’t you cold?” Effie asked, coming to a halt a few feet away from her.
The girl was wearing a brown wool dress without sleeves. A wisp of a shawl was the only thing close to covering her bare arms. She shook her head.
Effie wondered why she and Chedd hadn’t seen the girl in so long. She used to be out every day on the front landing. “Mind if I sit?”
The girl made a little shrugging motion with her mouth. Effie took it as a yes and sat. “My name’s Effie, Effie Sevrance. What’s yours?”
The girl stared ahead. She was silent for a long time. “Flora.”
“Like the Dhoone queen.”
“No, like my mother.”
There was no reply to that. Effie stared ahead for a bit, thinking. The stars were coming out; gas venting from the marsh made them ripple. “Do you put your cages out here now? I never see you at the front.”
“No.” There was something missing from the girl’s eyes. It took Effie a while to figure out what it was: focus. She was looking so far in the distance she wasn’t seeing anything.
Effie shivered. For some reason she thought of the pike. “
What happened to your brother? I heard you crying for him once.” She hoped she didn’t already know the answer, but she did.
“He’s dead.”
“Did the marsh kill him?”
This questioned appeared to interest the girl. Her breathing pattern changed, speeded up. “They never found his body.”
Effie didn’t like the sound of this one bit. “Perhaps he’ll come back.”
The girl puffed a hard pellet of air through her nostrils, and Effie suddenly felt as if she were the younger one here.
“My friend Chedd’s sick,” she blurted out. “I need to lift the curse.”
For some reason this brought down the girl’s breathing. Some of the tension she’d been holding in her bent knees relaxed. “There is no curse.”
“Yes there is. Gray’s the Cursed Clan, everyone knows that. People are dropping like flies.”
“It’s the marsh. Makes people sick.”
“That’s what Rufus Rime said, but he’s just dodgy.” Even as she spoke Effie knew she couldn’t say the same thing about Flora. The girl was too far gone for dodgy. She was so pale you could already anticipate her ghost. “Is that how your brother died?”
Flora did not answer this question and Effie sensed she was losing her. The girl’s focus was spooling further and further into the distance.
The only strategy Effie could come up with was to raise her voice. “There’s some big problem here. What is it?”
The girl blinked. The spooling paused. “Magic to find it. Magic to block it.”
Effie watched as Flora departed. She didn’t stand, didn’t move a muscle, but she left.
A sense of solidarity made Effie sit for a few minutes before departing. Get up straightaway and it would feel like desertion. So the nine-year-old and the six-year-old sat and looked at the swamp for a while.
It was full dark as Effie made her way along the landings. Water lapping against the pilings was the only sound in the night. Effie hurried to the Salamander Door. The marsh was a place where unspeakable things happened and she no longer wanted to be out here. Reaching the door, she discovered it closed and pounded hard on the wood.
“Let me in!”
The warriors who opened the door were amused by her fear. “We pulled a live one from the water,” the older one quipped.
Laughter followed Effie up the stairs.
She had meant to go to the kitchen, find someone and tell them about Flora so that the girl could be fetched inside, but Effie forgot all about Flora as she raced through the house. She desperately, desperately needed to see Chedd.
Her heart quivered when she spotted the spearman posted at her door. Running toward him, she cried, “Is he all right?”
The spearman barred the door. “No one enters. Healer’s orders.”
Effie stared at him wildly. “Is he all right?”
“Sorry, love. I don’t know.”
Effie’s knees gave way as she fainted.
CHAPTER 25
Target Practice
“IT’S THE HEART,” Chella Gloyal said, raising the tip of Raina’s right elbow. “All archery targets are the heart. Release.”
Raina released as she had been instructed, lifting her three middle fingers from the string. Air cracked against her ear as the arrow exploded from the plate. The string ricocheted forward, thrashing her left wrist. Raina winced. A C-shaped line of blood instantly appeared on her skin and she looked at it with a kind of puzzled wonder. She’d had no idea archery was so violent.
“Here. You can put this on now.” Chella took the bow from Raina and handed her a three-inch-wide strap of leather, a wrist guard.
Raina wiped the blood on her sleeve and began the awkward struggle of fastening the guard against her wrist. Chella watched. Raina’s fingers felt big and her wrist was smarting. A series of scars, at different stages of healing, stretched from her wrist to her lower arm.
“They’re like widow’s weals,” she murmured, thinking about the cuts widowed Hailswomen inflicted upon themselves to relieve the pain of losing husbands.
Chella Gloyal wasn’t impressed by this comparison. “They’re a lot more useful,” she said.
Raina let the remark go unchallenged. Chella was young and her husband was alive. What did she know about the very few ways the pain of loss could be eased? Finished with the wrist guard buckles, Raina said, “Hand me the bow. I’m taking another shot. I notice you didn’t pass comment on the last one.”
“Silence is louder.”
Raina couldn’t help but agree with that as she took her next shot.
They were on the graze north of the Hailhouse but south of the northern woods. The Leak, the stream that ran past the roundhouse, was flowing high at their backs. Chella had set up a target on the trunk of an oak: a melon-sized circle drawn in chalk. Raina had taken two shots already, but both of them had missed. Only one had hit the tree. It was her fourth archery lesson and this time Chella had made her stand at a distance of thirty feet—ten feet farther than yesterday. To add to the difficulty, the wind was shearing from the east.
“Let the bow follow your eye not the other way around. Elbow higher. Your knuckle should graze your ear. Hold.”
Raina held. The string was cutting into the meat of her fingertips and her entire body was at tension like the bow.
“Release.”
The arrow shot from the plate. The string whacked her arm but the guard protected it. Thuc. The arrow hit the tree, a foot above the target.
Chella did some more of her silent instructing, letting Raina work out for herself what she had done wrong. She needed to lower her bow arm and not overpower the shot. She said, “If the target’s the enemy’s heart at least I would have got his head.”
“No. You would have missed the head. The head’s small and there’s always more air around it than you think. That’s why we never target it.”
“But the heart?”
“Miss it and we might puncture a gut or blow a lung instead. Miss the head and while we’re reaching for another arrow we’ll get shot through the arm—if we’re lucky.”
It occurred to Raina that the more she got to know Chella Gloyal the less she sounded like a clanswoman. Was Croser that different than Blackhail? Or was there something more to Chella? Raina thought she’d better watch her just to be safe.
Chella handed Raina another arrow. “Only use one eye to sight the target this time and keep your chin down.”
Raina did as she was told and managed a serviceable shot, grazing the target’s upper boundary.
“Fair,” Chella told her. “We probably need to release some of the tension in the string. It looks a little tight for you.”
Raina handed off the bow. It had belonged to Anwyn Bird. Raina had found it, still strung, in Anwyn’s workshop. She watched Chella as the Croserwoman expertly unpicked the complicated array of knots at the tip. “Who taught you to shoot?”
“My father. He wanted a boy.”
“He taught you well.”
Chella’s fingers danced along the string. “I practiced a lot. I used to bowfish in the Wolf.” She smiled when she saw Raina’s expression. “You can’t call yourself any kind of bowman until you’ve shot a fish in running water.”
“I’ve never heard of fishing with a bow.”
“It’s a Croser thing. Our bowmen are a little mad.”
Raina laughed. She had begun to enjoy her mornings with Chella. The girl was full of surprises. “Did your father give you your bow? It doesn’t look clannish.”
Chella glanced at the shortbow strung over her shoulder. It was a built bow, Raina knew that much, made from pieces glued together, not a self bow carved from a single piece of wood. “You have a good eye,” Chella said, biting off a piece of string with her teeth. “It’s a Morning Star weapon. I got it while I lived there.”
“That must have been something, to live in a city,” Raina said. “All those people. None of them clan.”
“That should do it.” Chell
a handed back the bow to Raina. “Whoever used it last had shorter arms than you, so when you drew it there was too much tension. Give it a try.”
Raina took an arrow, knocked it against the string and drew the bow. Chella was right. Drawing was easier now and the string didn’t bite into her fingertips as much.
“Breathe,” Chella reminded her. “Exhale on release.”
For a wonder she managed a credible shot, the arrow entering the upper left quadrant of the target. Raina jumped up and down. “I got her.”
Chella grinned. “It’s a tossup between heartburn and heart-kill.”
It was good to laugh. It was good to shoot targets. “Now I’ve got to learn how to do it again.”
“Practice,” Chella said. “Every day. That’s the secret.”
Raina’s smile faded. There were no shortcuts here. It would take her weeks, months, to become a serviceable archer, let alone a decent one. And in the meantime the Weasel chief was sitting in Blackhail’s western meadow, gathering Scarpes around her like a queen bee, and acting as if she had a right to be there. Only yesterday she had intercepted returning Hail warriors and questioned them as if she were their chief. Then she had the gall to suggest that someone needed to remove Raina Blackhail from the Hailhouse before she did any more harm. “Dangerously volatile” was the phrase Yelma had used. And then in the very next breath she had pondered aloud, “We still don’t know who killed our guide.”
Raina’s cheeks heated. She could imagine the entire scene, the rich silk tent, the jewels on Yelma’s fingers, the small pause as she allowed the warriors to connect the two statements into one big indictment. Luckily, the party had included Dunkie Lye and Marten Gormalin who had paid the Scarpe chief little heed and returned to the Hailhouse to tell all. Still. Whispers had started. There were some here—Merritt Ganlow and her widows and Gat Murdock and his old-timers—who night be secretly pleased at the Weasel’s words.
“Release.”
Raina blinked. She was hardly aware she had drawn the bow. Sighting the arrowhead on the tree, she lifted her fingers from the string. As soon as she released she knew the shot was bad. The string skinned her arm above the wristguard on the recoil and the arrow shot into the earth, ten feet short of the tree.
