A Sword from Red Ice (Book 3)

by J. V. Jones

  Raif Sevrance could not walk away. And perhaps, just perhaps, there was a glimmer of hope in that. Perhaps from a distance, in a most terrible and dread way, in a manner he could never have anticipated, he could still be that good clansman and brother. It was a hope. And it was his only one.

  Coming back to the present was like emerging from icy water. He was cold and disoriented and it took him long moments to realize why Addie Gunn and Stillborn were watching him intently, waiting.

  Raif glanced over at the bloody carcass of the snagcat and then said what he had to say.

  “I will become Lord of the Rift.”

  And so it begins.

  TWENTY

  Pike

  Effie Sevrance was rubbing boat oil into her ankles. It felt good and not at all boaty, cool and soothing on her chafed skin. The smell left something to be desired and it might possibly be a bit rancid, but it was pretty interesting the way it turned her legs all slick and green. Of course Chedd had to come over and take a look.

  “What you doing?” he asked. Possibly the stupidest question in the entire world. He had eyes. He could see.

  Effie said, “I thought if I put enough boat oil on my ankles I could slip my feet through the cuffs.” For good measure she raised her legs above the deergrass and shook her leg irons. “What do you think?”

  She felt a bit bad when Chedd actually considered this theory, squinting so hard it pushed his cheek fat up against his eyes. Then immediately regretted it when he said, “No. Your feet are too big.”

  “Dare you to drink it,” she shot back at him, nodding toward the calfskin flask containing the boat oil.

  Chedd Limehouse was champion of the worm-swallowing, vast-quantity-eating dare. He glanced down toward the rivershore where Waker Stone was pulling in his fish trap, and then at the beached and upturned boat. “Hand it over,” he ordered tersely, like a surgeon requesting his saw just before he chopped off someone’s leg to save a life.

  Rolling forward onto her knees, Effie handed Chedd the flask.

  “For Bannen!” he proclaimed, holding it high above his head. Popping off the stopper with his thumb, he brought the nozzle to his mouth. And drank. Effie watched his throat apple bob up and down, up and down, as he swallowed large quantities of boat oil. Green grease began to spill from his mouth and roll along his chin, yet he continued drinking.

  Finally she could take it no more. Punching the flask from his lips, she shouted, “Stop it.”

  Chedd grinned and belched. His jaw and neck were slick with oil, and the collar of his fine wool cloak was black. “Tasty,” he said with deep satisfaction.

  Effie glared at him, while secretly hoping that boat oil was some sort of harmless plant oil. Like linseed or castor. She didn’t want to kill anyone, and she really did like Chedd.

  Wiping his chin with shirtsleeve, he said, “See that cliff over there. If you climb it you can see for leagues. It’s all open ground, heaths and rocks and things. Wanna take a look?”

  Effie felt a pinch of the old fear. “No,” she replied, knowing straightaway that she had disappointed him. “Bring me a rock back from the top.”

  It was a good thing to give a person something to do, she had learned. Chedd nodded. “Big or small?”

  Effie brought both of her hands together and cupped them. “This big.”

  After committing the size of the requested rock to memory, Chedd set off. Halfway to the base of the cliff, without looking around, he raised an arm in silent salute. Effie was impressed that he had known she would still be watching.

  Rising a little awkwardly to her feet, she started searching for the flask’s stopper. Gods knew how Chedd was going to get up that cliff with his feet connected by two feet of iron chain. Hop, probably.

  It was not going to be a nice day today, she could tell. The Wolf River, which was usually brown, was gray, and it had a little angry chop to it that made the surface matte. Thunderheads were shipping in from the south of all places and the hemlocks and blackstone pines on the riverbank were beginning to sway. To make matters worse Waker’s father was just sitting by the boat, watching her with eyes that were double-beady. Sometimes she imagined that the little old man knew just what she was thinking. Clan Gray, that was where he and his son were from. It was a strange clan and not much was known about it. Perhaps the elders there had learned how to divine unguarded thought.

  Even though she knew she was being silly, Effie made a face at him. It really was too much, all the staring and silence and I-see-what-you’re-about-girl knowingness. For want of something better to do she shuffled down to the shore and offered to help Waker Stone head the fish. At least she had the pleasure of surprising him.

  Waker had set the fish trap the night before after they’d pulled ashore. He’d caught three fish in the wicker basket; a shiner and two small trout. They were still skipping. “Take the shiner,” he said, handing her the trap. “Show me how you mean to do it.”

  She did just that, handling all three fish with confidence. The shiner wasn’t much longer than her hand and it was what Mad Binny would have called a “no-biter”: you either ate it whole or threw it away. It wasn’t worth heading or gutting, and Waker Stone knew it. Still, she laid it against the cutting stump, pinned its tail fin with her middle finger, and began making a scraping motion with the edge of her free hand. “Scaling,” she informed Waker calmly. “Best done before you open the gut and chop off the head.”

  “So you know fish then,” he said, looking at her with interest for the first time in all the days that she had known him. Abruptly, he turned his back on her. “Take it,” he said over his shoulder. “Don’t go lighting no cookfire.”

  Effie didn’t very much want the shiner, but the habit of good manners, drilled into her over many years by Raina Blackhail, was strong and she took it. After the time she’d spent hiding in the waterfall hollow west of Ganmiddich she no longer cared for fish. Especially raw ones. Trouble was, she’d stopped hearing Raina’s voice in her head and begun hearing Da’s instead. You kill it. You eat it. He could be hard, Da. Hard but right.

  Better than boat oil, she thought as she raised the wriggling shiner above her head. She had wanted to make a dedication, like Chedd, but the words “For Blackhail!” didn’t mean very much to her. Perhaps she’d been gone too long from her clan. Suddenly inspired, she cried “For Drey!” and dropped the silver fish into her open mouth.

  It took some swallowing, but now that Drey’s name was attached to it, it simply had to go down. She still didn’t know what had become of her elder brother after the raid on Ganmiddich and in some hopeful and superstitious part of her brain she thought that if she got the fish down in one gulp then Drey would be made alive and well. The shiner went down. She could feel it bucking as her gullet muscles pushed it into her stomach. After that she needed to sit.

  Waker’s father, who might or might not have been named Darrow, followed her progress with jablike movements of his eyes. She knew, in the weird and unspoken rules of the mutual game they played, that if she broke down and hid herself deliberately from his sight—say behind a tree trunk or a rock—somehow it meant he had won. And Effie Sevrance did not want to give him the satisfaction. So in plain sight she sat, away from the boat and up high against the hemlocks.

  From here she could see Chedd climbing the cliff. He was close to the top now. His technique of pulling himself up by his arms and then swinging his lower body behind him was pretty impressive for a fat boy. Now she wished she had agreed to go with him, but the old fears still had a grip on her feet.

  Open ground. See for leagues. She shuddered, though not nearly as strongly as in the past. A year back she wouldn’t have left the roundhouse unless bullied by Raina or Raif, enticed by the thought of Shankshounds, or driven out by the word “Fire!” Effie Sevrance had never liked outside. The more open it was the less she liked it, therefore woods were better than fields, low ground better than high. She couldn’t say why this was so. Well maybe she could but
the explanation was so . . . illogical that she didn’t like to admit it, even to herself. You were exposed outside. Revealed. You could see the lay of the land, the age of it, the gnarled rootwood and weather-beaten stones. And it smelled too. In the morning, that first wash of mist: that was the real true smell of the earth. It was old and watchful and tricky. It looked wide open, but all that air could be hard to breathe. The sky above was big and loose and if you looked long enough you could see it spin. Outside everything was moving, watching, growing, changing. Inside all was still.

  And no eyes could find you there. Here was the strange bit—oh she knew the other stuff was odd, but this was odd on a different level—Effie thought something without good intentions was trying to seek her out. What that might be, she would be hard-pressed to come up with. She’d once overheard Orwin Shank talking to Jebb Onnacre about Mace Blackhail’s mean-spirited dogs, “They’re a malevolence, Jebb. They’ll watch and wait, and then they’ll bite you right on the knuckle so you drop the lock and they can escape.”

  That was how the searching thing seemed to Effie: a waiting malevolence. For as long as she could remember, right the way back to being a toddie when Drey and Raif would toss her, squealing and happy, from one to the other, she had believed that something was trying to find her. No one knew this—though Raif might have guessed something, for he was always extra protective whenever he took her outside.

  What this thing might be, what it wanted, if it really existed or was just a thought that had got stuck in her mind, like a splinter, she did not know. All she knew for certain was that the feeling was strongest when she stood on open ground. Hollows, glades, even river channels that were lined with trees were preferable to high places and open places where Effie Sevrance might be exposed.

  Things had got a lot better since she’d left the roundhouse. Poor Raina, she had thought to send Effie to a better life at Dregg. It hadn’t worked out that way at all, but strangely enough it had still worked out. Effie knew that when Raina looked at her she’d seen a child who was too quiet and solitary, too interested in the Hailstone and the guidehouse and the dark, damp spaces beneath the roundhouse. After the trouble with the Shankshound being burned and Effie being accused of being a witch, Raina had feared that Effie would never be able to live a normal life at Blackhail and had sent her off to live with relatives at Dregg. Raina had hoped that Dregg would turn Effie around; Effie knew this for a certainty because Raina had come right out and told her. “You’ll be able to dance there and make friends. Learn to cook and sew and fight with swords if it pleases you. They have lovely gardens, Effie, with waterfalls and box hedges and roses. You need to dig in them, get some sun on the back of your neck and dirt between your fingers. Run out to the plunge pond and grab fish, roll on the grass, laugh, suck hay, play.”

  Effie felt bad when she thought of Raina’s words, as if somehow by being here she had let Raina down. Sometimes she thought it would be a good thing to send Raina a note. Caught fish, rolled in the grass, made a friend. Still waiting to learn how to sew. That was the funny thing, you see, by getting waylaid, first by Clewis Reed and Druss Ganlow and then by Waker Stone and his father, she was changing in the very sort of ways that Raina had hoped to bring about. Effie Sevrance in a boat, camping, cooking, laughing with Chedd, wading into the river to look for mussels and skimmers: those things would make Raina glad.

  Thinking about Raina made Effie’s heart feel heavy. There was no way to let her know that things were all right . . . and no way to be certain that those words would hold true.

  As the first spits of rain landed on Effie’s dress, Chedd did a victory wave from the top of the cliff. He was shouting and holding something up, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying. Standing, she waved back. On the shore, Waker had finished cleaning the trout and was wrapping the fillets in dock leaves to keep them fresh until tonight. Waker’s father had risen and was flipping the boat. Off soon then, Effie concluded. Another day on the river heading east.

  What surprised her about river travel—at least river travel upstream—was how slow it was. A man could trot faster than two men could pole. The times Waker and his father got up to their best speed was when they were in a deep, slow-moving channel, using their paddles. Yet for some reason they usually stayed off the main river, choosing streams and tributaries that were either shallow, frothing, narrow or twisty. And that meant using poles, not paddles.

  Effie often wondered how far they’d come. She’d been with Waker and his father for many days now and had fallen into an easy routine. Up at dawn or some time before it, breakfast, load the boat and float upstream until dark. The sparsest of camps would be raised, with neither tents, a proper campfire or latrines. A cold supper might be occasionally supplemented with lukewarm fish, and then to sleep, and the whole thing would start up again in the morning.

  Effie had to give it to Waker and his father: they ran a tight ship. Waker wasn’t even especially mean to her and Chedd. Mostly he treated them like cargo. As long as they did what he told them, sat still in the boat and stayed within sight of the camp, he did not raise his voice or touch them. Waker’s father was something different. Effie thought of him as an evil little marsh man who delighted in other people’s discomfort. She had noticed that when she was near him her stone lore felt muffled, as if it had been wrapped in thick blankets or plunged into water. It was alive and present, just unable to get enough air.

  “Boy. Hurry now.” Waker Stone called out to Chedd. “We set off within the quarter.” The riverman’s otterskin pants were wet to the knee and the water bought out their blue-green iridescence. Tight bands around the tops of his mooseskin boots prevented the riverwater from pouring inside them as he and his father floated the boat. “Girl. Cover the fire. Stow the pots and blankets.”

  Effie jumped to do his bidding. Waker wasn’t to be ignored when he was preparing the boat.

  Camp was a wooded and reedy inlet north of the Wolf. Chedd reckoned they weren’t far from Croser now. Thinking about that Dhoone-sworn clan with its roundhouse of giant riverstones gave Effie a little thrill. She was a long way from home, heading into territory hostile to Blackhail. If they continued east they’d pass the Dhoone-protected lands altogether and enter territory defended by Bludd. It was a long way from home, and the river, headlands, trees and rocks were all changing, becoming wilder. According to Inigar Stoop, the east was a barbarian place that the Stone Gods claimed but never wholly possessed.

  “Look out.” Chedd Limehouse came running toward Effie with his right hand at his shoulder as if he were about to launch a shot put. “Catch!” he cried, propelling his hand forward with force.

  Effie made a little cry and ducked.

  Chedd began laughing heartily, rocking back and forth at the waist as if what he had done was so funny it had caused his lungs to seize. “Got you!” he gurgled, actually becoming a little red in the face. “Never threw it.” Holding up his hand he revealed the stone he had brought down from the top of the cliff.

  Effie was denied the pleasure of giving Chedd a piece of her mind by Waker barking, “Here with you both. Now.”

  Chedd helped her carry the bedrolls and pots to the boat. Once he’d handed them off to Waker he tried to give Effie the rock—a dog tooth of yellow halite—but she wasn’t having it. A sharp look from Waker was enough to make Chedd drop the rock in the water.

  As they pushed off rain began to fall heavily. Effie wished she had thought to save a blanket from the bedrolls, for her boiled-wool cloak was quickly soaked. If she turned around she could see the bedrolls—they were stowed beneath Waker’s father’s seat—but some kind of pride stopped her from asking for them. As they headed into the main river channel, Waker handed back a tin cup and told Effie to bail once the water covered her toes.

  The water soon covered her toes. Thunder rolled from the south and the first of the big gusts hit the boat side-on. The long and narrow craft tipped wildly. Waker’s father plunged his paddle deep into the water
and turned in to the wind. Effie bailed, glad of something to do. The surface of the water was like a pincushion stuck with a million pins. The trees along the southern bank of the Wolf whipped back and forth as clusters of pine needles spun free. Directly ahead of Effie, Chedd Limehouse paddled with real force. Rain ran down Effie’s face and into the neck hole of her dress as she fell into the urgent rhythm of bailing.

  The river was wide here, a league across without a single island to block the view. Wooded hills formed the southern shore, and to the north lay impenetrable tangles of hardwoods, pines and winter dead vines.

  Waker’s father had set them on a course that was a fraction short of due south and she thought his intent might be to sit out the storm on the southern shore. That seemed like a good idea. With the bow of the boat facing the wind the going was steadier, yet every once in a while a rogue gust would get under the curve of the hull and for an instant the boat would rise, vertical, from the water. Waker would immediately stand, swinging his weight forward and stamp down the hull.

  Neither he nor his father seemed much perturbed. They were both working hard and concentrating, yet Effie could tell that paddling through high winds did not stretch them. Effie envied them their waterproof clothing. Even Chedd was faring better than she was, as his cloak was lined with fine doeskin.

  Rain was making it difficult to see. The southern shore became a murky grayness of darkly moving trees. The river itself appeared to be widening, for even as they headed south the shore did not look to be getting much closer. More river just kept spooling out. Effie tried to remember the maps of the clanholds that Dagro Blackhail kept, rolled and cased, in his chief’s chamber. As best she could recall the Wolf split into three separate rivers above Croser—or rather three separate rivers merged to form the Wolf. Effie was unsure of the correct phrasing, also unsure of the course and names of the higher streams. Gray was south of here. She knew that.