by J. V. Jones
Ahead and to the north lay the Bluddsworn clans: HalfBludd, Haddo, Frees, Otler and Gray. Chedd said the only roundhouse they’d be likely to spot was Otler’s and that was days east of here, but Effie thought he might be wrong. HalfBludd shared borders with Morning Star; depending upon what river branch they were on they might see it once the hills shrank away.
The Mouseweed felt different to Effie than the Wolf, older and more secretive. Last night she had seen a lynx withdrawing through the trees behind the camp. The wild and beautiful cat with its pointed ear tufts and blue-gray pelt did not seem to belong in the world of clan. She had tried explaining this to Chedd—who had matter-of-factly informed her the lynx was female—and Chedd had surprised her by agreeing. “It’s the Sull who wear their pelts,” he said. Sometimes he could say things that were exactly right. Clan did not wear lynx because they did not know how to trap or hunt them. Those skills belonged solely to the Sull.
Deciding she’d had enough of paddling, Effie shook the water from her oar and rested it against the gunwales. Hands free, she reached for her lore.
It was something she always did, that absentminded checking, that quick motion upward to see how things stood in her world. Stupid. Stupid. You’d think by now she’d have gotten used to the fact that her lore was gone, gobbled up by the pike that was more than a pike, lost for ever and eternity in the Wolf.
She had tried to make them go after it—spread nets, dive into the river, build dams—and in fairness to Waker Stone he had not dismissed her pleas out of hand. “It’s gone,” he had told her firmly. “Even if I dived for it how would I know the difference between that a thousand other stones?”
She had not told him about the pike. She had lived for a month with Mad Binny on Cold Lake, and knew the importance of sounding sane. The words A pike ate my lore were too close to My sheep knows how to fly for comfort. Instead she had commandeered Chedd Limehouse, forcing him to search the rivershore and set fishing lines. Guilt had prevented him from asking too many questions about the fishing lines—if he hadn’t vomited the boat would never have capsized—and he had worked diligently for two whole days on the task of locating Effie’s lore. On the third day she’d felt well enough to join the search and had waded thigh-deep into the now calm water, but her restored health had worked against her. When Waker saw her chastising Chedd for setting the lines in the wrong place, he had decided she was fit enough to return to the boat, and they were out upon the river by midday.
She held no ill feeling toward Waker for his haste. He had saved her life, and although she knew that he did so because she was in some way valuable to him—like gold—it didn’t alter the fact that her life was saved. Effie was very much fond of her life. She wasn’t one of those silly girls who heedlessly put their lives in danger by riding horses over high hedges, or sticking their heads underwater and counting how long they could hold their breath. Tree climbing, rock scaling, bridge swinging, roof walking, pool diving and even the wearing of insufficient layers in the cold were not things that Effie Sevrance did. Granted she used to sleep with the shankshounds, but even if they had torn out people’s throats, they were good as lambs around her.
Waker had treated her a little differently since the near drowning and she had treated him a little differently back. She understood now that the abduction and journey were nothing personal. Waker Stone was doing his job. She and Chedd were cargo, and what a man wanted in his cargo was simply that it be easy to stow. If she did not fight against the stowing, which by her reckoning was the equivalent of getting into the boat promptly each morning, Waker was satisfied. Freedom could be had in a sideways kind of manner. She and Chedd could do whatever they wanted at the camp—as long as they remained in sight. They could now talk in the boat—as long as woodsmoke wasn’t in the air. Nothing much was expected of them—they weren’t even forced to paddle—and that meant they were free to enjoy the river and its sights. And as long as you ignored old crazy Waker Senior and forgot that you were being hauled east against your will the journey wasn’t bad. She had even begun to think that she owed it to Waker to be good, what with him saving her life and all and she being precious cargo.
It was this realization that she ought to behave well that had made all the difference. Waker had recognized this shift in her, which was mostly detectable in the quickness she responded to his requests and her determination to show him she was a good paddler, and he had responded in some kind back. Just this morning he had thrown her a small pouch of dried spiced peas. No word, barely any warning that she needed to get her hand ready to receive a catch, just a white bag chucked at her chest. Spiced peas were strange and set your gums tingling, and it took her a while to realize they were meant to be a treat. Once she understood their specialness they began to taste better.
She had the feeling now that if Waker had possessed a pick with the correct bore to knock out the pins in her leg irons he would have freed her.
“Stoney broke. Brokey stone. What’s it like, girlie, to be all alone?”
Effie spun around in her seat and glared at Waker’s father. He was sitting on the stern seat, calmly pulling his paddle through the water. His lips were closed and his green eyes sparkled with spite. He was wearing the shaggy brown otterskin jacket he always wore, but today he’d thrust a bunch of club-moss though one of his string holes.
“I know what you said,” she told him.
He looked at her and started moving his mouth like a fish. Spittle wetted his lips as his old pink tongue jabbed out.
Disgusted, she faced front.
“Nothing to like about pike.”
She did not turn back. Suddenly cold, she decided to warm herself up with another bout of paddling. Mounds of hackled snow capped the rocks and gorges, and the river water had that thickness to it that meant it wasn’t far above freezing. Chedd had fallen asleep in his seat and was snoring. Effie used her own paddle to hook his back in the boat. The clump of wood hitting the gunwales roused him, and he shook his head like a dog shedding water. Within five minutes he was back asleep.
Effie tried not to think about her lore, but Waker’s father had a way of getting under her skin. Stoney broke. It was considered the worst kind of luck to lose your lore, like a doom. Inigar Stoop told chilling stories of those clansmen unfortunate enough to lose their lores. Jon Marrow had accidentally dropped his squirrel lore down a well shaft east of the Wedge. He was jumped by Dhoonesmen the next day, so the story went, and while he was defending himself against their hammer blows something horrible happened to his man parts. Effie thought they might have froze. Then there was the tale of little Mavis Gornley, who had lost her lore whilst riding to the Banhouse to wed her betrothed, a dashing Bann swordsman with teeth filed to points. As soon as she realized her grouse lore was missing, Mavis had dismounted and retraced her steps, carefully inspecting every hoofprint made by her horse. Mavis was so intent upon looking down that she hadn’t seen the big grizzly who came loping out of the woods and tore off her head. The only way to save yourself from similar misfortune was to rush back home to your clan guide and beg him to replace the missing lore. This was a tricky business apparently, and could take several months. During that time you were left vulnerable and unprotected and were advised to stay inside.
Well, Effie thought, glancing up at the crumbly red walls of the gorge and the hemlock forests that lay beyond them. There’s exactly nothing I can do about that.
In a way the stories didn’t bother her. Bad luck was something she didn’t believe in. It was the actual missing of the stone that felt bad. She hadn’t realized how much she had relied upon the ear-shaped chunk of granite until it had gone. Her uncle Angus had once told her how bats were able to fly in the dark. “They listen for their cries bouncing back off trees and walls.” “But they don’t make any sound,” she had replied. “Not any that you can hear,” he had countered. She’d thought about that conversation many times since, as it seemed to her that her lore was a bit like bat ears: able to de
tect sounds that no one else could hear. Vibrations caused by changes. Stirrings in the air. Course when you put it into words it also sounded a bit . . . pikish, but Effie Sevrance knew what she knew.
And she missed knowing it. That was the worst thing, the absence of reassurance, the forewarning of danger. Now bad things could happen and she would only know about them at the same time everyone else did.
It was like losing a sense. And a tooth. The hole was there, new and strange, and she kept poking it in disbelief.
Realizing that she’d been paddling for too long on one side, Effie switched her oar to the right. It was getting colder and her breath began to make clouds. She thought she detected the pitchy green sharpness of burning pine and searched for woodsmoke above the tree line. She couldn’t see any, but Waker Stone’s father wasn’t taking any chances and steered the boat closer to shore.
The curved prow of the boat glided over the still water, and for a while the only sound to be heard was the muted splash of paddles as they broke the surface. Oddly enough the silence seemed to waken Chedd and he jerked forward in his seat and had to scramble to steady himself.
“Looks like we’re going ashore,” he said to Effie, glancing around.
“Silence,” Waker warned, muscling the paddle. The walls of the gorge were closing in on them, and Effie could see rocks beneath the water. Red spruce and birches extended out over the river, their limbs fingering the surface. Effie could not see how it would be possible to go ashore. The cliffs were too high and there was no place to beach the boat. She thought perhaps that Waker was using the cliffs for cover, that by pulling close to them he was making the boat less visible from above. It was no use asking questions, that was for sure. Spiced peas and information were two separate things.
Using his paddle as a tiller, Waker’s father steered around the rocks with ease. As they rounded the river bend, Effie saw that the gorge wall was lowering and wedges of forest had forced their way to the shore. Undercut cliffs had toppled forward and sheets of sandstone lay half-submerged in the water, bleeding sand the color of rust. Waker was paddling with long, deep strokes and the boat moved quickly around the ledges. Both he and his father appeared to know this stretch of the river well and anticipated problems before they reached them. Just as they were moving out from the shore to avoid some willow-choked shallows something dropped into the river about thirty feet ahead of them. Effie had been minding her paddle strokes, and didn’t catch what it was, but she saw the splash. A big crater in the water.
Waker turned around and nodded at his father. The Grayman’s eyes were bulging with force, but he looked more displeased than afraid. Effie noticed that just before he dug his paddle into the water for his next stroke his right hand slipped away to check on his twin knives.
Once they’d passed the shallows they headed to the nearest landing. As Waker and his father maneuvered the boat parallel to one of the collapsed sandstone ledges, Chedd glanced back at Effie, his eyebrows high. Effie shrugged weakly. It would have been a pretty good time to have her lore.
Waker tied the mooring rope around a fist of rootwood that no longer had a tree attached, and then draped the air bladder over the side of the gunwale to act as a buffer against the rocks.
“You two,” he said, looking from Effie to Chedd. “Stay here. Keep your mouths shut and don’t try anything.” Waker’s eyes jiggled like gut fat as he waited for them to nod. Satisfied, he sent a hand signal to his father, plucked his daypack from beneath the bow seat, and alighted onto the ledge.
As Effie braced herself against the roll of the boat she checked upshore. The cliff wall that had been exposed when the ledge collapsed was deeply, damply red. Trees had not yet found their way into its crevices, but ropy vines were creeping down from the woods above. Two ravines split the cliff. The largest was running with meltwater that frothed over big sandstone boulders. The second appeared to be a path leading up. Waker headed toward it, jumping across a break in the ledge along the way. Within seconds he had passed out of sight.
Chedd, Effie and Waker’s father sat in the boat and waited. Effie put her booted feet against the back of Chedd’s seat to give them a rest from the standing water. Just as Chedd turned around to complain about them, men’s voices sounded overhead. Someone shouted, “Weapons on the rock.” In the silence that followed, Effie imagined Waker pulling out his twin knives, the frog and the salamander, and placing them carefully on the appointed ledge. Her gaze tracked the path Waker had taken into the narrow, winding ravine.
Suddenly harsh laugher exploded from a point lower and closer to the shore. Metal was rapped against rock. Something squealed. A command was issued in a low, guttural voice and the sound of footsteps tramping brush and crunching stone soon followed. Behind her, Waker’s father drummed his fingers lightly against the flat of his paddle.
As the footsteps grew louder and closer, Effie realized that Waker was being marched back down the ravine. Someone was holding a spear or a stick that scraped against the sandstone with every step. What she saw next was hard to fathom. A black-and-pink pig came into view. It was haltered like a horse with a bit between its teeth and someone was leading it on a leash. The pig’s eyes were small and mean and its hairy chewed-up ears flopped around the sides of them like blinkers. Snuffing wetly, it snouted through the sedge and berry canes at the bottom of the ravine. The man holding the leash came into view next. He was nearly as ugly as his pig. His nose had been broken so many times it looked as if it had knuckles. Hefty but turning to lard, he was dressed in a stripy red-and-gold cloak and donkey-hair pants that were too tight. His weapon was a two-pronged spear that he held upright like a pitchfork. A slack iron chain, not unlike a hammer chain, connected the spear head to a leather band at his wrist.
Waker followed next, and two other men brought up the rear. Both men were armed with evil-looking four-bladed spears. The smaller man wore a cloak that had been embellished with iridescent disks that flashed like fishskin. Effie could not tell if any of them were clan.
“What ’ave we here, my little piggy?” the man with the broken nose said, spying the boat. “Livestock, by the looks of it. Good and healthy.”
Waker came forward. He was unrestrained and Effie saw that his knives were riding high in their sheaths. Tar oozed over their hilts. The strangers must have poured it on the blades to disable them. “They’re mine, Eggtooth. I’ve paid the toll on them.”
The pig trotted over the sandstone to investigate the boat. The man named Eggtooth followed. “That was before I had me a proper look at ’em.” His eyes were pale, almost colorless, and they were now focused on Effie. He licked his lips. The pig began to squeal. Reaching the boat, it pushed its wet, pine-needle-encrusted snout against Chedd’s arm. Chedd jerked away and the boat rolled. Waker’s father made a quick adjustment. Steadying.
Eggtooth glanced at him. “Good day to you,” Effie leant forward, thinking, Here it is: Waker’s father’s name, “old man.”
Waker’s father made no reply. The pig would not go near him, Effie observed.
“And what ’ave we here?” Eggtooth jabbed her chin with the butt of his spear, forcing her to raise her head. “A little scar I see. The stitcher did good work.”
Effie resisted the urge to touch her cheek. She had forgotten the scar existed. No one had mentioned it to her since the day Laida Moon had winkled out the stitches. Cutty Moss’s knife had cut deep, but Laida had told her she was lucky because the luntman had picked the one spot on her cheek where there was no muscle underlying the skin. When Laida had held up the glass and shown Effie her handiwork, Effie remembered thinking Is that all? She had expected something . . . grander.
Unsure what to do she looked at Eggtooth evenly. His nose was covered in broken veins and there was some kind of insect bite on the left nostril.
“Cool as milk,” he commented, throwing the remark backward to his men. “Pretty hair. A man could make good coin just in the scalping.”
Effie frowned. Why was he
trying to goad her? The pig, finished with examining Chedd, turned its flat pink face toward her. She wasn’t about to have any of it and clapped her hands right in front of its snout. With a loud grunt, the pig closed its tiny black eyes and launched itself at her throat. Eggtooth snapped on the leash, lassoing the pig in midair. Ungodly squealing followed. Chedd plugged his fingers in his ears.
Under cover of the noise, Waker’s father leaned forward a fraction in the boat and whispered in Effie’s ear, “To get rid of scum, best play dumb.”
Eggtooth twisted the leash so that the metal bit dug into the corners of the pig’s mouth. The creature’s eye bulged and it began to wheeze pathetically. After a few seconds, Eggtooth released the slack.
“On your way to the Cursed Clan, eh?” he said, still addressing Effie. “Know what they do to young uns there?”
Effie nearly, but did not, say No.
“Feed ’em to the bog,” Eggtooth said with a nasty laugh.
A strangled, airless sound came from Chedd’s throat.
“Tie stones to their chests and sink ’em,” Eggtooth said, switching fire from Effie to Chedd. “Pull ’em up a week later and eat what the fish didn’t want.”
Chedd fainted. One moment he was sitting upright, if a little forward on his seat, and the next he keeled right over, falling straight into the prow of the boat. Something cracked. The boat rocked wildly. Effie dug her heels into the deck to stop herself from sliding forward.
Eggtooth and his men roared with laughter. The one with the fish-scale cloak slapped his side. The pig sneered at Effie. Waker’s father stretched his arm to work out a cramp. On the sandstone ledge fifteen feet away, Waker watched his father’s arm. Effie felt her mouth begin to tingle.
“I told you these two were no good,” Waker said, speaking over the laughter. “A fattie and a mute. You’ve had a gold piece for them—they’re not worth any more.”
Eggtooth tapped his forked spear against the rock. He seemed to be thinking. The pig had found a lump of duck crap and was licking it.
