by J. V. Jones
Chedd’s head and chest were covered with a white cloth so fine you could see the contours of his face. He was laid out on the low stone table—maybe the table was an altar; Effie did not know. The woven cane stretcher lay limp beneath him, its guide poles perfectly aligned with Chedd’s body on both sides. Effie touched the edge of the table. The granite was very cold. Chedd had been lying upon it for two days. Tomorrow they would come to take him away.
Only Chedd Limehouse would be gone; Effie Sevrance was taking him. He was her love and Gray could not have him. And only she, in the entire world, knew what to do with Chedd’s body.
“Open the door. Then take the end,” Effie told Lissit, nodding toward the stretcher handles by Chedd’s feet. “I’ll take the head.”
Lissit was someone who responded well to being told what to do. She ran to the front of the guidehouse, opened the door between the guidehouse and the Salamander Hall and then moved into position at the end of the table. She grabbed the stretcher handles by Chedd’s feet. Effie took the other side.
“On three.”
The hardest thing was getting the body off the table. They had to shimmy the stretcher sideways, moving awkwardly with their arms outstretched and their hands on the butts of the poles. Chedd’s feet came first. Once they overhung the table by a sufficient margin, Lissit moved into position between her poles. Once there, she swung the stretcher around, pushing it forward at the same time so that the stretcher and Chedd formed a cross against the table. Effie could then take her position between the poles, and together she and Lissit edged Chedd sideways and clear of the table.
The weight was on the far edge of bearable. Effie would not have had it any other way.
Arms straining, fists white around the poles, Effie and Lissit bore Chedd Limehouse from the Grayhouse. Perhaps there was a kind of sorcery here, perhaps not. Effie knew for certain that no one would stop her. Even if they challenged her she would not be stopped.
No one challenged her. People must have seen the two girls shuffling through the Salamander Hall with the stretcher, yet no one prevented their passing. Perhaps it was such an incredible sight that they did not believe their eyes. Or perhaps they realized: Yes, this must be done.
The old warrior at the Salamander Door did not meet Effie’s gaze. He was idly rubbing rust from his blade with his fingernail and did not look up. Outside it was nearly dark. A halo of green light lit the west.
The loons were calling.
Effie led the way along the dock. She wasn’t sure how it was going to work—getting Chedd into the boat—but in the end it turned out to be easier than pulling the stretcher off the table. Lissit must have learned some things at Croser, for she was the one who showed Effie what to do. Dropping down to their haunches they lowered Chedd and the stretcher onto the wood slats of the dock, at a right angle to the water. Following Lissit’s direction, Effie boarded the boat and turned it so that it formed a line with Chedd’s body. Crouching, Lissit pushed the stretcher so that Chedd’s head extended over the dock and above the boat. When they were in position, Lissit raised her end of the stretcher and Chedd’s body slid into the boat. It thunked a bit but Effie wasn’t stupid. It didn’t matter. Dead was dead.
Lissit pushed off the boat and then stood on the dock and watched as Effie paddled across the Stillwater with Chedd.
Effie headed east, away from the setting sun and toward the rising moon. She wasn’t coming back.
Flames from the gas vents cast yellow light upon the water. You could hear them hissing softly, spending fuel. Effie watched the moths and crane flies orbit the flames. Only skill kept them from death.
Some didn’t make it. Effie paddled easily and lightly through the water. Chedd was in the stern of the boat and her supplies and the lead weights were in the front. At some point during Chedd’s transport the cloth covering his face had fluttered away. Smoke from the guidehouse fires had cured his skin, but apart from the change in color he looked exactly like Chedd. Not creepy. Not squelchy. Just Chedd.
Part of her wanted to lie down beside him and sleep, but that wouldn’t get them anywhere. They’d just float into a bank of reeds.
Reaching the margins of the Stillwater, Effie rested her paddle and lit the safe lamp. She’d thought of everything: flint and striker, extra fuel, a blanket for when she got cold. The weights. Perhaps she should have brought food, but dead bodies and bread and cheese didn’t seem a good match. She had eaten beforehand, forcing herself to chew and swallow, and to drink when her throat got dry. She had chosen not to eat anything tasty, like pastries or fried fishcakes, because she knew that whenever something good passed her lips she had an urge to go and tease Chedd. He was smart until he saw food, and then he was dumb.
Look how easy it had been to maneuver him into helping her lift the curse. One sweaty pastry was enough. Chedd Limehouse was very, very dumb.
Effie frowned her way through something dodgy happening behind her eyes. It was stinging back there, but when she scrunched up her forehead tight enough it stopped.
Chedd would have been impressed by how she got the weights. She stole them. Easy peasy, from a fisherman who left his traps unattended on the dock. She had taken her knife and cut them from the trap line, then transported them two at a time to her boat. She didn’t get them all, because the fisherman returned, but she thought she’d gotten enough for the job. And she took his gold weight too. It was funny, watching him realize what had happened. His traps were exactly where he left them, but most of the weights to keep them sunk in the water were gone. Scratching his chin, he had circled the traps as if another angle of view might help. Effie was sitting nonchalantly on the edge of the dock, and when he looked at her accusingly she’d played dumb. Her dumb was better than his smarts and he’d strided off in the opposite direction looking for someone else to blame.
It was amazing what you could get away with if you were brazen and didn’t care about getting caught. What could the fisherman have done to her that would be worse than losing Chedd? Beat her? She could jump into the water. Shout at her? She could shout right back, tell him exactly what she thought about his mangy, sinking clan. She was glad she’d got his gold weight. What did he need it for anyway? Catching fish?
Realizing she wasn’t paying enough attention to the way ahead, Effie concentrated on steering. She was in one of the channels now and rushes formed walls to either side of the boat. The safe lamp was up front on the deck, its light creating a twelve-foot orb. She couldn’t see very far ahead, but she wasn’t paddling fast. She still wasn’t sure where she wanted to go.
East would do for now. East was right and good.
She wasn’t a bit afraid or nervous. That was the other thing about when bad things happened to you: They didn’t leave much space in your head for the stuff you normally felt. And besides. It was better to be doing something than nothing. And it was definitely better being here with Chedd than at Gray.
She wasn’t doing this for them. She was doing this for Drey and Raif and Raina and everyone back at Blackhail. She was doing it for Bannen and the fine and honorable Limehouse family who lived there.
She was doing this for herself and Chedd.
He had promised to help her lift the curse, and the fact that she now knew more about the curse’s true nature didn’t change that promise. Its spirit remained the same. He was helping her to prevent something bad from happening. They were helping each other in that way.
Magic to find it. Magic to block it.
That was the reason Gray stole children with old skills, because they were hoping one or all of them could prevent the bad thing from happening. Bairns with old skills were born throughout the clanholds but Gray was increasing those odds. There were probably more magic users in Gray than in the entire western clanholds combined. Flora, Flora’s brother Gregor, Lissit, Rufus Rime. They’d all been hauled from other clans in the hope that someone would find the weak point where the Endlords would ride through, and block it somehow with magic. Gre
gor Dunladen had died trying. Poor Flora had gone insane. Lissit was reduced to a scared mouse, and Rufus Rime had become a recruiter, finagling people into becoming part of the Gray crew with his stories and mysterious rules and lessons in marsh lore. Effie imagined that’s what happened when you’d been here too long. You got to imagine it was a fine place and wondered why so few people thought the same.
They’d probably miss the curse when it was gone. How hard could they have really tried to change things? She knew what to do and she’d been here less than two months.
Reaching a confluence in the Reed Way, Effie chose a channel at random, turning the boat southeast. The moon was rising so quickly you could almost see it moving. It wasn’t full but it was bright. Clouds closing from the north would eventually put a stop to that.
Effie wondered if a prophecy was the same as a curse. Only if it’s bad, she decided. It seemed more accurate to call Gray the Doomed Clan, but the longer she thought about it the more certain she became that the doom didn’t really have much to do with Gray at all.
They’d just picked a bad spot for their clan. It was like mountains. Uncle Angus said that mountains were mostly mountains but once in a while one blew, just plain exploded out of nowhere. Gray had chosen a bad mountain: one that was about to blow its top and spill out terrible stuff.
The trick was to find the spot where the stuff was set to escape.
And the second trick was to stop it.
That’s what Gregor Dunladen had been up to when he was drowned. Perhaps he’d made the same connections she had—he had been named after a king and all. And the name Gregor did sound smart. Trouble was he couldn’t have found the spot. At least not the way that she could find the spot.
Her way was unique to Effie Sevrance.
Feeling a bit cold, Effie reached for the blanket. Mosquitoes had begun to dance around her hands and face. She swatted them with the paddle. They flew a short distance and then came back.
The rushes smelled like broth. They swayed in great waves, but Effie didn’t think it was the wind that moved them. The breeze was blowing a different way. For some reason this made her think of the Graystone.
How was it possible that only three days had passed since she’d touched it? She could swear she’d been having bad dreams about what it showed her for ten times longer than that. Somehow Chedd was mixed in with the dreams. In them, the terrible force that reached through the stone came and snatched him right from his bed.
Effie had to do some forceful frowning for a bit to stop a sudden stinging behind the eyes. The force didn’t care. It just destroyed things. It wouldn’t rest until everything was gone.
Do you think what you saw will stop at the border of Clan Gray?
“No,” Effie said out loud, recalling the clan guide’s question. You couldn’t see what she had seen and not know the answer.
She turned the boat—she did not know why—and took a narrow channel that was little more than a crack between the rushes. The first fingers of mist were rising from the water and the clouds had caught up with the moon. Effie glided through darkness, keeping the boat centered on the channel and avoiding the thick roots of the bulrushes
After a while she adjusted the blanket. It didn’t appear to be working.
The channel led to a second needle-thin passage and Effie didn’t think, didn’t make any conscious decision, just let her arms do the paddling. They paddled her due east. Once she caught a glimpse of something rising above the water—a mound, either an island or partially sunk building—but knew it didn’t concern her and paddled on.
The boat seemed to weigh nothing at all. It skimmed over the marsh like a damselfly. Effie steered and paddled and thought of nothing or thought of Chedd. She had fallen asleep next to him that final night and she recalled a moment as she was falling into unconsciousness when she imagined that the arc of her fall and the arc of Chedd’s greater, deeper fall intersected. The healer woke her soon after that and she was made to leave while they tended the body. They had closed the door, as if that would make any difference.
Skirting a bed of reeds, Effie took another channel. Mosquitoes were feeding on the back of her hands. Mist was rising along the hull and pouring into the boat. She increased her speed, growing more and more certain. She could feel it now, the tow upon her body.
The stone lore was calling her home.
Did you really think it would be that easy to be rid of it?
Raif had not been able to throw away his raven bill; gone was not gone when you were a Sevrance and lost your lore.
Of course it had come here, brought by the pike that was not a pike, carried back toward the darkness that spawned it. Chedd was the one who had helped her understand that part of it. All this water drains into the Wolf. It’s how we got here, remember? The pike had snapped the lore from her throat and swam hundreds of leagues against the current to reach the place in the marsh, the weak spot where its masters would rise. In a way it had been homing too.
Effie would not think about why a force of destruction had bothered with something as simple a girl’s lore. Instinctively she knew the answer would not help her.
The Endlords themselves had revealed the final piece of the puzzle. As they moved toward her through the stone, their massive forms spinning like storm clouds, they had formed a shape to strike her. It was the streamlined head of a pike. She hadn’t realized it properly at the time because the clan guide was there, shouting, and her dress was wet, and there were lots of other things to remember. But she thought about it later. She hadn’t forgotten.
The Endlords had revealed themselves to her. They were the pike that had taken her lore.
Effie seated the paddle in the locks at the side of the boat. She was close now. Momentum would take her where she needed to go. The marsh water was running quickly and the current caught and carried the boat. The first sign of open water was the overhead mist: it had formed a white disc low in the sky. Mirroring, that was the name for it. Rufus Rime had told her that water in the air, either clouds or mist, would often mirror the shape of the pond or lake below it.
The rush walls fell away on both sides of the boat, and although Effie couldn’t see very far she had a sensation of opening space. The air smelled different, like metals in Brog Widdie’s forge. A line of palely glowing posts formed a string across the water.
Effie wondered if it was the Sull border. The posts had that look to them, the silent authority of a boundary. She didn’t know what made them glow, for they weren’t alight or burning. She did know some minerals shed light in the dark. Perhaps the posts were made from phosphorescent stone.
As the boat moved toward them Effie readied Chedd. He had been dressed in his own clothes: wool pants and tunic and the gray leather cloak of Bannen. Someone had cleaned them, but the smoke from the guide fires had sort of canceled it out. Effie took the rope from the front of the boat and began winding it around Chedd’s waist. It wasn’t easy as Chedd needed to be tilted a bit when the rope passed under his back. The shape of the boat helped. The V of the hull provided a small but crucial space beneath him. Effie pulled the rope tight with each pass, cinching Chedd’s belly. A little gurgly noise puffed from his lips as she did the final cinching but it was surprisingly easy to ignore. Dead was dead, remember.
As she tied the weights to the rope, she was aware of the current turning and slowing the boat. Black water was swirling between the glowing posts, and it wasn’t hard to guess where the boat was going to end up.
Effie worked quickly, using knots Mad Binny had taught her, complicated beautiful knots that would hold fast in water. When she was done she sat and waited for the boat to come to rest. She could feel the thinness of the world now. Forces on the other side were close and waiting to kiss her. It was not a good kind of kiss given in love or kinship.
But it was a welcome.
The boat stopped skimming forward. The current began to turn it on its axis, slowly spinning it like a bottle. Effie rose in the center
of the boat and took off her clothes and boots. Naked she stood, spinning as she gathered the old magic around her. And then she knelt and slid her fingers around Chedd’s waist rope and with a mighty heave capsized the boat.
Down they plunged into the cold black water, joined together like an anchor and its line. The force of entry punched air from Effie’s lungs. It was shockingly, stunningly raw. Chedd’s body dropped so quickly it yanked at Effie’s finger joints and armpits, and she set everything in her—all thoughts, willpower and strength—to the task of holding the rope.
They fell through darkness. Deeper and deeper, sinking to a point on the thinnest edge of the world. Effie could feel them, the Endlords, moving to meet her, pushing from the other side. They were a storm the size of the world, spinning with perfect violence, tearing apart everything in their path to intercept her.
No, she told them.
No.
Time passed. She opened her eyes. All was black. She could not remember who she was and why she was here. A speck of light existed below her. As she plummeted toward it, the blankness in her mind formed a word.
Lore.
It lay there in the black, marking the edge of an infinitely deep abyss. One inch farther and it would have fallen into the crack in the world. Stop here, the lore said to her. Effie Sevrance stops here.
It was telling her it was the end of her and Chedd. She did not want to release him, but what choice did she have? Effie relaxed muscles in her fingers. Her skin sawed against the rope. For a second they cleaved, her and Chedd, holding together for one final moment in this world. And then she let him go.
Chedd Limehouse sank into the abyss.
Magic to find it. Magic to block it.
Chedd Limehouse was magic. He knew things about birds and turtles and fish and bears that no one else could know. The old skills ran in his veins, they strengthened his bones and sharpened his eyes. He would block the Endlords. He would keep his Eff safe.
Aware that she was bottoming out, her body slowing and beginning to buoy, Effie flung out her hand for her lore. With her fingers closing around the small piece of Hailstone, she began to rise.