His hands felt big and dull as he poured himself a cup of water. Clumsily, he spilled liquid down his cloak. Exhaustion was making him shake. Although he did not much want to he forced himself to go outside and search for oil. Aware that the lamb brothers kept most supplies in the corral, he headed toward the animals. The milk ewe bleated as he stepped over the hide barrier and entered her tiny domain. She was a fine-looking animal, with bright eyes and a curly coat. Her udder was swollen with milk. To comfort her Raif unhooked her honey log from the ceiling and placed it within her reach. The mules poked their heads over the partition wall and watched as he searched for oil.
Once he'd found a brick of sheep's butter and a carafe of lamp oil, he nodded farewell to the animals and left. A sharp breeze pushed him forward. The great dome of stars was paling, and the mist was on the move. Raif spent most of the journey looking at his feet. He did not want to get lost. As he studied the footprints leading to and from the dunes he realized that one of the lamb brothers must have made his way back to the camp and then returned to the bodies. The thought that someone had been at the camp at the same time he was there bothered him. Why had they not made themselves known?
When he reached the dune he saw that all three men were standing over the body of their slain brother, heads bowed, face cloths moving as they prayed. Something had been done to the body. An L-shaped incision had been made to open the chest, but Raif was only allowed a fleeting glimpse. As Tallal stepped forward to bar his approach, a second brother hastily covered the corpse.
Feeling unwelcome, Raif indicated the things he had brought. "I'll prime the fire."
"No." Tallal faced him and said no more.
Raif said, "I would help you." Even beneath the gravecloth, he could see the corpse was smoking.
"You have slain the wrall. That is enough."
Raif was surprised to hear the world wrall from Tallal. It was the same one used by Heritas Cant all those months ago in Ille Glaive. He would have liked to ask to what the lamb brother knew of them but the time wasn't right. Placing the carafe and butter on the ground, he said, "It must be done now."
"As you wish." It was a dismissal, and Tallal stood and waited until Raif realized that fact.
It was a long walk back to the camp. As he approached the tent circle Raif smelled burning oil and felt some measure of relief.
Knowing he would not sleep, he set about rebuilding the fire. The discipline of peeling sticks, packing kindling and stacking logs helped clear his mind. "It's no small thing to build a fire," Da always said, and Raif decided he was right. When the flames grew fierce enough to sustain themselves, he sat back on his cloak and watched. The heat felt good. It burned, and that was fine.
Dawn came. The mist drained, and clouds began crossing the sky. The lamb brothers did not return. Raif rose, deciding he would milk the ewe. She was bleating plaintively now, in need of release.
Tomorrow he would leave this place. He barely wanted to admit it, but some small childlike part of himself had hoped that he might find a home with the lamb brothers. They searched for the lost soul of the dead; he watched the dead. It had seemed…fitting. Right. Only it wasn't, and he'd been a fool to imagine otherwise. He did not blame them. How could he? They had healed and sheltered him. They deserved his thanks and respect.
Who he was, what he did, had shocked them. They dealt in spirits. He dealt in flesh.
Raif caught the raven lore in his fist and turned it The hooked piece of bird ivory felt as rough as if it had been scoured by the dunes.
Will you come back?
Strange as it was, the Maimed Men had accepted him. Stillborn, Addie Gunn, even the Robber Chief himself, Traggis Mole: None cared about his past. They had used him, but perhaps he was made to be used. And they needed him. The Rift was the deepest canyon in the North. Its greatest flaw. Maimed Men would be the first to die if it were breached. After tonight he understood that what had happened in the Fortress of Grey Ice had slowed, but not changed, things. The Unmade were still pushing through. Someone had to push the other way.
Letting the lore drop against his chest, Raif went to milk the ewe.
Yes, I'm coming back.
TWELVE Along the Wolf
Effie Sevrance sneezed. It was a big thick one with lots of snot. In the old days she would have been mortified; there'd be Letty Shank and Florric Horn squirming and crying "Eeeew!" Raina shaking her head and saying, "Really, Effie, get a cloth," and Da warning, "Wipe that on your sleeve and I'll tan your backside. I didn't trade two unopened fawn carcasses for that dress to be spoiled within a year." Da never tanned her backside, not once. She knew he didn't mean it. He knew that she knew. It was the thing that came after that hurt. "What would your mother think?" Effie reckoned those five words held more power than an entire armory of swords. They were like a spell: speak them and he who hears them will change.
They worked even if you had never known your mother, if she had died giving birth to you. Effie wiped her nose on a scrap of ragging left behind when the cheese it contained had been eaten. It smelled like feet. The men from the Cursed Clan had the worst kind of food.
They were over by the shore, pulling their long lightweight boat up the bank. Last night's frost had surprised them with its depth, and even though only two feet of stem had been left in the water, the entire boat had frozen in place. Waker Stone and his tiny, aging father had worked for the past hour to free the craft from the ice. Fourteen feet long, the boat consisted of mooseskin stretched over a wooden frame-It was so light that the two men could haul it over their heads and carry it right up the mud beach. Setting it down, keel up, on the dry reed— grass above the highwater mark, Waker called for Chedd to help him. Chedd was doing something stupid with a stick and centipede, making the ugly thick-bodied insect scuttle up the same mound over and over again by pushing it back down every time it reached the top. Effie had warned him centipedes could bite, but Chedd was two years older than she was and from Bannen and he wasn't about to listen to anything a nine-year-old Hail girl had to say. Served him right if he got poisoned. Might even stop him stuffing his fat face for a day.
"Got a greenie hanging," he said to her as he coaxed the centipede onto the stick.
As soon as she raised her hand to her face, Effie knew she'd made a critical mistake.
"Got you!" he cried, tossing the centipede toward her. "Nothing there."
Effie was so mad at herself she stamped her foot. Chains rattled. Chedd's annoying laugh — it sounded like a dog being sick—went on and on until a single word from Waker stopped it.
"Boy."
Chedd's face froze and he dropped the stick. Lurching into motion, he hopped and shuffled down the beach as fast as his leg irons would let him. His tunic was too short and Effie could see the roll of fat around his waist jiggling. She must be a bad person, she decided, for her thought at that moment was I'm glad it's not me. Waker Stone was not a man you wanted mad at you.
Shivering, Effie tramped her way back to the firepit—passing a somewhat disoriented centipede along the way. It was about an hour past dawn and the clouds that had hung over the Wolf for the last five days were beginning to break up. Yesterday it had snowed. Today that snow was on the ground, frozen into little icy pellets that crunched when you stood on them. Ahead, the river seemed sluggish. The Wolf was not pretty here, one day east of Ganmiddich. Waker said they were in flood country. The land north of the river was flat and choked with bog willow, frog fruit, reedgrass, and great big bulrushes with exploded heads. There was a lot of mud. Luckily it was frozen—yesterday when it was oozing it had smelled really bad. You could see it in the river, turning the water an unpleasant murky brown. Waker wasn't pleased with it at all. He said it made the river acidic, and acidity was the enemy of his boat.
He and his father would spend at least an hour a day tending the boat Its skin had to be patched and stretched, waxed and tied, the sprayrails and gunwales oiled daily, the load removed before beaching.
It
was, Effie had to&miAa be#tiful vessel, with skin the color of old parchment and a gleaming cedar frame. The only time Waker and his father spoke to each other was to discuss the condition of the boat Which made the fact they'd left it overnight in the water pretty strange. Effie glanced upriver toward Ganmiddich. Although she was several leagues east of the roundhouse, she could still see the tower. The fire had gone out now, but smoke still puttered from the open gallery on the top floor. The tower was probably the reason the boat not been properly beached. Yesterday at noon when Chedd had spotted the strange green fire, Waker had immediately steered to shore. They'd been camping on the frozen mudbank ever since.
No one had slept much last night. The first fire hadn't lasted very long, but the smoke it produced poured from the tower's windows all day. Then, after it had grown dark and there was nothing to see in the west except sky and stars, a second fire had ignited. This one was different. It was red.
Blue fire of Dhoone, black smoke of Blackhail, red fire of Clan Bludd, that was the litany Effie had learned as a child. Clan Bludd had seized Ganmiddich in the night. Blackhail was defeated and unhoused.
Drey. Effie scooped out her lore from beneath the neck of her dress and held it in her fist. Her lore was a round piece of stone with a hole drilled through it given to her by the old clan guide Beardy Hail. As far as she knew she was the only person in the clan who had an inanimate object as her lore. It just wasn't done. People had birds and animals and fishes, and occasionally—but not often—trees. No one had a piece of glass or a chunk of coal, it just wasn't… clannish. When she had first been given it as a newborn, her da had told Beardy to take it back. "Her mother's body is still cooling," Da had said. This child has enough to bear." Beardy wouldn't hear it Beardy had never retracted a lore, not even Raif s.
Effie didn't mind it much now. She no longer cherished fantasies about the fawn lore or the swan lore. Fawns were nothing but wolf bait and swans were great honking birds that had to run half a league to take off. At least when a stone sank it sank fast.
Yesterday she had been glad of her lore. The small lump of granite had told her about Drey. She'd known he was in danger even before Chedd had seen the fire, and later she'd known when the danger became worse. Drey was in command of Blackhail forces at Ganmiddich: he would have been on the front line. Effie did not know how the battle had fared or what had befallen Blackhail. That wasn't the way her lore worked. It pushed warnings through her skin but not much else. About three hours after midday it had jumped against her breastbone and instantly she knew Drey had been hurt. There had been nothing after that; the stone was still. Through the evening and the night she kept checking, taking the stone in her fist and squeezing hard, but she could not force anything out of her lore.
It was difficult not knowing what happened to Drey. Effie Sevrance loved her brothers very much. Both of them, Drey and Raif, and she didn't give a swan's bottom about what anyone at Blackhail said. Raif wasn't a traitor. Raif had killed four Bluddsmen outside of Duffs defending Will Hawk and his son Bron.
Aware that her chin was sticking out, Effie tucked it back in. Dropping the lore against her chest, she went to sit by the dead fire as the men of the Cursed Clan fixed the boat.
Clan Gray, that was where Waker Stone and his father came from. The clan in the middle of the swamp. Effie didn't know much about Clan Gray, didn't even know if they had a roundhouse still standing. She knew it was the farthest west of the clanholds and it shared borders with Trance Vor and the Sull. Just thinking about that made Effie glad to be a Hailsman—Blackhail's only vulnerable border was with Dhoone. Still, the swamp probably kept invaders at bay, always supposing there were invaders, of course. A clan with a curse laid upon it would hardly make a grand prize. They had a good clan treasure though, if Effie remembered rightly. A steel chair that had been carried across the mountains during the Great Settlement.
We are Gray and the Stone Gods fear as and leave us be. That was their boast, or part of it Inigar Stoop had told her it overreached the boundaries of boastfulness and stepped right into blasphemy. Perhaps that was why they were cursed. No one at Blackhail ever mentioned the reason behind the curse, and Effie had come to the conclusion that there were two possible explanations why. First, they didn't know. Or second, a curse might be catching. Clansmen were nothing if not superstitious.
Effie had considered asking the present company about the origins of the curse, but Waker and his father, who Chedd believed might be named Darrow, were hardly the kind of people who could be questioned. Father Darrow barely said a word, just kept his beady-eyed gaze bouncing from Effie to Chedd and back again, and Waker was just plain scary. He looked like something that had been left too long in the water. Once, when he'd been pulling off his otter-fur coat, Effie had got a glimpse of the pale, grayish skin around his waist. You could see the organs through if the dark purple lobe of the liver and the coiled sausage of the intestines. It was enough to put Effie off her food for an entire day. Waker had the jelly eyes as well, that's what Mog Willey used to call them. Eye whites that protruded too far from their sockets and were so full of fluid that they jiggled when they moved. Waker's father didn't have them so Effie imagined they'd been passed down from his mother's side. The thought of meeting a woman with eyes like that made Effie hope the journey to Clan Gray lasted an especially long time.
At least she assumed that's where they were going. Waker had made it clear to her from the very first night he would answer no questions from a child.
"You'll be quiet, girl, unless you fancy the gag."
Effie did not fancy the gag. Even in the confusion of all that had happened that night, she knew she didn't want that wet and moldy ball of ragging thrust in her mouth. "I will not cry out," she had told him quite calmly. "I doubt if the men crossing the river would aid me even if I did."
Waker Stone had glanced across the Wolf at the city men army crossing on barges. "You're a smart one," he told her, "but don't make the mistake of imagining you're smart enough to fool me."
It had been ten days since she'd been abducted from the clearing by the waterfall. That first night Waker had dragged her north through the brush that choked the riverbank to a camp set up in the tumbled-down ruins of an old stovehouse. Part of the stove was still standing, and although its iron door had long since gone, the big wrist-thick hinge pins that had held it in place were still sunk into the brick. Waker had shackled her to them while he explained the rules she would now live by.
"You'll be fed and treated fair as long as you are silent and obey me. The first time you attempt to run I will capture you and cut off your left hand. Try it again and my knife moves up to your elbow. If you're foolish enough to attempt a third time you will die—not because I will kill you, because no one's ever survived having their arm hacked off at the shoulder." He looked at her hard with his pale, bulging eyes. "Do you understand?"
She did and nodded.
"Good. Tomorrow I put leg irons on you. Once they are on there is nothing in my possession that can remove them. I carry no ax strong enough to cut the chains or no pick with the correct bore to punch out the pins. Do you understand this also?"
Again, she had nodded.
"Very well. I'll send the boy over with some food. You will eat it and then you will sleep."
The boy had turned out to be Chedd Limehouse, a big lumbering redhead from Bannen who she had been surprised to learn was only eleven. He'd been taken three days earlier, he explained the next day when they were finally alone. Her leg irons were on by then—ankle cuffs forged from matte gray pig iron strung together by a two-foot chain—and Waker had gone off to sell Chedd's horse. Chedd had been taken by the river too. Not the Wolf, but by its northern tributary, the Minkwater, that drained the uplands above Bannen. Chedd had been turtling in the rock pools close to the bank. It'd had been a good day for it, he explained. Warm enough to have roused some snappers from their winter sleep. He had been alone except for his horse. "Waker came out of nowhere, he di
d," Chedd whispered. "One minute I'm turning over a great big dobber, the next I'm being dragged by the hair through the reeds." His horse had been taken too, and while Chedd and Waker's father had paddled upriver on the boat, Waker had ridden parallel to the shore. "He's not much of a horseman," Chedd confided knowingly. "Kept bending forward in the saddle and losing his stirrups."
Chedd didn't know why he had been taken, but he feared the worst. 'They're going to eat us—roasted whole on sticks. Either that or sacrifice us to the marsh gods: tie stones around our ankles and throw us over the side."
Effie wasn't having any of that. "There's no such thing as a marsh god," she'd told him, "and clansmen aren't cannibals. They're more than likely selling us to the mines."
To hear Chedd wail about that one you'd think he'd prefer to be eaten alive. "But it's not clan! They can't take us to Trance Vor… it's not… right."
Nor was being shackled and kidnapped, but Chedd did have a point. It was hard to imagine any clansman anywhere—even one who was cursed—selling clan children to the mine lords. Perhaps Waker was up to something else, but Effie couldn't imagine what that might be. Only two things were clear: they were slowly heading east toward Gray; and Waker wanted her and Chedd alive. So far the going had been slow. It wasn't just that they were paddling upstream, it was the need for caution. With all sorts of armies fighting over Ganmiddich, the Wolf River had become a dangerous place. Waker's father had knowledge of the waterways, and sometimes they would leave the main river and portage to the backwaters; the streams and meanders, the flood-season creeks and pools. They had circumvented the Ganmiddich roundhouse entirely, and Effie still hadn't quite worked out how. She just knew they left the Wolf for a day, poled up a fast-running tributary, portaged through an overgrown shrub swamp and then floated the boat on a second tributary, following the current downstream to the Wolf.
A Sword from Red Ice Page 22