by J. V. Jones
Waker and his father executed a series of sharp turns that zigzagged the boat around an island of woody rushes and steered them away from the main channel. Soon the rushes began closing in. They formed fences on either side of the boat, rising as tall as ten feet, bristling and pale, flattened in places and crushed in others. They stank like meat broth turned bad. Effie scrunched up her shoulders and brought her elbows to meet across her chest. She did not want them scratching her. Festerers, that’s what Drey would have called them.
Both Waker and his father sat. Waker ceased poling completely, but his father began a tilling motion with the paddle, gently keeping the boat in motion. The channel narrowed and the rushes created a tunnel around the hull. Rush heads scraped against the gunwales, rustling and scratching, bending and snapping off. A sting of pain on her cheek told Effie she had been stabbed, and as she raised her hand to bat the offending stem away she spotted the dim glow of lights reflecting in the water. The sight of them made her gulp. They were a deep, unearthly green.
Waker grunted something to his father, and the old man took his paddle from the water. Effie turned to look at him and she watched as he cupped his hands around his lips and issued a deep whooping noise, like a crane. A second passed and then the call was returned from two separate locations. Waker’s father grinned at Effie as she turned to track them.
“Feed the dog a bone. Girlie’s coming home.”
Suddenly the reed stands cleared and water opened up ahead. Effie saw rings of green lights burning just above the surface. Waker stood again, but before he resumed poling he glanced over his shoulder at Effie and Chedd. A man checking on his cargo, Effie thought. She hoped Chedd had stopped feeling the ghosts. Behind her, Waker’s father began rummaging noisily through a sack. Effie tried to resist thinking about what he was up to but in the end she could not bear it, and looked round.
It took her a moment to understand what she was seeing. Waker’s father was combing his near baldy head with a pickax, dragging the scant and greasy hairs back one by one. He had a mean and victorious look in his eye. Effie began work on her best, most withering glare—the man truly was insane—and then the missing piece of the puzzle fell into place. The memory of Waker’s words from a month earlier burned through her brain like drops of acid. “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.”
She had believed him. She and Chedd had believed them.
She had lost her lore and nearly died because of those chains. And he had still kept them on her. Foolishly she had thought there was some honor between them and that after Waker had pulled her from the water she owed it to him to be a good passenger. She had owed him nothing. He and his father were kidnappers, and if she and Chedd had thought there was a possibility of freeing themselves from the chains they would have tried an escape. Chedd Limehouse and Effie Sevrance would have given it a go. The master faker and master gamer could have cooked something up.
Effie felt betrayed. And stupid. And suddenly very afraid. She and Chedd were going to be fed to the bog.
Waker’s father waited for full comprehension to dawn’s on Effie’s face and then carelessly tossed the pickax in the water.
Facing front, Effie tried to breathe away the tightness in her chest. She should have snatched the pickax from him and put it through his eye. More soberly she wondered if she would ever tell Chedd. Was there any point? Only if the fish decide not to eat us.
A fortress of bulrushes encircled the open water that contained Clan Gray’s roundhouse. Dark paths led through the tangle of hard canes like mouse cracks in a wall. Waker completed punting the boat through one such crack and they floated into the shallow lake. Giant rings of green light burned just above the water. Effie could hear the hiss of marsh gases and smell the methane. The Gray roundhouse was a black hump in the center of the lake. Massive torches circled it, their stands twenty feet high, their heads shaped like giant beehives. The same eerie green flames that flickered above the water burned at the top of each torch.
The roundhouse sat on an island of oozing mud shored with stones, bird skeletons, muskrat bones and a basketwork of canes. Wooden landings and causeways extended out from the main structure, supported by pilings for the first few feet and then left to float upon the lake. Ladders woven from canes and rushes led below the black water. Rafts and other shallow craft were tied to mooring poles. Some poles sticking out from the lake had iron baskets lashed to them; Effie could not see what was inside them.
Gray’s roundhouse was not round; it was an octagon made from rotting cedar planks and marsh mud baked into clinker. Part of it looked to be sinking. Bands of square windows ran along its upper stories but all of the shutters were closed. Some had been boarded up. A few had been sealed with metal bars. Weeds were growing from softened sections of roof timber and a snarl of chokevines was threatening to overgrow the clan door.
“Buckets of mother-mud!” Chedd whispered with feeling. Effie had never heard that particular curse before but it seemed to sum things up.
A man and a woman floating on a basic raft of lashed logs moved to intercept the boat. The woman had a scrawny coon hat perched on her head like a bird’s nest—she was the one doing the poling. The man was sitting cross-legged. He was wearing muskrat furs dyed green, and his skin was mottled like a newt’s.
“Way-Ker,” he said, turning the name into two separate words and seeming somehow to disparage it. “What birdies have you brought us today?”
Waker set down the pole and let the boat drift toward the raft. “Boy and a girl. Real nice. The boy has the old animal skills and the girl . . .” Waker turned to look at Effie with his oversize bulging eyes. “She’s a smart one. There’s no telling all she can do.”
Effie spat at him.
Waker’s expression didn’t change as the spittle landed on his cheek and in his eye. He blinked, and as he did so he seemed to be dismissing Effie Sevrance as someone who no longer held his interest. Raising his fist he wiped his face clean and returned his attention to the green-fur man.
“She’s from Blackhail,” Waker told him, “and the boy’s a Bannerman.”
The man’s gaze settled on Effie. His eyes were the same black tar as the water. “Haul ’em up. Come see me tomorrow—I’ll mind you get paid.”
Waker’s father steered the boat so it pulled alongside the raft. The woman with the coon hat set down her pole and gripped the boat’s gunwales to dock the boat against raft. Waker turned to Chedd and said, “Up.” He meant both of them, but he never looked at Effie Sevrance again.
Chedd and Effie stood, their leg chains rattling in unison. Understanding that they had limited movement, the green-fur man slid over to the edge of the raft and helped them alight. Chedd first. Effie next. The man’s hands dug deep into Effie’s armpits as she stumbled against him. “Good shot,” he whispered, as he guided her down onto her backside. He might have winked at her, but she couldn’t be sure.
As soon as she and Chedd were safely on board and sitting down, the coon hat woman pushed off from the boat.
“Girlie, girlie, girlie, girlie. Never assume you’ll be treated fairly.”
It was the old man’s idea of a farewell. Effie ignored it. She did not look at him or his son as the woman turned the raft and poled toward the Grayhouse.
“I reckon you’ll both be hungry,” said the green-fur man, tossing Effie and Chedd an apple each. “That Waker is a tight one with his stores.”
Chedd and Effie looked at each other and then the apples. Was the green-fur man trying to fatten them up?
Suspicious, Effie dropped her apple in the water. Chedd looked regretfully at his own apple but eventually did the same.
The green-fur man shrugged. The coon-hat woman shot out a hand and plucked Chedd’s apple from the water.
“We won’t go willingly to the bog,” Effie said loudly and firm
ly. “We’re prepared to fight.”
The green-fur man chuckled knowingly. “Believe me, girl. If I intended to feed you to the bog, the pike would be eating your eyeballs by now.”
Chedd Limehouse and Effie Sevrance exchanged a long and surprised glance as they floated across the black-water lake toward the Grayhouse on a raft made entirely of relief.
FORTY-ONE
Raina Blackhail
Anwyn Bird was laid to rest in the manner of honored clansmen. Laida Moon, the clan healer, and Merritt Ganlow, the head widow, prepared the body over several days. Anwyn’s brain was scraped out with a bladed spoon, and her torso was split open and the organ tree removed. Her skin was washed with milk of mercury and left overnight to dry. A soft putty of gray clay, silver filings, powdered guidestone and mercury salts was packed into her body cavity and skull. Her eyelids and mouth were drawn closed and sealed with clear resin. Laida fastened the torso with sutures of silver wire. Merritt brushed and braided the three-foot-long hair, securing it with a silver-and-jet clasp given by Raina Blackhail. The body was covered in a winding sheet of black linen and rested on a stone-and-timber plinth in the destroyed eastern hall.
As the women prepared the body the men rode out to the Oldwood to select and fell a basswood. A hundred-and-twenty-year tree was chosen and a loose line of over three hundred men formed, each waiting to take his turn with the ax. The felled log was limbed and dragged back to Blackhail by a team of horses. As the weather was judged uncertain it was brought into the house. Longhead hollowed it out with a carpenter’s chisel, and the roughly finished log was left to cure for two days.
It had not been long enough, for the sap was still oozing and the sulfur wash that had been brushed on the inside walls now dripped on Anwyn’s naked body. The clan matron had been entombed in the hollow of the tree. Raina shivered as she saw the yellow splotches on the mottled blue skin of the corpse. She stood on the greatcourt and watched the men lift the basswood onto a flat-bedded cart, their movements synchronized by terse orders from Orwin Shank. The great weight of the twelve-foot log made some of the older clansmen shake, but pride kept them shouldering their share of the burden.
Hundreds of clansmen and clanswomen stood in silence as Orwin Shank clicked the team of horses into motion and drove Anwyn Bird’s body east toward the Wedge. It had been a small victory for Raina, that insistence that Anwyn not be laid to rest in the Oldwood as was planned and considered proper. She had won it not by reasonable argument or by wielding whatever small power she had left as chief’s wife. She had won it by a near-hysterical fit thrown in the presence of many people in the greathearth. “No,” she had cried when she learned where Stannig Beade intended to place the body. “No. No. NO!”
After the outburst Stannig Beade had seemed pleased to let Raina have her way. It had been dark days for her then and she looked back now and realized she had lost some essential portion of control. And she was not sure she had it back.
Certainly she knew enough to play her role as grieving friend and chief’s wife on the greatcourt this gray and cloudy morning. She kept her silence and nodded acknowledgments at people, her bearing grave. But beyond that she felt wild and not-properly-hinged; an insane person playing at being sane.
People were treating her as if she were a damaged piece of pottery likely to break. They were careful with her, watchful, attempting to buffer her from shocks. Raina despised such treatment and would not normally have stood for it, but she could not rally the will to bring it to an end. It had its comforts, the buffering, the cautious care. She was fed and clucked over, shielded from the messages that arrived nearly daily from Ganmiddich and Bannen, and relieved of the duty of running this vast and creaking house.
Merritt had stepped into her place, emerging from the widows’ hearth like an ancient warrior called by a sacred horn. Raina did not mind it much. At least Merritt was a Hailsman.
“Are you not coming?” Merritt said to her now as the cart lurched from the solid stone of the court onto the softer, lower surface of the road. “I’ll walk with you.”
The head widow’s hand fluttered toward Raina’s arm but Raina stepped away from it. She wanted no one touching her. “I am not going.”
Merritt opened her mouth to protest this latest strangeness, but then thought better of it. Lips pressed into a tense line, she nodded curtly, and left to join the procession that was forming behind the cart.
Raina stood still against the flow of people. Corbie Meese, holding his delicate wife Sarolyn firmly by the waist, nodded to her as he passed. No man or woman would ride a horse to the laying-down of Anwyn Bird. They would walk the league and a half to the Wedge, where Stannig Beade would be waiting for them by a site he had deemed suitable to one of such high status. It would be a wooded glade cleared of snow or a stone bank above a stream, or perhaps she would be laid close to one of the paths so all that used the Wedge in the coming months would see her slowly blackening corpse and pay the respects that were its due.
Blackhail never buried its dead. They were left to rot on open ground, often in full view of hunting tracks, roads, rivers and lakes. Children who played in the woods and fields might stumble upon the hollowed-out basswoods and receive a lesson in death. No matter how beautifully a corpse was prepared, how it was rubbed with poisons and packed with precious metals, the flesh always corrupted in the end.
Raina recalled a nasty trick played on her the first summer she was here. She had befriended a handful of clan maids, Ellie Horn was one of them, and it had been decided they would go to the Oldwood to collect the wood violets that were in bloom and could be brought home and pressed into oil to make unctions. The girls were high-spirited that day, their voices sharp, their whispers theatrical and broken off by sudden gales of laugher. Raina recalled Ellie Horn complimenting her most particularly on her dove gray wool dress. “So pretty,” she had said. “What would you call the color? Mouse? Mud?” The rest of the girls had giggled wildly while Ellie just looked at Raina with big fake-innocent eyes. Raina remembered the skin on her face pulling tight. She had been unsure of herself in such new company and had said nothing in her own defense. They had reached the first stand of trees by then and it seemed easier to go along and pick violets.
After they had spent an hour or so in the woods Ellie Horn had sought her out. “I’m sorry for what I said about your dress. It was mean of me.” There was such candor in Ellie’s voice, such appeal in her bright blue eyes, that Raina had immediately believed her. “Look,” Ellie had continued, moving closer. “I just found the best, most purply violets growing out of that downed log over there. I was going to take them myself, but then I started feeling bad about what happened and I thought to myself, I’ll let Raina pick them.” Raina had hesitated. Ellie nodded vigorously toward the old felled log. “Go on. You’ll be surprised by how fine they smell.”
That was the first time in her life Raina had seen a dead body. She had approached the log hopeful, not about the violets as much as about the prospect of friendship with Ellie Horn. Ellie was the important girl in the clan. The prettiest, the most smartly dressed, the ringleader. Raina recalled seeing something black and burned-looking and not understanding what it was. She had moved closer, smelled the sickly foulness of rank meat, and then recognized the contours of a face. The blackened skin was floating above the skull, suspended on a sea of maggots.
She had not screamed. That must have disappointed Ellie Horn and the other three girls who were hiding in the shadows behind the yews. The girls had broken into nervous, excited laughter and it was only then that Raina fled.
It had been one of the many hard lessons she’d had to learn at Blackhail. This was not an easy clan. Its roundhouse lay the farthest north of any in the clanholds, and had not been designed to keep out the cold or take advantage of the bright northern sun. It had been built solely for defense. The main structure had so few windows that there was only one chamber in the entire building where you could be sure to feel sunlight on a clo
udless day. The winters were long here, and springs came late. Raina had learned to set aside the light and airy pleasures of Dregg—the dancing, the hotwall gardening, the embroidering with city-bought silks—and had replaced them with more earthly ones instead. There was the pleasure of a sprung trap with a mink in it, the delight of being recognized by a herd of milk cows and the satisfaction of building a hot blazing fire against the cold.
She had learned to love Blackhail, and its proud, grim ways. She had even become proud and grim herself, and when friends or kin visited from Dregg she would feel superior to them. We are the first amongst clans, she would remind herself as she tolerated their frivolities. That claim was Blackhail’s alone. Dregg might be brighter and better situated, but it would never be first.
Raina stared at the cart rolling across the graze and the crowd of people walking behind it and tried to hold on to some of that old and deeply held pride. She had the sense that if she could it might anchor her. She feared that she, Raina Blackhail, was drifting free of this clan.
How much could a person lose and remain whole? A husband, peace of mind, a dear friend? What was left? Dagro was gone. Effie was gone. Now Anwyn. She lived in a house full of strangers, some of whom wished her harm. Since Dagro had died her life had been this clan. But this clan had changed. The Hailstone had shattered and the gods had fled. Stannig Beade had wheeled in half of the Scarpestone to lure them back, but no god would enter such an ill-begot stone. Blackhail was cursed. Its chief had murdered its chief, its guide was a man who would stop at nothing to gain power, and the guidestone at its heart was as dead and useless as Anwyn Bird’s corpse.
Breathing hard, Raina turned her back on the procession. She found herself staring directly at the Scarpestone that stood on its tarnished silver plinth at the center of the greatcourt. Work had just been completed on a wooden canopy that would be hung with skins to protect the narrow hunk of granite from rain and snow. Raina’s lip twitched as she looked at it. At first she had wondered why the gods didn’t simply destroy it as they had the first Hailstone. It would be an easy thing for a god—an exhalation. Now she realized the gods didn’t care.