A Fortress of Grey Ice (Book 2) (82 page)

A day had passed and then another, and Effie hadn’t got very far at all. The barley was running low, and she was contemplating living on spice alone. At some point the trees had begun to choke the way ahead, and now all she could see in front of her were tree canopies and swirling river water. The Wolf had widened and it was suddenly difficult to perceive it as a whole. Below her a rocky shore curved inward and then was lost in a dense coppice of bushes. It was midday so she stopped to eat the last of the barley. Some of it was sprouting where the damp from the river had wetted it; you didn’t have to soak those bits for as long.

Effie watched the river as she ate. Its level had dropped in the past few days, and its water was clearer and more settled.

Great currents moved across it, creating crosshatched ripples and powerful tows. Close to its middle, water was turning in a huge spiral; Effie couldn’t understand why. She
could
wait and learn, though, and she sat and studied the kingfishers who dove down through its cold surface and emerged with wriggling fish; the treader flies who skimmed over the slack water at the shore; and the pair of fat-tailed beavers who were constructing a dam across a small channel separated from the main body of the river by a wall of rocks.

Then she spied the harlequins, a mated pair. They had emerged from beneath the coppice, swimming on a channel that passed beneath the ash bushes. Effie looked hard at the coppice. She hadn’t even noticed the water running there.

The harlequins swam the rapids for a bit, the big handsome male performing all sorts of cross-current hopping to impress his mate. The dun hen followed him effortlessly, her tail feathers moving like a tiller. When she’d had enough of her mate’s posturing she made her way across the eddies and swam under the channel cloaked by bushes. Effie waited but they didn’t come out. After a time she looked at the sky. Perhaps an hour or more had passed. It was time to follow the ducks.

The way down was treacherous, and the thorny-weeds tore holes in her skirt. By the time she’d reached the coppice she just
knew
bruises were forming. Crawling through the shallow channel under the bushes was positively, absolutely the worst thing ever. Every part of her got soaked—and not a caught-in-the-rain sort of soaked either. No. A genuine fallen-in-the-river sort of soaked. Her teeth were chattering like a whole lot of crickets when she finally pushed her way through to the other side.

The first thing she heard was the territorial honking of the male harlequin, and then she became aware of the crashing of water. Quite suddenly she realized the noise had been there all along, running alongside the roar of the river. She had entered a kind of draw in the cliffs, a little pocket screened from the river by bushes and rock walls. A waterfall streamed from the cliffs above, and the force of its drop had hollowed out a plunge pool in the rocks. The harlequins had made their nest there, beneath a birch brush.

It was the perfect place to hide. Straightaway she had stripped down to her small linens and laid her clothes over the rocks to dry. The ducks watched her warily, the male charging her if she drew too close to the nest.
Must have eggs
, she thought.

The idea of eggs made her mouth water—the red spice would taste most delicious on raw duck eggs—but her gaze had already been drawn to a second, if slightly less appealing, food source.

Fish. They came over the waterfall, dropping right along with the water, and landing so hard when they hit the pool that they were temporarily stunned. Watching them was as good as watching a puppet show at the Dhoone Fair. The noise they made when the slapped into the standing water was like . . . like the sound of a wet fish. Effie didn’t know the names of many fish, but she reckoned these were mostly shiners. Their scales were quite glinty, and they were silver and pink. When she got one and crushed it with a rock, its insides were full of bones. She tried a piece raw. Tried another, this time with the application of a great deal of the red spice. Her eyes watered as she swallowed. It was definitely time to build a fire.

The woody bushes provided good burning timber, but between the waterfall and the river everything was a bit wet. She broke off the most likely-looking branches, using her foot to stamp them free, and hauled them to the driest place she could find. Even here, on a flattish rock in the middle of the clearing, the drift from the waterfall still sprinkled them. Effie frowned as big wet blobs fell on her tinder pile. There was exactly nothing she could do about that.

Kindling, that was what she needed. Turning a critical gaze around the inlet she searched for something dry and crackly. Raif could start a fire with almost anything, that was what Da always said. Pity he wasn’t here now. Him and Drey.

No. No.
No
, Effie warned herself.
Absolutely no feeling sorry for yourself.
Sevrances had never been cowards or complainers.

Warmed a little by her anger, she ran over the rocks and around the pool for no good reason at all. Letty Shank and Florrie Horn would be scandalized. Running around in her smallclothes! Did she think she was a child, not a maid of nearly nine?

Her running scared the ducks and sent them fleeing from the nest to the safety of the water. Effie slowed to a halt and watched them.
Good time to steal eggs
, said a little voice inside her. No. They were berserkers; it wouldn’t be right. At least not until she got
really
sick of fish.

Still. Something beneath the birch bush drew her eye, and she crossed over and knelt beside it. The nest was perched on a platform of pebbles that kept it high and dry above the river water. It was protected from the waterfall by the canopy of the bush. Seven pale green eggs lay in a thick matting of straw, down, twigs and moss. Kindling. Effie reached in, carefully nudged the eggs to one side, and then tore off a big chunk of the nest.

She giggled on the way back. It was probably the first time ever in the history of nest-raiding that someone had taken the nest, not the eggs. As she stuffed the kindling around the firewood, the male harlequin returned to the bush to investigate. Effie tried not to move too much as he poked nervously around the nest. She’d caused him enough anxiety for one day.

The fire was not nearly so easy to light as she’d imagined. She had taken possession of Clewis Reed’s flint and its iron striker, and it made good sparks, but catching them on the kindling was difficult. They were fickle things, and sometimes the wind helped and sometimes it didn’t. It took at least three hundred goes to start the kindling burning, and it had grown dark by then and the knuckles on her striking hand were bleeding.

Once the flames had gotten started on the wood, Effie went to fetch her clothes and basket. Her skirt and cloak were still pretty damp, and she tried to work out a way to dry them. The whole fire business had left her exhausted, and she couldn’t think of anything cleverer than putting on her dress and using herself as a drying rack. It was a horrible thing, to pull on something wet, and it started her teeth chattering all over again. Steeling herself, she settled down to cook fish.

Ten days had passed since then. Every morning Effie awoke and thought,
Perhaps I might get going today
. But she didn’t. Here, in the inlet, she was safe and protected. Cliff walls surrounded her on three sides. The space was small and contained, about the size of the guidehouse, only rocky and a lot wetter. There were fish and water, and the fire didn’t go out
every
day. True, her clothes were never entirely dry, and sometimes she felt a bit lonely at night, but it had to be better than being in the wide-open spaces of the headland. Just thinking of them made her shiver.

No. She’d stay here for a while longer. Her lore would warn her of any danger, and there hadn’t been a peep out of it in days.

Besides, the harlequin eggs might hatch at any moment. The ducks were fat and glossy now—Effie supposed she wasn’t the only one to benefit from the stunned fish—and one of them attended the nest at all times. They’d grown quite accustomed to Effie, and only honked when she was especially close. She even talked to them sometimes, not that they listened, of course. It was more about hearing the sound of a human voice . . . even if it was just her own.

Feeling the sensation returning to her fingers, Effie pulled her hands from her armpits and wondered what to do next. Firewood, she supposed.
Not much fun but it has to be done
, that was what Jebb Onnacre used to say about clearing the stables of horseshit. Effie grinned as she walked toward the bushes. Collecting firewood
had
to be better than that.

The waterfall made it feel as if it were raining every day. It was pretty, she had to give it that, but rainy and noisy counted a lot more than looks, and she fervently believed the inlet would be much improved without it. Water droplets spattered her back as she yanked off ash and birch branches.

Effie’s hands began to return to a more normal color as she worked, and it made her wonder what the rest of her must look like. Absently she ran her fingers through her hair. She knew she wasn’t supposed to be vain about it, but Raif, Drey, Da and Raina had all said they loved her hair. Even Letty Shank had once admitted it was pretty enough, if you liked things the color of tree bark. It was, Effie thought rather disdainfully, a stupid thing to say. Tree bark came in all sorts of different colors, depending on the type of tree. Letty Shank wouldn’t know that because Letty Shank couldn’t tell a turnip from a pinecone.

Effie grimaced. Her hair felt like straw and there were
things
in it. Leaving the firewood where it was, she crossed to the fire and sat on the pallet of wagon canvas and heaped twigs she’d made to keep her bottom off the cold rocks when she ate. Using her fingers like the teeth of a comb, she worked on her hair, pulling out feathers and burrs and rubbing dried on mud until it disintegrated. It took a long time; Effie Sevrance had a lot of hair.

When she noticed the fire was burning perilously low she took a rest and went to fetch some of the firewood. It was getting dark, and she hadn’t cooked her three fish yet. As she bent to pick up a heavy branch of white birch she heard a shout from the east. Stilling herself, she listened. After a few seconds the shout came again, only this time it sounded south of her. Carefully, Effie laid the branch on the ground, and then brought her hand to her lore. The little ear-shaped chunk of granite was vibrating but with little force.

She held it, thinking. A shout to the east and then the south. Men were calling each other from across the river. The gold men! She stood. Perhaps the city traders who had been meant to take the gold from Druss and Clewis were finally making their crossing. Perhaps they’d arranged for a bargeman on this side of the river to bring them across.

Effie paced, agitated, unsure what to do. What did she owe the gold men? Nothing. What had she to give them? Only the information about Druss’s and Clewis’s deaths. The manner in which they had died was worthy of telling, but would city men value the knowledge in the same way clansmen would? What was her responsibility here? She owed nothing to the gold men, but what did she owe to Druss Ganlow and Clewis Reed?

Glancing at the bushes, she made her decision. She owed Druss and Clewis her life. The least she could do for them was go and take a look at the river and see who was crossing. Perhaps when she saw whoever it was she’d know what to do.

Quickly, she grabbed her basket and cloak. Already her skin was breaking out in gooseflesh at the mere thought of entering the channel again. Uncle Angus had once told her that the men who lived beyond the Topaz Sea used water as a means of torture.
Boiling?
she’d asked him.
No
, he’d said.
Cold. One drop at a time.

Effie snorted. They must have very delicate constitutions beyond the Topaz Sea, for her body was about to take a whole lot of cold droplets—and without her even speaking a word.

Not much fun but it has to be done.
Gritting her teeth, she knelt by the bushes and entered the water. By keeping her head low and pushing forward with her toes she managed to avoid the overhanging branches. She could feel the icy water seizing her chest, but thoughts of the Topaz Sea men kept her going. Ragged stones along the channel bottom scraped her knees as she cleared the coppice.

Effie could see nothing at first, just blackness where the river flowed. It was a dark night, the sky thick with clouds. Even when her eyes grew accustomed to the light level she still couldn’t make out much. The river glinted, a little bit, and she followed the glint east to see if she could determine the source of the first call.

Nothing. But then, farther in the distance than she’d imagined, she saw the pale red glow of a turned-down lamp. A thrill of fear made hairs rise on Effie’s neck—even the wet ones. She’d been right; someone was making a crossing. Two ferry-men were pulling one of the large flat barges used for transporting cattle and horses. The barge was rigged to thick guide-ropes that traversed the river, and both men were working cranks mounted to either side of the vessel. After a time the noise of the cranks drifted downriver and Effie could hear the swift
whir
of well-oiled wheels.

A crossing at night. Instinct made Effie keep very still. The gold men were likely to make a crossing at night, true, but surely a few city traders wouldn’t need so big a barge?

Her gaze tracked the barge as it labored across the river. As it neared the south bank she spied a movement on the shore. Yet it didn’t make any sense; it was kind of rippling, like a wheat-field in a wind . . . or thousands of ants moving on a hill.

Effie felt a blade of cold fear enter her heart as she realized what she was seeing. Not gold men, not smugglers. An entire army waiting to gain passage to the clanholds.

It would take them from now until dawn to cross the river.

The barge beached with a violent jolt and one of the ferry-men rushed to anchor it while the other removed the lamp from its post. Effie felt the world tilt on its axis as the lamp passed close to the man’s face.