A Sword From Red Ice (30 page)

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 admit, a beautiful 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 Duff's 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 us 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 it: 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 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 did,"
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.