A Sword from Red Ice

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 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."