Effie tried not to think about her lore, but Waker's father had a way of getting under her skin. Stoney broke. It was considered the worst kind of luck to lose your lore, like a doom. Inigar Stoop told chilling stories of those clansmen unfortunate enough to lose their lores. Jon Marrow had accidentally dropped his squirrel lore down a well shaft east of the Wedge. He was jumped by Dhoonesmen the next day, so the story went, and while he was defending himself against their hammer blows something horrible happened to his man parts. Effie thought they might have froze. Then there was the tale of little Mavis Gornley, who had lost her lore whilst riding to the Banhouse to wed her betrothed, a dashing Bann swordsman with teeth filed to points. As soon as she realized her grouse lore was missing, Mavis had dismounted and retraced her steps, carefully inspecting every hoofprint made by her horse. Mavis was so intent upon looking down that she hadn't see the big grizzly who came loping out of the woods and tore off her head. The only way to save yourself from similar misfortune was to rush back home to your clan guide and beg him to replace the missing lore. This was a tricky business apparently, and could take several months. During that time you were left vulnerable and unprotected and were advised to stay inside.
Well, Effie thought, glancing up at the crumbly red walls of the gorge and the hemlock forests that lay beyond them. There's exactly nothing I can do about that.
In a way the stories didn't bother her. Bad luck was something she didn't believe in. It was the actual missing of the stone that felt bad. She hadn't realized how much she had relied upon the ear-shaped chunk of granite until it had gone. Her uncle Angus had once told her how bats were able to fly in the dark. "They listen for their cries bouncing back off trees and walls." "But they don't make any sound," she had replied. "Not any that you can hear," he had countered. She'd thought about that conversation many times since, as it seemed to her that her lore was a bit like bat ears: able to detect sounds that no one eke could hear. Vibrations caused by changes. Stirrings in the air. Course when you put it into words it also sounded a bit … pikish, but Effie Sevrance knew what she knew. And she missed knowing it. That was the worst thing, the absence of reassurance, the forewarning of danger. Now bad things could happen and she would only know about them at the same time everyone else did.
It was like losing a sense. And a tooth. The hole was there, new and strange, and she kept poking it in disbelief.
Realizing that she'd been paddling for too long on one side, Effie switched her oar to the right. It was getting colder and her breath began to make clouds. She thought she detected the pitchy green sharpness of burning pine and searched for woodsmoke above the tree line. She couldn't see any, but Waker Stone's father wasn't taking any chances and steered the boat closer to shore.
The curved prow of the boat glided over the still water, and for a while the only sound to be heard was the muted splash of paddles as they broke the surface. Oddly enough the silence seemed to waken Chedd and he jerked forward in his seat and had to scramble to steady himself.
"Looks like we're going ashore," he said to Effie, glancing around.
"Silence," Waker warned, muscling the paddle. The walls of the gorge were closing in on them, and Effie could see rocks beneath the water. Red spruce and birches extended out over the river, their limbs fingering the surface. Effie could not see how it would be possible to go ashore. The cliffs were too high and there was no place to beach the boat. She thought perhaps that Waker was using the cliffs for cover, that by pulling close to them he was making the boat less visible from above. It was no use asking questions, that was for sure. Spiced peas and information were two separate things.
Using his paddle as a tiller, Waker's rather steered around the rocks with ease. As they rounded the river bend, Effie saw that the gorge wall was lowering and wedges of forest had forced their way to the shore. Undercut cliffs had toppled forward and sheets of sandstone lay half-submerged in the water, bleeding sand the color of rust. Waker was paddling with long, deep strokes and the boat moved quickly around the ledges. Both he and his father appeared to know this stretch of the river well and anticipated problems before they reached them. Just as they were moving out from the shore to avoid some willow-choked shallows something dropped into the river about thirty feet ahead of them. Effie had been minding her paddle strokes, and didn't catch what it was, but she saw the splash. A big crater in the water. Waker turned around and nodded at his father. The Grayman's eyes were bulging with force, but he looked more displeased than afraid. Effie noticed that just before he dug his paddle into the water for his next stroke his right hand slipped away to check on his twin knives.
Once they'd passed the shallows they headed to the nearest landing. As Waker and his father maneuvered the boat parallel to one of the collapsed sandstone ledges, Chedd glanced back at Effie, his eyebrows high. Effie shrugged weakly. It would have been a pretty good time to have her lore.
Waker tied the mooring rope around a fist of rootwood that no longer had a tree attached, and then draped the air bladder over the side of the gunwale to act as a buffer against the rocks.
"You two," he said, looking from Effie to Chedd. "Stay here. Keep your mouths shut and don't try anything." Waker's eyes jiggled like gut fat as he waited for them to nod. Satisfied, he sent a hand signal to his father, plucked his daypack from beneath the bow seat, and alighted onto the ledge.
As Effie braced herself against the roll of the boat she checked upshore. The cliff wall that had been exposed when the ledge collapsed was deeply, damply red. Trees had not yet found their way into its crevices, but ropy vines were creeping down from the woods above. Two ravines split the cliff. The largest was running with meltwater that frothed over big sandstone boulders. The second appeared to be a path leading up. Waker headed toward it, jumping across a break in the ledge along the way. Within seconds he had passed out of sight.
Chedd, Effie and Waker's father sat in the boat and waited. Effie put her booted feet against the back of Chedd's seat to give them a rest from the standing water. Just as Chedd turned around to complain about them, men's voices sounded overhead. Someone shouted, "Weapons on the rock." In the silence that followed, Effie imagined Waker pulling out his twin knives, the frog and the salamander, and placing them carefully on the appointed ledge. Her gaze tracked the the path Waker had taken into the narrow, winding ravine.
Suddenly harsh laugher exploded from a point lower and closer to the shore. Metal was rapped against rock. Something squealed. A command was issued in a low, guttural voice and the sound of footsteps tramping brush and crunching stone soon followed. Behind her, Waker's father drummed his fingers lightly against the flat of his paddle. As the footsteps grew louder and closer, Effie realized that Waker was being marched back down the ravine. Someone was holding a spear or a stick that scraped against the sands stone with every step. What she saw next was hard to fathom. A black-and-pink pig came into view. It was haltered like a horse with a bit between its teeth and someone was leading it on a leash. The pig's eyes were small and mean and its hairy chewed-up ears flopped around the sides of them like blinkers. Snuffing wetly, it snouted through the sedge and berry canes at the bottom of the ravine. The man holding the leash came into view next. He was nearly as ugly as his pig. His nose had been broken so many times it looked as if it had knuckles. Hefty but turning to lard, he was dressed in a stripy red-and-gold cloak and donkey-hair pants that were too tight. His weapon was a two-pronged spear that he held upright like a pitchfork. A slack iron chain, not unlike a hammer chain, connected the spear head to a leather band at his wrist.