TWELVE Along the Wolf

Effie Sevrance sneezed. It was a big thick one with lots of snot. In the old days she would have been mortified; there'd be Letty Shank and Florric Horn squirming and crying "Eeeew!" Raina shaking her head and saying, "Really, Effie, get a cloth," and Da warning, "Wipe that on your sleeve and I'll tan your backside. I didn't trade two unopened fawn carcasses for that dress to be spoiled within a year." Da never tanned her backside, not once. She knew he didn't mean it. He knew that she knew. It was the thing that came after that hurt. "What would your mother think?" Effie reckoned those five words held more power than an entire armory of swords. They were like a spell: speak them and he who hears them will change.

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&miAa be#tiful 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 Duffs 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.