Even though she knew she was being silly, Effie made a face at him. It really was too much, all the staring and silence and I-see-what-you're-about-girl knowingness. For want of something better to do she shuffled down to the shore and offered to help Waker Stone head the fish. At least she had the pleasure of surprising him.

Waker had set the fish trap the night before after they'd pulled ashore. He'd caught three fish in the wicker basket; a shiner and two small trout. They were still skipping. "Take the shiner," he said, handing her the trap. "Show me how you mean to do it."

She did just that, handling all three fish with confidence. The shiner wasn't much longer than her hand and it was what Mad Binny would have called a «no-biter»: you either ate it whole or threw it away. It wasn't worth heading or gutting, and Waker Stone knew it. Still, she laid it against the cutting stump, pinned its tail fin with her middle finger, and began making a scraping motion with the edge of her free hand. "Scaling," she informed Waker calmly. "Best done before you open the gut and chop off the head."

"So you know fish then," he said, looking at her with interest for the first time in all the days that she had known him. Abruptly, he turned his back on her. "Take it," he said over his shoulder. "Don't go lighting no cookfire."

Effie didn't very much want the shiner, but the habit of good manners, drilled into her over many years by Raina Blackhail, was strong and she took it After the time she'd spent hiding in the waterfall hollow west of Ganmiddich she no longer cared for fish. Especially raw ones. Trouble was, she'd stopped hearing Raina s voice in her head and begun hearing Da's instead. You kill it You eat it He could be hard, Da. Hard but right.

Better than boat oil, she thought as she raised the wriggling shiner above her head. She had wanted to make a dedication, like Chedd, but the words "For Blackhail!" didn't mean very much to her. Perhaps she'd been gone too long from her clan. Suddenly inspired, she cried "For Drey!" and dropped the silver fish into her open mouth.

It took some swallowing, but now that Drey's name was attached to it, it simply had to go down. She still didn't know what had become of her elder brother after the raid on Ganmiddich and in some hopeful and superstitious part of her brain she thought that if she got the fish down in one gulp then Drey would be made alive and well. The shiner went down. She could feel it bucking as her gullet muscles pushed it into her stomach. After that she needed to sit. Waker's father, who might or might not have been named Darrow, followed her progress with jab like movements of his eyes. She knew, in the weird and unspoken rules of the mutual game they played, that if she broke down and hid herself deliberately from his sight—say behind a tree trunk or a rock—somehow it meant he had won. And Effie Sevrance did not want to give him the satisfaction. So in plain sight she sat, away from the boat and up high against the hemlocks.

From here she could see Chedd climbing the cliff. He was close to the top now. His technique of pulling himself up by his arms and then swinging his lower body behind him was pretty impressive for a fat boy. Now she wished she had agreed to go with him, but the old fears still had a grip on her feet.

Open ground. See for leagues. She shuddered, though not nearly as strongly as in the past. A year back she wouldn't have left the roundhouse unless bullied by Raina or Raif, enticed by the thought of Shankshounds, or driven out by the word "Fire!" Effie Sevrance had never liked outside. The more open it was the less she liked it, therefore woods were better than fields, low ground better than high. She couldn't say why this was so. Well maybe she could but the explanation was so … illogical that she didn't like to admit it, even to herself. You were exposed outside. Revealed. You could see the lay of the land, the age of it, the gnarled rootwood and weather-beaten stones. And it smelled too. In the morning, that first wash of mist: that was the real true smell of the earth. It was old and watchful and tricky. It looked wide open, but all that air could be hard to breathe. The sky above was big and loose and if you looked long enough you could see it spin. Outside everything was moving, watching, growing, changing. Inside all was still.

And no eyes could find you there. Here was the strange bit—oh she knew the other stuff was odd, but this was odd on a different level— Effie thought something without good intentions was trying to seek her out. What that might be, she would be hard-pressed to come up with. She'd once overheard Orwin Shank talking to Jebb Onnacre about Mace Blackhail's mean-spirited dogs, "They're a malevolence, Jebb. They'll watch and wait, and then they'll bite you right on the knuckle so you drop the lock and they can escape."

That was how the searching thing seemed to Effie: a waiting malevolence. For as long as she could remember, right the way back to being a toddie when Drey and Raif would toss her, squealing and happy, from one to the other, she had believed that something was trying to find her. No one knew this—though Raif might have guessed something, for he was always extra protective whenever he took her outside.

What this thing might be, what it wanted, if it really existed or was just a thought that had got stuck in her mind, like a splinter, she did not know. All she knew for certain was that the feeling was strongest when she stood on open ground. Hollows, glades, even river channels that were lined with trees were preferable to high places and open places where Effie Sevrance might be exposed.

Things had got a lot better since she'd left the roundhouse. Poor Raina, she had thought to send Effie to a better life at Dregg. It hadn't worked out that way at all, but strangely enough it had still worked out. Effie knew that when Raina looked at her she'd seen a child who was too quiet and solitary, too interested in the Hailstone and the guidehouse and the dark, damp spaces beneath the roundhouse. After the trouble with the Shankshound being burned and Effie being accused of being a witch, Raina had feared that Effie would never be able to live a normal life at Blackhail and had sent her off to live with relatives at Dregg. Raina had hoped that Dregg would turn Effie around; Effie knew this for a certainty because Raina had come right out and told her. "You'll be able to dance there and make friends. Learn to cook and sew and fight with swords if it pleases you. They have lovely gardens, Effie, with waterfalls and box hedges and roses. You need to dig in them, get some sun on the back of your neck and dirt between your fingers. Run out to the plunge pond and grab fish, roll on the grass, laugh, suck hay, play."

Effie felt bad when she thought of Raina's words, as if somehow by being here she had let Raina down. Sometimes she thought it would be a good thing to send Raina a note. Caught fish, rolled in the grass, made a friend. Still waiting to learn how to sew. That was the funny thing, you see, by getting waylaid, first by Clewis Reed and Druss Ganlow and then by Waker Stone and his father, she was changing in the very sort of ways that Raina had hoped to bring about. Effie Sevrance in a boat, camping, cooking, laughing with Chedd, wading into the river to look for mussels and skimmers: those things would make Raina glad.

Thinking about Raina made Effie's heart feel heavy. There was no way to let her know that things were all right… and no way to be certain that those words would hold true. As the first spits of rain landed on Effie's dress, Chedd did a victory wave from the top of the cliff.He was shooting and holding something up, but she couldn't make out what he was saying. Standig, she waved back. On the shore, Waker had finished cleaning the trout and was wrapping the fillets in dock leaves to keep them fresh until tonight. Waker s father had risen and was flipping the boat. Off soon then, Effie concluded. Another day on the river heading east.