"Jones, J V - Sword Of Shadows 02 - A Fortress Of Gray Ice V2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones J. V)

“I know you see only the bleakness of this guidehouse. Don’t deny it. It’s plainly written on your face. What you don’t see is the life behind it. When I stand here and take a chisel to the guidestone I deal in men’s souls. Every man and woman in this clan holds steel fired by Brog Widdie and powdered guidestone ground by me. Which is the most powerful, Raina? Tell me. That which kills or grants grace?”
He paused, not for her to answer, but to allow her time to think. The Hailstone smoked behind him, a giant slowly dying as it froze.
“It would not be a bad life for her. Sparse and solitary, yes, but ordered and meaningful too. I think if you were honest you would say it would suit her. She came here often enough of her own free will. You know she is happiest in closed, dark spaces. Let me take her and teach her. She can sleep on one of the benches, and take her meals with me.”
Almost he persuaded her for there was much truth and sense in his words. Effie feared open spaces; gods knew how they would get her to Dregg. But get her there they would. What Inigar offered was a kind of half-life, led amidst darkness and quiet and smoke. Raina would not have it for her. She had raised Effie as her own child, taught her how to speak and hold her spoon, and she wanted simple happiness for her. She wanted her to dance at Dregg.
Inigar read it all on her face, and she was prepared for his anger, but in the end there was only resignation. “Take her then,” he said. “No matter if she ends up in Dregg or the farthest Badlands you cannot change her fate. She was born to the stone, Raina Blackhail, she wears it around her neck. You’re an eagle and can see clearly and know I speak the truth.”
She nodded, and there was nothing else to say, so she left him there in the darkness, a broken man with a broken stone.
———«»——————«»——————«»———
She couldn’t get out of the roundhouse quick enough. Running, she made her way along the tunnel and out through the entrance hall. People saw and tried to hail her, but she paid them no heed. She needed light and wind and freshness, and she raced to the stables to saddle Mercy.
Sweet-faced Jebb Onnacre trotted out her mare. “I thought you might be taking a run,” he said. “Be careful around Cold Lake, the ice is rotting there.” As she took the reins from him their eyes met. “I’ll be telling anyone who asks that you headed south to the Wedge.”
She thanked him, glad in her heart for the small kindness. Jebb was a Shank by marriage, and their loyalty to Effie remained unchanged. Orwin Shank knew where the girl was hidden, and Jebb had doubtless guessed that Raina was on her way there. Well she was, but she’d lay a little ghost trail first. Mace had her watched and she had to be careful.
Little mice with weasels’ tails.
Shaking off her unease, Raina gave Mercy her head.
Oh, it was glorious to ride! To feel the mare’s muscles beneath her, and the wind buffeting her chest. She grinned with the joy of it, sending Mercy galloping over a series of hedgerows for no good reason at all.
South first, must be careful, she counseled herself, somehow afraid that her joy might make her careless. Turn west only when you reach the trees.
They had tried to find Effie, of course. Mace and Stanner Hawk and Turby Flapp. They suspected Raina and the Shanks had concealed her, but the Shanks and the Blackhail hammermen had closed ranks: Effie was one of their own, and no one was going to find her, so help them gods. Mace had questioned Raina about it, casually asking why she’d ridden out so often these past ten days, especially given the freeze. He knew she was lying, but could not press her. After all, his interest in Effie had to be seen to be purely honorable, a chief concerned for a little girl. He did not fool Raina. She knew whose hand lay behind the burning of the hound. She had heard the threat herself.
Slowing her pace to a canter, Raina turned for Cold Lake. All about her stone pines and black birch showed signs of the sudden freeze. Ten days back the temperature had dropped so low so quickly that you could hear the trees exploding. A thaw had begun a week earlier and the winter-starved trees had begun drawing water. Longhead said that the freeze couldn’t have come at a worse time, for the water in the pines turned to ice and split the trunks clean open. Over five hundred mature trees had been lost in the Wedge alone, the worst anyone could remember in a single season.
More bad omens, thought Raina grimly as she turned onto a little-used dogtrot to the lake. Two hours passed as Mercy worked her way through a mire of half-frozen bulrushes and mud. Raina found herself thinking longingly of the fine trail that led directly from the roundhouse to the lakeshore and could be traveled in less than an hour. Damn rushes! They tore her ankles to shreds, and gods only knew whether firm ground or water lay beneath them. When she finally spied the ugly little crannog extending out across the lake, she let out a great sigh of relief.
Mad Binny was out upon the pier waiting for her, cool as if she’d known all along Raina would come. The old clan spinster was dressed in black, and she held a wooden mallet in her hands. “For the fishes,” she said in greeting, seeing Raina’s gaze upon it. “They come up to the surface by the poles, and they’re slow at this time of year.”
Raina could think of nothing to say to that, though she did notice that several fair-sized bull trout lay skipping at the spinster’s feet. Dismounting, she looked over the queer little crannog Mad Binny had claimed as her own.
Raised on stilts above the water, it commanded the southernmost shore of the lake. It had been built by Ewan Blackhail in the time of the River Wars, when every clan chief worth his guidestone was obsessed with running water and the need to defend it. Looking around, Raina could not understand the crannog’s position, for none of the streams that fed the lake looked wide enough to hold a boat.
Still, men would be men, and if other clans were building defensive crannogs then so, by gods, would Blackhail.
Trouble is, this one hadn’t been built well at all—Hailsmen not being rivermen and so being unfamiliar with the challenges of building over water—and forty years later it had fallen to ruin. The roof sagged and had been mended here and there with bulrushes and animal hides, the window frames were rotten and broken and an entire wall of outbuildings had half sunk into the lake. Gods knew what lay beneath the water. It was a wonder the thing still stood.
“You’ll be wanting to see the bairn then?” Mad Binny squatted and hit one of the skipping trout with the mallet. “She’s inside, learning how to make a broth to boil a fish.”
Raina was growing accustomed to being speechless in this woman’s presence. It was hard to believe that this strange, big-boned woman had once been a great beauty, betrothed to Orwin Shank. Birna Lorn, her name was, and some old men in the roundhouse could still recall the day Orwin and Will Hawk fought for her hand in the graze. Not much later she had been named as a witch, for she had correctly predicted that Norala’s unborn child would be born dead. If I ever turn into a prophet, Raina thought dryly, I’ll keep all the bad news to myself.
“You should learn how to kill a fish, Raina Blackhail,” Mad Binny said, clubbing another trout. “It’s good practice for killing men.” Brilliant green eyes caught the light, and Raina couldn’t decide if she saw madness or cleverness in them.
“Take me to Effie.”
“Take yourself. Door’s right there, what’s left of it. I’ll be in when I’ve headed the trout.”
Knowing that was one thing she definitely did not want to see, Raina climbed the rickety ladder and made her way inside the crannog. The room she entered was dim and warm, scented with the mulish odor of wet rot and lit by a tiny iron stove. Effie stood by the stove with her back toward Raina, stirring a little pot. She was singing as she did so, some song about the shankshounds and how they had once saved a baby from the snow. Standing at the doorway, watching her, Raina realized that she had never before heard Effie Sevrance sing. When a board beneath Raina’s foot creaked, Effie jumped, spilling the broth.
Fear changed to recognition in an instant, and Effie ran to her with arms stretched. “Raina! I’ve been making broth! Did you know you put carrots and onions in it, and then boil them till they nearly disappear?”
Raina nodded. She was still seeing Effie’s jump of fear in her mind and her chest was too tight to speak.
“Binny says it won’t be done until she brings the trout and I boil their heads in it. Is Drey back yet?”
Raina had visited Effie three times in nine days, and each time she did so she was greeted with the same question: Where was Drey? Disentangling herself from the girl’s embrace, she thought what best to say. It suits Mace to have Drey away at the moment while he decides how best to deal with you. So he keeps coming up with things your brother can do that will keep him far from home. No, that wouldn’t do. Aloud she said, “I heard word from Paille Trotter’s son. He saw Drey seven days back at Gnash, and thinks Drey will head home soon.”
Effie was not fooled by Raina’s forced optimism, and she returned dispirited to her broth.
Raina wanted nothing more than to comfort her, but she knew better than to speak lies to a child. “So, what has Mad Binny been teaching you?”
“Lots of things. Cooking. Herbs. Do you know that maggots can eat the pus from a wound and make it heal faster? And that piles shrink when you put vinegar on them?”
Raina laughed. In many ways the clan guide had been right: Effie needed to learn. Suddenly tired, Raina sat on an old chicken crate, content simply to watch Effie chop onions and stir broth. She had to believe she’d done the right thing. The guidehouse was no place for this bright and lovely girl.
In this light you could hardly see the scars. Effie’s long lustrous hair covered most of them, and the one on her cheek had been so expertly stitched by Laida Moon that it looked as if a fine feather rested there. Some would think it beautiful. Raina did.
“Here we are. Trout. Effie, put those heads in the pot. Yes, they have eyes. Too bad they didn’t use them.” Mad Binny took command of the room, detailing how the broth should be made and the fish cooked, directing Raina to the woodpile for firewood, and Effie to the storage chest for hard liquor. It was a relief to let someone else take charge for a change—even if she was a madwoman—and Raina found herself surprisingly happy to be told what to do.
When they had eaten a good plain meal of trout in its own broth and black rye bread smothered in honey, Mad Binny told Effie to go outside and try her hand at stunning passing fish with the mallet. “But it’s nearly dark,” Effie observed.
“Even better then. They’ll be half asleep already.”
Effie had no argument for that, and she picked up the mallet and let herself out. Raina had her money on the fish.
“So,” said Mad Binny, pouring a double measure of malt into Raina’s cup. “Has that old sourpuss Inigar Stoop made a play for the girl yet?”
Raina couldn’t stop her eyes from widening.
“You needn’t look so pelt-shorn, Raina Blackhail. Why d’you think they drove me to this mud bucket in the first place?”
“I . . . well . . .”
“Aye. I’m either a madwoman or a witch. Possibly both.” Mad Binny slammed the malt flask onto the table, flattening a fly. “I’ll tell you this, Raina, that girl can’t stay in Blackhail. And if you don’t know that you’re a fool.”
Raina nodded, still reeling from the turn of the conversation. “I’m planning to move her to Dregg.”
“When?”
“When her brother returns. She won’t leave without seeing him.”
Mad Binny raised the malt flask and studied the squashed fly. “Well, she’ll be leaving soon then, as Drey Sevrance is on his way here this night.”