Call Of The Rift: Crest , livre ebook

Ecw Press - Jae Waller

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250 pages

English

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'Step through the portal into a world ravaged by chaotic spirits and corrupted magic in the third book of The Call of the Rift high fantasy series.Kateiko Rin lives a quiet life with her parents and her people in the coastal rainforest. Everything changes when her estranged uncle washes up on their shores, harried and half-dead, trailed by two blue-eyed children no one knew existed. To protect her family, Kateiko secrets away her young cousins. Caring for them includes hiding their ties to the Roonbattai, a warlike cult trying to claim the land for themselves along with as many lives as they can. With the immigrant mage Tiernan and his companions Jorumgard and Nerio, Kateiko enters into the fray, facing strange, dangerous magic that unwinds the fabric of time. She must end the war before it tears the land, and her family, apart.In the third book in The Call of the Rift series, Jae Waller invites us into another dimension and introduces an alternate version of h

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Children's

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	18 mai 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773056517
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

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Extrait

Call of the Rift: Crest
Jae Waller

Contents Dedication Maps 1. The River 2. Strangers 3. Festival 4. Through the Fray 5. Voyage 6. Customs House 7. Golden Oak 8. White Wolf 9. Child of the Forest 10. Turquoise Mountains 11. Brånnheå 12. Plains of Nyhemur 13. Rainy Day 14. Family Near and Far 15. Apothecary 16. Caterpillars 17. Reunion 18. Lady of the Woods 19. Taking Root 20. Laudanum 21. Break 22. A Year without Stars 23. Fourth Elken War 24. Ombros-Méleres 25. White Raven 26. Like Flying 27. Thin Ice 28. Oaks & Lilacs 29. Kianta Kolo 30. Ivy House 31. Honour & Hope 32. Somewhere Safe 33. Goodbyes 34. Letters 35. Nettle Ginu 36. The North 37. Rolling the Die 38. Tjarnnaast 39. Bøkkhem 40. Ghosts Epilogue Glossary Gods, Spirits, Mythology Aikoto Ferish Sverbian Phrases, Slang, Profanity Cultures Aikoto jouyen: North Aikoto jouyen: South A Brief History of Eremur and Surrounding Lands Acknowledgements About the Author Copyright

Dedication
For Kathleen
“A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary.”
— Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Maps

© Tiffany Munroe
© Tiffany Munroe

1. The River
“Ooh, how about this, Kako?” Nili thrust a scrap of amber cloth at me. “If I embroider that in white, you’ll look all shimmery.”
“You’d lose me on the lake.” I waved at the sun-struck cove where we lounged with our friends, cooking breakfast and preparing for the day’s work. Shafts of golden light cut through puffy clouds and glittered in the morning mist. Cottonwoods with yellowing leaves shaded the beach, dripping dew into puddles with tiny plinks .
I went on sharpening my fish knife. Every autumn Nili sewed me new shirts and leggings, and every autumn we argued about it. She insisted that bright berry dyes would complement my colouring — brown hair, brown eyes, tanned skin. I wanted something dark for tromping around the muddy rainforest.
After I refused her fifth choice, Nili shoved swatches back into her fabric bag. “I don’t know why I care,” she huffed. “You’ll outgrow them anyway.”
“Sorry. Should I stop wearing clothes?”
“ That’ll get Canoe Boy’s attention.” She snickered. “Are the duck potatoes done? I’m starving.”
I knocked a bundle of singed leaves from our campfire. While Nili grew up learning textiles from her mother, my mother had spent years teaching me to sense and control water. Closing my eyes in meditation, I slipped my mind through the leaves to the small roots inside the bundle, measuring the water temperature and the amount of steam. I peeled the charred leaves back with my knife to reveal small steaming roots. “Perfect—”
Cheering interrupted me. Several boys were spitting squash seeds onto a tarp, competing to get one furthest. Onarem, an axe-jawed leatherworker, raised his fists over his head and called for anyone brave enough to challenge him.
Nili stood up. “Ai, bludgehead!”
She popped a seed in her mouth and spat. It soared over the tarp and plunked into the lake. Onarem gaped. Nili kissed another seed and spat it at his bare chest. Laughter rippled through the onlookers.
As we ate, an ochre-red canoe slid into the cove. Its high prow was carved into a kinaru, the long-necked water bird that was our tribe’s sacred crest. I peered at the paddler and swore. If I’d known Rokiud was home from summer travels, I’d at least have brushed my hair.
“ Yan taku ,” Nili breathed as he landed. “I forgot how lush Canoe Boy is.”
I pushed her jaw shut. Like every boy in our tribe, the Rin-jouyen, Rokiud went shirtless to show his tattoos, which included crossed paddles on his chest for being a canoe carver. He’d razored off his hair, leaving a thin black layer like leaf fuzz. It highlighted the sharp angles of his face.
Onarem punched his arm in greeting. Rokiud swiped at his head. Onarem tackled Rokiud and they rolled head over boot, shouting joyfully and trying to pin each other in the shallows.
Nili elbowed me. “Go say hi.”
“I’m done wasting time on Rokiud,” I said, picking soot from my fingernails. “I have things to do. Training for my water-calling test, working my trapline—”
She looked at me like I was made of stupid. “You passed every practice test, and it’s not trapping season yet. C’mon.” She pulled me to the shore and beamed at Onarem. “Kateiko and I wanna go fishing by the old smokehouses. Can you take us?”
Onarem scrambled up, dripping. “Uh, my canoe’s only got two seats—”
“Riiight,” Nili sighed. “Guess we gotta ask someone with a bigger boat.”
“Nei, hang on,” he stammered. “Rokiud, why don’t you bring Kateiko? We’ll all go.”
Rokiud grinned at me, shaking droplets off his head. “Do your water-caller thing and we’ve got a deal.”
My stomach flip-flopped. I seeped my mind into the fibres of his breeches to dry them, acutely aware of his muscular legs. I tossed my fishing gear into his canoe’s bow, then stopped when I noticed gouges in the hull. The carved kinaru’s bill had broken off. “What happened?”
“I went over a waterfall and hit some rocks,” Rokiud said. “No big deal. I resined over the damage, so it hasn’t rotted.”
He’s the rotten one , my mother would say. For years the elders had refused to initiate him as a carver — first for skipping lessons, then sneaking off to river-race, then stealing his father’s war canoe to race again. The day they were finally going to evaluate his work, he’d found crude symbols painted on his hull, probably a prank by another kid. I’d made new paint from ground ochre, helped Rokiud cover the symbols, and dried the paint just before the elders arrived.
His proud look while getting his carver tattoo had been the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Then, before I worked up the nerve to say anything, we’d separated for summer. My family had canoed to an alpine village of itherans, the foreigners who’d settled around our land. In the high pastures, busy trading my furs for goat wool, I’d tried to forget about Rokiud. Here, eye level with his radiant smile, my resolve melted like honey in sunlight.
I dropped onto the bow seat and grabbed a paddle. Rokiud leapt into the stern and pushed off. We glided from the cove onto the lake proper, framed by steep valley walls dense with forest. Tendrils of mist parted around us. Nili and Onarem followed in his boat, her laughter carrying across the turquoise water.
All along the beach, canvas tents hung from huge conifer trees. The canoes at my family’s campsite were gone. Everyone must’ve left for the day. My father had jokingly moaned that I’d grown up enough to avoid my parents, but they didn’t mind as long as I gathered my share of food. I wondered if I could keep it secret that I was going fishing with Rokiud — then a voice hollered my name.
Fendul, a lanky older boy wearing a sheathed sword, walked out from the woods. “Where are you headed?” he called.
I raised my fishing net. “To catch bears.”
He looked unamused. “Remember to stay off the downriver branch of Kotula Iren. It’s not safe these days.”
“The river I canoed every summer to get to the ocean until your father banned anyone from going?” Rokiud said. “You think I’d forget?”
Fendul rubbed the lines tattooed around his arm, a marker that he was our okoreni, the second-in-command of the Rin-jouyen. “If you knew what’s going on out there—”
“Let’s go,” I interrupted. Fendul and I lived in the same plank house at our permanent settlement. I got enough lectures from him.
We pushed off again. Rokiud’s bitterness radiated like smoke. Earlier this year Fendul’s father, our current leader, had declared the war-torn coast too dangerous to visit — for everyone except Fendul’s family, who’d travelled there on some diplomatic whatever. All I knew was itherans kept fighting over land that wasn’t theirs to begin with.
“Where’d you go instead this summer?” I asked Rokiud.
“A new village up north,” he said. “Some itherans fled the coast and settled in the high mountains. It’ll be rough come winter, but I guess they plan to stay, ’cause they hired me and my brothers to build log cabins. Waste of our skills.” He shook his head. “Anyway, how was your trip? Did you . . . y’know?”
I winced. Coming of age was the most sacred rite in the Rin-jouyen. Our ancestral spirits gifted us an animal body, our attuned form, that we could change into at will. Rokiud had attuned at twelve and most of our friends at thirteen. I was well into fourteen and still waiting. Surely soon , my parents whispered when they thought I was asleep.
Most people kept their attuned form private, but Rokiud had boasted that he got the form of a blackfin whale, sleek and deadly. Other kids dared him to prove it, so he transformed in the lake and capsized their canoes. He was only a year older than me, but ever since then, there’d been a gulf between us. I stowed my paddle and started untangling my net so I didn’t need to meet his eyes.
“Wait,” Rokiud said. “Let’s go down the river and see if the salmon run started.”
“Fendul just said—”
“Piss on that. You think I attuned by doing what I was told?”
My insides lurched. “You’d break the rules to help me?”
He shrugged. “I owe you for the canoe paint. Couldn’t have passed my carving apprenticeship without it.”
Refusal pressed on my tongue, but Fendul’s warning seemed ridiculous. The coastal skirmishes were thirty l