It is a Spotlight Day!! Today I bring you Call of the Rift: Crest By Jae Waller. The third book in the Call of the Rift series! "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" (Goodreads synopsis). Below you will find an excerpt of Chapter 1 and a giveaway!
Publisher: ECW Press
Publication Date: May 18, 2021
About the Book
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 out-grow 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 leagues away. “I’ll go if Nili comes,” I said. If the boys did something dumb, she and I could take one canoe and go home.
Rokiud flashed that honey-melting grin. “Ai,” he called to Nili and Onarem. “Wanna look for salmon?”
Nili looked to me. When I nodded, she called back, “Sure.”
We paddled past the old crumbling smokehouses where we’d planned to fish, then past our sacred tree, an immense rioden with sprawling branches and mossy bark. Finally we rounded a forested point. Rumbling signalled Kotula Iren ahead. It’d rained overnight and the current ran high and fast, beckoning with promise. My future was out there in the unknown.
Our canoes hit white froth and careened onto the river. We glided around bends, slicing through patches of floating leaves. The rush was intoxicating. I knew that this sense of freedom was the real reason Rokiud suggested coming. It was too early for salmon. I’d have to return to the lake to catch enough fish to dodge my parents’ ire, but I would’ve gladly ridden the river forever.
Then Rokiud said, “What’s that ahead?”
In the distance, a speck floated on the water, growing larger. It shifted on the left, right, left. Someone was paddling a canoe upriver toward us, but the motion was weirdly off pace.
“Let’s go back,” Onarem said. “I didn’t sign up for getting caught.” “Nei, wait,” I said. “Are they in trouble?”
“Kaid,” Rokiud swore. “They will be if they lose to the current. There’s rapids further down.”
Something yanked in my gut. This felt like a test from our ancestral spirits. A brave person would help, but a responsible person would obey the rules and turn back. Maybe I hadn’t attuned yet because I didn’t know which I was. I thought of the gouge in Rokiud’s canoe, imagining the stranger’s craft hitting a boulder.
“Fuck the rules,” I said. “We ’re going to rescue them.”
Onarem dropped his protests when Nili told him to shut up. We paddled hard and soon neared the stray boat. Its prow was uncarved and tall enough to handle ocean swells. A man was slumped inside, clutching a paddle that dragged uselessly through foaming water. I grabbed at his canoe and missed. The current yanked it out of reach. We’d nearly caught up again when the canoe disappeared around a bend. We rounded it, too, and hit rapids coursing through a ravine. Echoes roared off the rock walls. The stray canoe spun this way and that. Whitecapped waves struck its hull, rocking the man’s limp form.
“I’m going for it,” Rokiud yelled over the thunder of water. “Gonna need your help, Kateiko.” He yanked off his boots, dove into the river, and swam toward the stray canoe.
I kept paddling as I dropped my mind into the current, struggling to restrain it. Nili tossed Rokiud a rope. He looped it around the stray canoe ’s prow. She hauled it in while Onarem kept them afloat, but rapids kept pulling the crafts in opposite directions. I called on as much water as I could, sweat running into my eyes, and guided all three canoes forward until the ravine widened to reedy banks.
Nili and Onarem tumbled ashore and pulled in the stray canoe. With a last surge of strength, I ran Rokiud’s canoe aground. The boys lifted the stranger and eased him onto the mud. He sagged, breathing shallowly, gripping his paddle like it was fused to his hands. One leg of his breeches was rolled up, exposing a sticky poultice over a crusted wound. I choked at the stench of infection.
Rokiud drew his fish knife and sliced open the man’s sleeve. Underneath was a kinaru tattoo. The man was Rin like us, yet I’d never seen his face. Neither had my friends, judging by their confused looks. I reached for his sleeve to tear it further and check his family crest.
“Stand back,” a voice commanded.
I whirled. Fendul stood on the riverbank. Birds landed around him and shifted to their human forms — an owl and falcon to Rin warriors, a black-billed swan to my dark-haired, tattooed mother. Rokiud and I backed up, hands raised.
My mother drew forward as if she were in a dream. She dropped to her knees and stroked the man’s hair. My eyes widened. No one in our confederacy would do that to a stranger. Touching someone ’s hair, one of the sacred parts of the body along with the heart and blood, was an intimate act saved for relatives and loved ones.
“Yotolein?” she breathed.
Before I could find words, Nili bent over the man’s canoe, pulled back a tarp, and yelped. Huddled in a pool of river water were two shaking children.
Excerpted from The Call of the Rift: Crest by Jae Waller. © 2021 by Jae Waller. All rights reserved. Published by ECW Press Ltd. www.ecwpress.com
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