Читать книгу Dishonour Among Thieves - Paul Durham, Paul Durham - Страница 10

YE SAT ALONE on a cold, black rock jutting out from the sea. She counted in her head as she stared at the violent, churning waves. Two hundred and eighty-nine. Two hundred and ninety. Rye hated being alone. She liked waiting even less. But she didn’t dare move for fear of slipping on the barnacles and being dragged out by the current.

A dusky brown gull struggled to fly against the wind.

Rye squinted at the bird. It gave her the sudden sense that she’d been in this spot once before, which was odd, since she had never travelled outside of Village Drowning. She shook off the unnerving feeling and resumed her count.

Two hundred and ninety-nine. Three hundred. Five minutes now.

A gale sent the gull hurtling off in the wrong direction and it disappeared into a brightening sky that had been grey with fog and snow since Rye’s arrival.

Rye pulled her new seal-leather coat tight at the collar, its thick hood snug over her head and its long hem covering her to the knees. Even in an ocean storm it kept her remarkably warm and dry. The seal whose hide it was made from met no harm. The reclusive northern salt seal was the only mammal in the world known to shed its skin. Harmless had given her this coat as a belated twelfth birthday present. He’d missed that birthday over this past winter, just as he’d missed all the others before it.

Harmless might seem like a strange name for a girl to call her father, but Rye’s father was – to put it nicely – an unusual man. Rye hadn’t even known that she had a real live father until last autumn. That was when he appeared like a wisp of smoke out of the ancient forest known as Beyond the Shale. He’d been gone for over ten years.

Not everyone had been happy to see him. Harmless was a Luck Ugly. An outlaw so notorious that he and all of his kind had been driven into exile by Earl Morningwig Longchance. But, with Rye’s help, Harmless was able to summon the Luck Uglies and once again save Village Drowning. It had been under attack by a fierce clan of Bog Noblins – vile, swamp-creeping beasts who had threatened the lives of the villagers. One would think that such an achievement would have earned a certain degree of appreciation from the Earl, but Longchance’s hatred of Harmless only grew. It was Harmless’s threat – that the Luck Uglies would be watching – that had kept Longchance at bay ever since.

Rye pulled her knees into her chest to avoid the whitecaps that snapped at her oversize boots like frenzied sharks. Finally, when her count reached three hundred and thirty, Harmless broke through the surface of the water. He pulled himself on to the rock and refilled his lungs with a great gulp of air. His long dark hair was tied into a wet knot on top of his head. The leather-and-tortoiseshell goggles over his eyes made him look like a bug-eyed flounder. Where the skin of his bare chest and arms wasn’t etched in the green ink of faded tattoos, it flamed pink from the cold. He dropped a heavy bag at her feet.

“How long was I down?” he asked with an expectant smile.

“About five and a half minutes?” Rye said.

Harmless frowned at himself. “Poor showing. I made it six the dive before.” He threw a heavy cloak over his shoulders and clasped on a runestone necklace that matched the chokers Rye and the rest of her family wore around their necks.

“Well,” Rye said, picking her numb fingernails, “I did lose track of my count once or twice.”

“Nonetheless, it was quite productive,” he said, brightening.

He reached inside the bag and retrieved a strange black object, holding it carefully between his thumb and forefinger. It was the size of an ordinary stone, flat on the bottom, but with long, sharp spines jutting out in all directions.

“What is that?” Rye said, and reached out to touch it.

“Careful. This is a midnight sea urchin,” he said with delight. “The most toxic creature in the northern oceans – one prick of its spine is enough to fell a draft horse. They make excellent darts.”

Rye pulled her hand back warily.

“It also happens to be our lunch.”

He unsheathed a sharp knife and cut open the bottom of the sea urchin. Rye peeked inside the shell. It looked like something Lottie might have expelled from her nose.

“Would you care for the first one?”

“Um, no thank you.”

“No worries, plenty for later,” he said, and slurped the creature up from its shell. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, carefully placed the prickly remains of the first sea urchin into the bag, and removed another.

Rye stared out at the churning waves around them. She couldn’t see more than ten yards in the swirl of snow, fog and ocean spray.

“Harmless, aren’t you cold?” Rye asked.

“Spring is finally in the air,” he said cheerily, eating the second sea urchin. “And the tide’s on its way out. Our path back to the house will soon be clear.”

Rye saw nothing but an impenetrable blanket of fog that consumed the earlier hints of sunlight.

“There’s always a path, Riley, you just need the courage to take the first step.” Harmless pointed into the fog. “Look, you can see the top of the first rock right there. Follow me.”

Harmless skipped across the slick rocks as if they were a well-worn trail through a meadow. Rye had improved with practice over the past few days, but the slippery brown seaweed still pulled her boots out from under her with the slightest falter.

A staircase rose from the waves, ending at a landing high above their heads. Scowling, barnacle-pocked faces loomed over them as they carefully climbed the hand-carved steps, the mansion’s walls sculpted into the shapes of hungry sea monsters, wailing hags and nautical gargoyles lifelike enough to put a scare into even the hardiest seafarer.

This was where her father had brought Rye after rescuing her from the woods. The place he kept secret – even from the Luck Uglies.

Harmless called it Grabstone.

They ate at the large table by the main fireplace, surrounded on all sides by salt-sprayed windows and sweeping views of the sea. One window was cracked open and a rather frosty-looking rook peered in from the ledge, sleet accumulating on its inky black wings.

“Have the rooks brought any word from Mama?” Rye asked.

“Nothing yet,” Harmless said. He broke off a crust of bread from their loaf and dangled his hand out over the ledge. The bird eagerly took it from his fingers with its long, grey beak. “Don’t be too troubled by it, though. I wouldn’t be eager to fly in these winds either.”

Harmless had sent word of their whereabouts to her mother by way of a rook, much the way Rye and Folly used pigeons to convey messages back home. But even after several days and two more birds, there had been no reply.

“And what about him?” Rye asked.

In addition to carrying handwritten notes, Rye had seen the clever rooks communicate with Harmless in other ways. Occasionally they brought him what looked to be random nesting items; a scrap of leather, or piece of fishing line. But from them Harmless could glean distant comings and goings.

“Slinister masks his movements well,” Harmless said, and Rye tried not to cringe at the mention of his name. “But I suspect that, like everyone else, he and his allies hunkered down somewhere to ride out this storm.”

Harmless had explained to Rye that while Slinister was in fact a Luck Ugly, he was a man who harboured radically different notions from her father. They had once been fast friends, but a rift had grown between them over some matter Harmless didn’t elaborate upon. Slinister became the leader of a small but ruthless faction of Luck Uglies called the Fork-Tongued Charmers. They masked themselves in ghoulish white ash and blackened their eyes and lips with soot. Their name came from their gruesome custom of splitting their own tongues as a display of commitment. The disfigurement symbolised a pledge that could not be easily undone.

Harmless must have noticed the lingering look of concern on Rye’s face as she fidgeted with her spoon.

“I won’t lie to you, Riley. Slinister is a dangerous man, one haunted by wounds of the past. Even his name is an old jeer that he’s embraced and now wears defiantly. I am sorry that you ever had the misfortune of meeting him, and I’m afraid that I’m to blame for that. I’d heard the Fork-Tongued Charmers planned mischief for Silvermas – under cover of a Black Moon. I had been tracking them for weeks, but obviously I underestimated Slinister. And it turns out, I was an hour too late.”

Harmless shook his head, as if still puzzled by his own misstep.

“But why me?” Rye asked. “Why send a false message only to rob Good Harper and leave me freezing in the woods?”

“He lured you on to the Mud Sleigh so that I would find you there,” Harmless said. “Slinister wanted to show that he was one step ahead of me. It was wrong of him to use you that way, and I promise he will be held accountable.” There was a fleeting hint of darkness in Harmless’s tone. “But the message was a forewarning meant for me, and you are in no jeopardy.”

“How can you be sure?” she asked. She remembered Slinister’s parting words. Perhaps they would have a chance to meet again.

“We have rules – unwritten but understood – not unlike the House Rules your mother raised you with,” Harmless explained. “Answer the Call. My Brother’s Promise Is My Own. Say Little, Reveal Less. Lay No Hand on Children of Friend or Foe. Those are just a few. Sadly, ours don’t rhyme as cleverly as your mother’s,” he added with a smirk. “But the consequences of ignoring them are, shall we say, severe. No Luck Ugly would break them.”

“You realise it wasn’t so long ago that I broke every one of Mama’s House Rules?” Rye muttered. And besides, she thought, if Harmless was so confident, why did he feel the need to bring her here to Grabstone?

“You mustn’t worry, Riley,” he said reassuringly. “I knew that calling the Luck Uglies back to Drowning after all these years would bring with it certain … complications. Ten years is a long time for men of independent spirit to be apart. But the Fork-Tongued Charmers are still Luck Uglies. Once a Luck Ugly, Always a Luck Ugly, Until the Day You Take Your Last Breath. That is perhaps the most important rule of all. And as brothers, we will settle our differences in our own way.”

“And what way is that?” she asked.

Harmless pushed himself up from the table and bowed his head.

“More often than not,” he said solemnly, “by way of a dance challenge.”

“Harmless …” Rye said, pursing her lips and crossing her arms.

“It’s true,” he said, and did a few steps of jig so poorly it made Rye blush. “And if that doesn’t resolve it, we have a baking contest. The man who serves the best dumplings wins.”

“Then you’re doomed,” Rye said with a laugh, swirling her spoon in his homemade stew – a medley of sea urchins and other slimy things that crawled out of tide pools.

Harmless smiled and turned to look out the windows.

“There’s another blow coming in,” he commented, and Rye sensed he was happy to change the subject.

Rye reached out and snatched the rest of the bread while Harmless studied the approaching storm. She hid it in the folds of her shirt.

“Can we watch it from the Bellwether?” she asked. The Bellwether was the room nestled in Grabstone’s tallest turret – a chamber sealed shut at all times behind a door so bare it didn’t even have a latch or keyhole. Harmless had told her it was off-limits.

“You’re nothing if not persistent, Riley, but no.” He looked back at her. “When I bartered for Grabstone, the Bellwether wasn’t part of the arrangement. And you know I never break a deal.”

Harmless was always negotiating bargains of one sort or another. He didn’t seem eager to explain who Grabstone belonged to before, or what he had to trade to get a whole house, either. Well, the whole house except the Bellwether. Harmless seemed to do a lot of things other people might describe as dishonest – but breaking deals wasn’t one of them.

Rye shrugged and belched loudly after finishing the pungent stew.

“You’re welcome,” Harmless said. He burped too, and they both laughed.

Harmless had once told Rye that, in some cultures, a loud belch was how you thanked your host for a good meal. She and Lottie had eagerly adopted the custom. Their mother had not been pleased.

Rye climbed the stairs to her room. Grabstone was built tall and narrow. Instead of halls there were stairways – a great number of them. The bedchambers were situated in the tallest tower, beyond the reach of even the highest waves. This high up, she could hear the wooden timbers straining against the wind.

Pausing briefly at her own door, she continued up the last flight of dark steps. They ended at the Bellwether. No one – not even Harmless – was allowed in there, and yet Rye had heard footsteps on the floorboards overhead. On her first night at Grabstone, she saw shadows under the crack of her door. When she jumped from the covers and threw open the latch, the stairway was empty. Rye wasn’t persuaded by Harmless’s suggestion that it must be rats.

Seeing strange things in the dark didn’t frighten her any more. Not seeing them – that was still the scary part.

Rye removed the leftover bread from her shirt, crouched down and carefully placed it at the base of the Bellwether’s formidable door. Only a small glass peephole adorned its stark face. She peeked over her shoulder to make sure Harmless wasn’t coming, then pushed up on her toes, craned her neck, and was just barely able to press her eye against the circlet of glass. The distorted lens revealed nothing but cloudy shapes, as it had when she’d tried this before. Rye struggled to stay on her tiptoes, wishing she was an inch taller.

An ear-splitting noise rattled the entire tower and Rye leaped back.

Thunder.

She could tell the clouds had opened up, and a fierce, freezing sleet pounded the roof. Rye climbed back down the stairs to her room. The sky danced with light outside her window. Lightning bounced from cloud to cloud. Snow lightning was considered bad luck. The worst kind.

Rye sifted through a pile of unusual trinkets until she found her bronze-and-leather spyglass. Grabstone was full of oddities and minor treasures, the likes of which she had never seen before. Harmless had little use for them and Rye had already collected the most interesting ones here in her room. Rye squinted at the thin band of rocks and sand that stretched from below her window to the beaches and cliffs. Grabstone was connected to the shore by a treacherous shoal jagged enough to sink ships and thwart the curious who might attempt to venture there by foot. Normally, pipers, gulls and the occasional seal inhabited the shoal, but that day only waves and sleet battered its rocks.

Then Rye jolted in surprise. There was something out there. A light?

She lifted her spyglass for a closer look. It was indeed a light – a lantern. It bounced and bobbed, pausing as waves hit, moving forward quickly but clumsily through an afternoon that was now as dark as night. Rye held her breath. Who would be out in this storm? Another wave and the little light seemed to topple to the ground. Whoever was carrying it slowly regained their footing. Then, one final wave crested over the entire shoal, making it disappear beneath the sea for a just a moment, and the little light went out entirely.

Rye rushed down the stairs. She found Harmless in a small sitting room, its windows thrown open. He snoozed in a hammock strung to the beams of the house, the howling winds from the sea strong enough to rock him gently back and forth.

She shook him awake, the hammock now bouncing like a ship in a squall. He blinked away the sleep.

“Someone’s trying to reach us,” Rye said. “There is – well, there was – a light. Out on the shoal.”

“Hmm,” Harmless said, “I’m certainly not expecting anyone. Don’t worry, the rocks make quick work of uninvited guests.”

He folded his hands back on his stomach.

“Harmless, someone’s in trouble,” Rye said.

“Indeed. The sea is a more ferocious watchdog than the most ill-tempered hound.”

Rye shook his arm.

“Harmless, isn’t there only one person in whole world who could know where we are?” she asked urgently.

Harmless furrowed a brow. He was beginning to understand.

That person was Rye’s mother. She wouldn’t venture out to Grabstone unless it was of dire importance. And she wouldn’t stand a chance out on the shoal in that storm.