The Fork-Tongue Charmers (4 page)

Rye and Good Harper huddled under a tall pine. Rye shivered more from the shock than the cold. She couldn't comprehend what had just happened.

“A pox on the Luck Uglies and their bargains,” Good Harper muttered. “Mouse droppings for the whole lot of them.”

No sooner had he uttered his curse than a specter clad in black leather and fur appeared like a flickering shadow. In the moonless night, Rye could have mistaken it for a massive wolf rising up on its hind legs, but in its hands, two blades glinted in the light from the fire. Rye pressed her back against the tree. There was nowhere to run.

“Come to finish the job?” Good Harper called defiantly.

The shadowy figure loomed for a moment then, stepping forward, violently thrust its swords downward. Rye pinched her eyes tight. She heard the steel sink into something moist. Perhaps she was just too numb to feel their bite. But when she cracked open one eye, fearful of what she might find, she saw both blades embedded in the ground.

The figure pulled off its wolf-pelt hood and clutched her by the shoulders.

“Riley,” the man whispered, his familiar gray eyes wide in a face of faded scars. “What in the Shale are you doing out here?”

“Harmless!” Rye exclaimed. She blinked in disbelief. “You tell me—you're the one who sent for me!”

He gently touched her cheek. His hands, like the rest of his body, were etched with tattoos, and while Rye didn't think there was anything magical about the circular patterns on his palms, whenever he did this it seemed to warm her whole body, his night-chilled skin notwithstanding.

“Make no mistake, I'm always glad to see you,” he said softly. “But I did nothing of the sort.”

Rye shook her head as if she didn't hear him correctly.

“Three Luck Uglies came to our cottage with a message. And here, on the river, there was a man—a Luck Ugly, I thought. He called himself Slinister.” She shuddered at the thought of his split tongue. “He said he knows you well.”

Harmless's jaw hardened. A darkness seemed to creep through the lines of his scarred face. Rye had only seen brief flashes of that look before, and each time it had unnerved her. Harmless must have sensed her unease, and pulled her close. His embrace and tender tone shielded her from the fire in his eyes as he scanned the burning river.

“Don't fret,” he whispered. “We'll sort this out in due course. But right now we must be on our way. I know a safe place to spend the night.”

The hour was late by the time Harmless escorted Good Harper to the closest roadhouse on the path back to Drowning. But to Rye's surprise he then led her away from the warmth of the inn. They traveled not to the village but over the edge of a tall bluff and down the jagged coastline. Waves crashed around them as Harmless navigated a rocky shoal that seemed to lead directly into the sea. He stopped only when they reached a mountainous outcropping nestled among the tide pools.

“Here?” Rye asked in disbelief.

Harmless put an arm over her shoulder and waved a hand above him. “Here.”

What looked to be a massive sea stack loomed over them. But now, within spitting distance, it became clear that it was nothing of the sort. The battered rocks had been hollowed out, and rising from the waves were two enormous doors. Each the width of a castle's drawbridge, they were wide enough to sail a ship through with the tide out to sea, but would once again become a submersed secret when the water rolled back in. A towering, weatherworn mansion seemed to grow out of the craggy rocks, its crooked gables, twisting turrets, and jumbled archways slinking upward like coral in search of sun.

Rye shot Harmless a wary glance from under the folds of his fur cloak.

“You'll like it. It's a secret—even from the Luck Uglies,” he said, appealing to her insatiable curiosity. “We won't stay long. I promise to return you to Drowning in short order.”

But as luck would have it, the lingering hand of a stubborn winter delivered one last blow the next morning. And no one, not even Harmless, the High Chieftain of all the Luck Uglies, was going anywhere at all.

R
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 eighty-nine
.
Two hundred 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 traveled outside of Village Drowning. She shook off the unnerving feeling and resumed her count.

Two hundred 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 gray 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 thirty
, Harmless broke through the surface of the water. He pulled himself onto the rock and refilled his lungs with a great gulp of air. His long dark hair was tied into a wet knot atop 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, gray 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 harbored radically different notions than 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-Tongue 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 symbolized 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-Tongue 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 onto 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 visit 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 realize 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-Tongue 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.