The Fork-Tongue Charmers

by Paul Durham

  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.

  Seeing strange things in the dark didn’t frighten her anymore. 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 earsplitting 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 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 the 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.

  4

  Messages Undelivered

  Harmless tried to make Rye promise not to follow him out onto the shoal. Even if a wave dashed him against the rocks he wanted her to stay put—at least until the storm blew over. Rye had just frowned. Surely Harmless had gotten to know her well enough to realize she couldn’t promise that.

  He’d been gone nearly thirty minutes when she finally threw caution to the wind and gathered the supplies she imagined she might need for an ocean rescue—a lantern, a coil of rope, a flask of hot stew. Fair Warning, her mother’s knife that had once bitten the hand of Morningwig Longchance himself, was sheathed inside her boot, although the fiercest thing Rye had ever done with the blade was shuck an oyster. Icy rain slashed her face as she stepped onto the slick stone steps, but she stopped abruptly as a drenched figure emerged from the fog.

  It was Harmless, a shivering body in a sleet-crusted cloak dangling from his arms. Rye was shocked to see that it wasn’t her mother. It was the body of a girl.

  Rye and Harmless huddled by the fire in the entry hall, where Harmless had carefully laid the child. “Were you going on a picnic?” Harmless asked with a smirk, nodding at her flask.

  Rye’s eyes flared.

  “Sorry, a poor time for humor,” he said softly. “Your friend is most resourceful. She found a little cove to hole up in and wait out the storm. It was dry . . .” He glanced down at his sopping clothes. “Relatively speaking.”

  Rye looked at the girl in anticipation.

  “Give her a drink of stew,” Harmless said. “I’ll fetch some dry clothes.”

  Rye watched for any movement in her friend’s face, her white-blond hair frosted to the color of snow, glassy eyes flecked as blue as ice chips.

  “Folly,” Rye whispered.

  Folly’s eyes focused at the sound of Rye’s voice. Her red cheeks creased into a grin.

  “Here, drink,” Rye said, and pressed the flask to Folly’s purple lips.

  She accepted a big mouthful and swallowed it down, her grin turning into a frown.

  “Ugh, what is this?”

  “Snails, whales, and sea bug tails.”

  “Really?” Folly said, her eyes now brightening with interest. “Can I take some for an experiment?”

  “Of course,” Rye said, and smiled at her best friend, the ever-aspiring alchemist. She handed the flask to Folly, who cupped it in her cold hands.

  “How did you find us?” Rye asked.

  “Your mother was talking to my mum at the inn,” Folly said. “She received your message from the rook but was worried that you hadn’t replied to hers.”

  Rye wasn’t surprised that Folly had overheard her mother. She suspected her friend must have the biggest ears in Drowning—there was scarcely a story or secret whispered around the Dead Fish Inn that she didn’t catch wind of sooner or later. But the fact that Rye and Harmless had missed a message from her mother was more troubling.

  “What message?” Rye asked eagerly.

  But Folly’s cheeks had lost their color after their brief exchange and she fell silent, her teeth chattering so fiercely she could barely part them long enough to swallow sips of the steaming stew. Only after Folly was good and dry, bundled in blankets and dressed in Rye’s extra shirt and leggings, did Harmless and Rye bring her upstairs to the big table by the fire. Harmless busied himself in the pantry. Folly’s blue eyes were wide, marveling at the most unusual surroundings.

  She took notice of Harmless, who appeared to be wringing the neck of a very recently deceased fish over a tumbler.

  “What’s he doing?” she whispered to Rye.

  “Mackerel oil,” Harmless replied from the pantry. Rye had long since discovered that there was little Harmless didn’t hear or see.

  “Helps keep the mind sharp,” he explained, tapping his temple as he examined the cloudy liquid that now filled the glass. “Care for some? I know better than to ask you, Riley.”

  “Uh, all right,” Folly said.

  Rye cringed at Folly’s mistake. Harmless looked most pleased to bring an extra mug as he joined them at the table.

  “So, Folly,” Harmless said, “as delighted as we are to hav
e you pay us a visit, I must ask what brings you out here in such foul weather. Riley mentioned a message.”

  “It looked to be a pleasant day when I left the village this morning. It finally felt like spring,” Folly said. She took a sip from the mug Harmless had offered. She gave him a tight-lipped smile, strained to swallow, and politely slid it away. “The weather turned rather suddenly,” she rasped.

  “Indeed,” Harmless said. “A fickle storm this late in the season is not a good omen. But, more important, the message?”

  Folly seemed to hesitate. “Mrs. O’Chanter sent a message by rook. Two days ago now. You never received it?”

  “No,” Harmless said. “The fellow on the ledge turned up yesterday but bore no message. He seems to have had a rough go of it.”

  Folly swallowed hard. “You heard what happened to the Mud Sleigh? On Silvermas?”

  Harmless and Rye exchanged looks, and Harmless nodded to Folly.

  “They say it was . . .” Folly began, and peeked over her shoulder out of habit. “. . . the Luck Uglies.” She whispered the name, even though she knew very well who and what Harmless was. “After the attack on Good Harper, the Earl’s new Constable made some immediate changes. ‘Valant’ he’s called, and from what I’ve heard, he’s not like the other lawmen.”

  Rye saw Harmless lean forward, listening intently.

  “My father says Valant has a long reputation—whatever that means. He doesn’t stay in one town for more than a few months. I heard he came from Throcking most recently. He makes the prior constables seem like lambs.”

  Folly paused, shifting in her seat before continuing.

  “Among other things, Valant has . . .” Folly hesitated.

  “It’s all right, Folly,” Harmless said. “You can speak freely.”

  “He . . .” She looked at Rye with eyes that made Rye’s stomach sink. Folly swallowed hard before forcing out her words. “Burned the Willow’s Wares.”

  “What?” Rye shouted in alarm. The Willow’s Wares was her mother’s shop.