by Paul Durham
Dedication
For Caterina and Charlotte,
whose magic makes dreams come true.
And for Wendy,
who stayed in the ring.
Contents
Dedication
Map
A Word about Villains . . .
Chapter 1 - The Gargoyle
Chapter 2 - The Willow’s Wares
Chapter 3 - The O’Chanters of Mud Puddle Lane
Chapter 4 - Scuttlebutt and Secret Rooms
Chapter 5 - Black Moon Rising
Chapter 6 - The Wirry Scare
Chapter 7 - The Dead Fish Inn
Chapter 8 - Curious Beasts
Chapter 9 - Watch What You Eat
Chapter 10 - The Man in Miser’s End
Chapter 11 - Things That Go Bump in the Night
Chapter 12 - Longchance
Chapter 13 - Unmasked
Chapter 14 - Leatherleaf
Chapter 15 - Trouble Afoot
Chapter 16 - The Spoke
Chapter 17 - Last Room at the Dead Fish
Chapter 18 - Grim Green
Chapter 19 - The Keep
Chapter 20 - A Blackbird Calls
Chapter 21 - Cold, Dark Places
Chapter 22 - A Lady’s Last Resort
Chapter 23 - House Rule Number Five
Chapter 24 - A Shady Situation
Chapter 25 - Luck Uglies
Chapter 26 - The Gloaming Beast
Chapter 27 - The Luck Bag
Epilogue - What Tomorrow Brings Us
Tam’s Pocket Glossary of Drowning Mouth Speak
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Map
A Word about Villains . . .
Mum said the fiends usually came after midnight. They’d flutter down silently from rooftops and slither unseen from the sewers under a Black Moon. Luck Uglies, she’d call them, then quickly look over her shoulder to make sure they weren’t listening. Father said the Luck Uglies weren’t monsters. Outlaws, criminals, villains for sure, but they were men just like us.
I still remember the night the Earl’s army marched through the village, forcing them north into the toothy shadows of the forest. Soldiers were sent to follow, but none ever returned. With time, the Luck Uglies faded into ghosts, then whispers. And finally, after many years, it was as if they had never existed at all.
—Anonymous Villager
1
The Gargoyle
Rye and her two friends had never intended to steal the banned book from the Angry Poet—they’d just hoped to read it. In truth, it was nothing more than curiosity that brought them to the strange little bookstore wedged between a grogshop and the coffin maker. But the store’s owner overreacted so strongly that they fled without thinking, the illicit tome still clutched under Rye’s arm.
The accidental thieves tore back out onto Market Street, bouncing off villagers who shared the winding, cobblestone road with horse-drawn carts and pigs foraging the sewers for scraps. The street was narrow and congested at the noon hour, its alleys clogged with foot traffic blocking their escape. The poet himself, hefty and determined, plowed through everything in his path. With a quick nod as their unspoken signal, the children changed course. Their escape turned vertical as they scattered in different directions, each searching for footholds in the jagged brick and mortar of the Market Street shops.
Rye had never been comfortable on the rooftops. They had scaled them once or twice before, but only as an avenue of last resort. She scrambled up the steeply pitched timbers, darting among the twisted chimneys, scowling gargoyles, and leaking gutters of Village Drowning. Black smoke billowed up from the shops and markets, fogging her cloak with the smell of cured meat and birch bark. She didn’t pause to look back for her pursuer—she’d been chased enough times to know better than that. Clearing the ridge of a gable, her momentum plunged her down the other side, legs churning uncontrollably to keep up. She stopped hard at the edge of the thatch-and-shingle roof, peering down past the toes of her oversize boots to the unforgiving cobblestones far below.
In front of her was freedom. Quinn Quartermast had already made it across a narrow alleyway onto the neighboring roof. He was all arms and legs, built perfectly for jumping.
Somewhere not far behind Rye was a poet with bad intentions, one who had proven to be a remarkably agile climber for someone of such large proportions.
“I don’t think I can do it, Quinn,” Rye said.
“Sure you can,” he yelled and waved her on.
“No, really. I’m not very good at this sort of thing.”
Rye looked out at the village around her. Drowning was more of a sprawling town than a village, one built on a foundation of secrets, rules, and lies, but mostly just mud. It straddled the edge of the brackish River Drowning, close enough to the sea for residents to smell the tide in the mornings and watch the brash gulls waddle into the butcher shop and fly off with a tail or a hoof. North of the river and the town’s walls were creeping bogs blanketed in salt mist, and beyond that, the vast, endless pine forest rumored to harbor wolves, bandits, and clouds of ugly luck. Villagers referred to it only as Beyond the Shale. Nobody respectable believed it to be full of enchanted beasts anymore, but old rumors died hard, and there was still a general notion that the great forest teemed with both malice and riches for those brave or foolhardy enough to go looking.
Footsteps pounded the roof behind Rye. They belonged not to the angry poet, but to a small cloaked and hooded figure that stormed right past her, arms pumping. It leaped into the air and landed with a thud and a barrel roll on the opposite roof, next to Quinn. The figure popped to its feet and pulled off its hood to reveal a crazy nest of hair so blond it was almost white. Her big blue eyes shone like marbles.
“He’s right behind me,” Folly Flood said between gasps.
“Just run and jump,” Quinn said to Rye. “It’s really not that far.”
“You’ve jumped this far a hundred times on the ground,” Folly added.
“Yes, but this is different,” Rye explained, looking down again. “Something will happen. It always does.”
“You can make it. Come on,” Quinn said.
“I’ve been told that I’m a little bit clumsy.”
“Nonsense,” Quinn said, without conviction.
“Absurd,” Folly scoffed, unconvincingly. “Now jump.”
“He’s a poet,” Rye said. “How bad could it be?”
“He’s angry,” said Quinn.
“And big as a humpback,” Folly added.
As if waiting for just such an introduction, the poet in question pulled his ample belly onto the far side of the roof. He was indeed angry—for a variety of reasons, Rye supposed. For one, nobody paid much attention to poets anymore. Most villagers wanted to hear words sung over harps or stomped out by actors in tights and feathered caps. Plus, as far as Rye could tell, books weren’t exactly flying off the shelves in Drowning, its residents more partial to fishing, fighting, and fortune hunting. In fact, the Earl who oversaw the affairs of Drowning had not only banned women and girls from reading, but went so far as to outlaw certain books altogether. None was more illicit than the book Rye now pressed close to her body, Tam’s Tome of Drowning Mouth Fibs, Volume II—an obscure history textbook that was widely ignored until the Earl described it as a vile collection of scandalous accusations, dangerous untruths, and outright lies. Even an eleven-year-old could figure out that meant there must be some serious truth to it.
The Earl’s soldiers had collected and destroyed every copy they could find. Rye had heard rumblings that the poet kept a copy of Tam’s Tome in a secret back room. On certain nights he would hold private re
adings for rebellious nobles with inquisitive minds. Rye and her friends had no silver shims to buy their way in, so they had held their own secret reading in the shop’s broom closet. Unfortunately, the poet had picked an inopportune time to sweep the floor.
He seemed none too pleased that they’d now made off with Tam’s Tome, accidentally or not.
“Come on, Rye,” Quinn and Folly yelled together. “Now.”
Rye took a deep breath. “Here goes.”
Rye took five steps back to prepare for her run. She adjusted her leggings. She puffed her cheeks, clapped her hands together, and then made a critical mistake.
She glanced over her shoulder.
The poet had cleared the ridge behind her. The roof shook with his heavy footfalls as he steamed down toward her, and Rye narrowly escaped his lurching grasp as his momentum carried him right past her. Rye froze wide-eyed as the enormous man hurtled to the edge of the roof, flailed to regain his balance, teetered on his toes, and somehow managed to avoid plunging off the side. He glared accusingly at Rye.
Rye turned and darted over the next gable to the village’s tallest bell tower. Its rusted whale weathervane loomed over her as she crouched among the stone gargoyles and grotesques under the tower’s shadowed eaves.
Quinn’s and Folly’s urgent calls were muffled by the throbbing pulse in her ears. The gargoyles stared with gaping mouths as they awaited her next move. A rook perched on the shoulder of one gargoyle, grooming its inky black feathers with a sharp gray beak. This was no place to hide for long.
Rye could hear the wheeze of the poet’s gasps as he made his way toward her. She knew she had to move. She wiped her damp hands on her leggings but her muscles refused to budge.
The solitary rook cocked its head at her and made a clicking sound with its beak. Rye twisted her face into a scowl and shook a fist, hoping to threaten it into silence. Drowning was overrun with the ugly black birds. The locals had taken to calling them roof rodents.
That was when she noticed that the bird’s perch was not like the other gargoyles. If this gargoyle had wings, they fell over its shoulders like the folds of a cloak. Its angular black eyes and long, pointed nose jutted forth from its cheeks, its face more leather than stone. Like a mask.
Rye did not come from a home with many rules, but the ones she lived by were absolute and unbreakable. The first House Rule flashed through her mind.
HOUSE RULE NUMBER 1: Don’t stop, talk, or questions ask, beware of men wearing masks.
Rye swallowed hard. An agitated warble vibrated in the rook’s throat. Then, inexplicably, the gargoyle raised a gloved finger to its masked, lipless mouth, as if to tell the bird, “Shhh.”
Now that got Rye moving.
She burst from the eaves, the poet himself jolting in surprise as she rushed toward him. Throwing Tam’s Tome at his feet, she sped past and called to her friends.
“Folly! Quinn! I’m coming! Get ready to catch me!”
Rye heard Folly’s shriek and the throaty kaw of the rook. She timed her jump as she ran and, with great focus and concentration . . . snagged her boot and fell off the side of the roof.
2
The Willow’s Wares
Rye was an expert when it came to falling. Landings, not as much so. They could be bone-crunching if you slipped backward onto frozen ground. Or piercing if you tumbled headfirst into a thicket of thorns. They were seldom soft. Falling from such a height, Rye assumed this landing would be her last. Much to her surprise, it was just wet.
Rye swallowed hard to make sure her heart wasn’t actually in her throat, and promptly coughed up a mouthful of runoff that tasted worse than bog water. Dragging herself to the edge of the shallows, she hiked her dripping dress past her leggings and up around her chest. The first clothesline had left an angry red welt straight across her belly. She quickly looked above her. For the moment, neither poet nor gargoyle had followed.
“Riley, put your dress down please,” a woman’s voice scolded. “The whole village can see your business.”
Luckily for Rye, her fall from the rooftop was slowed by several clotheslines full of laundry before she landed in the foul-smelling canal that drained swill from the village to the river. Not so luckily, that’s where Mrs. O’Chanter had found her. Rye dropped her dress back into place and tried to flash a smile as the thin green stew flowed around her feet. Mrs. O’Chanter frowned and extended a hand.
Mrs. O’Chanter suspected that Rye must have swallowed a horseshoe as a baby—she would have been a cripple ten times over if not for her otherworldly luck. She took the opportunity to mention this to Rye once again on their walk back to her store, the Willow’s Wares. Rye glanced warily at the rooftops as they went.
After Rye changed her clothes and was good and dry, and just when she began to think she was out of hot water, Mrs. O’Chanter sent her down to catch the basement wirry that haunted the crawl space under the shop. Rye didn’t believe in wirries, and neither did Mrs. O’Chanter from what she could tell. Still, she seemed to assign Rye this task once or twice a week, often after Rye had cartwheeled into a shelf of glassware or asked one too many questions about the jug of cranberry wine kept under the counter. Apparently, stealing from local merchants and plummeting from rooftops amounted to a similar offense.
Rye left her dress in a neat pile and opened the trapdoor to the dark crawl space below the floorboards. She wore her sleeveless undershirt and tight black leggings so she wouldn’t further scrape, bruise, or otherwise scar her well-worn shins. She had tied her hair in a short ponytail and stuffed it under a cap to avoid accidentally lighting it on fire with her lantern. That was something you didn’t want to happen more than once. She insisted on wearing the damp leather boots that had belonged to her father when he was her age—in case she stepped on anything sharp or hungry. They were far too big and probably contributed to some of the scars on her knees, but she filled the toes with fresh straw each day and wore them everywhere she went. Sitting on the edge of the trapdoor, she dangled her boots into the darkness as bait, an iron fireplace poker at the ready. In the unlikely event that an awful beasty really was running around down there, she fully intended to impale the little fiend.
Rye spent most of her afternoons helping out Mrs. O’Chanter at the Willow’s Wares—the finest jewelry store in all of Drowning. Of course, the Willow’s Wares was the only jewelry store in Drowning, and more of a curiosity shop than anything else. It was not the type of place you would find the noble class shopping for golden heirlooms or silver wedding goblets. In fact, the only nobles who turned up in Drowning were usually hiding, and were quite often followed by whoever was trying to lock them in a dungeon or lop off their heads. Instead, Drowning attracted wanderers, rapscallions, rogues, and other adventurous souls who were long on courage and short on sense. The Willow’s Wares offered the charms and talismans these mysterious travelers needed—or thought they did, anyway.
It had been an hour, and Rye had caught four spiders, a blind rat, and something that looked like a worm with teeth, but no wirries. Rye’s boredom was interrupted when she heard footsteps overhead. She put her wirry-hunting tools aside and set off upstairs to investigate. The Willow’s Wares’ customers always had tales of misadventure or, at the very least, some good gossip to share.
The hawk-nosed man in the store had watery eyes and stringy hair and did not look particularly adventurous. He looked like someone who spent most of his days locked in a room full of books. In fact, he had brought one with him. He hovered over the black leather journal he’d laid out on a workbench, a quill in hand. The two soldiers who accompanied him milled around, thumbing the hilts of their sheathed sabers and looking suspiciously at the curiosities lining the store’s shelves.
“And what is your name, boy?” the man asked, in a voice that creaked like an old iron chest.
“I’m a girl, thank you very much,” Rye said. She was still in her tights. Her arms, legs, and face were covered in basement grime.
“Oh.
Indeed you are,” he said, eyeballing her disapprovingly.
“R-y-e,” Rye spelled. “Rhymes with lie.”
Mrs. O’Chanter frowned and gave her a harsh look.
“Sorry,” Rye said. “Rhymes with die.”
That didn’t improve Mrs. O’Chanter’s mood. She scowled at Rye as the man carefully made markings in his book.
He raised a thick eyebrow and looked up. His eyebrows resembled the gray dust balls that accumulated under Rye’s bed.
“The girl can spell,” he noted. “Interesting.”
“Of course I can spell,” Rye said.
“I see,” he said, and made some more markings.
“What she means,” Mrs. O’Chanter interjected, “is that she knows how to spell her name. You know how children are these days, Constable Boil. Always curious. You need to indulge them sometimes. Otherwise they won’t leave you a minute’s peace.”
“In my house,” the Constable said, “I find a good thrashing on the tail does the trick.”
Mrs. O’Chanter did not seem at all pleased with the conversation. She stared out at the soldiers from the pile of black hair atop her head, held fast with a simple blue ribbon and two wooden pins that had come from the store. One soldier fingered a display of charms made from beeswax and alligator hide. He wasn’t gentle. Rye knew that Mrs. O’Chanter hated when people touched with no intention to buy and she could be downright scary about it—but she said nothing this time.
“Mrs. O’Chanter,” the Constable continued, then paused to look her over. “Is it still Mrs. or do you finally go by Miss now?”
“It’s Mrs., thank you very much.”
“How patient of you. Well, then, there was quite a disturbance at the Angry Poet today.”
“Was he reading those off-color limericks again?”
“No, Mrs. O’Chanter. There was a robbery. Children, no less.”
“My goodness,” Mrs. O’Chanter said, without alarm.
“Indeed,” Constable Boil said. “They took a bag of gold grommets and two flasks of rare wine.”