LITMIR.BIZ

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pillory. Someone else grabbed at her arm. It might have been Folly. The Constable had moved on to the next name on the list.

      “Harriet Wilson. Guilty of—”

      Rye flung the fish. It knocked the parchment scroll from the Constable’s grasp and bounced off his leather vest before landing at his feet. He considered his empty hand with surprise then glowered out at the crowd. The soldiers and the squire looked her way as well. The Constable’s dog growled and strained at its leash.

      Suddenly Rye was aware of her surroundings again, and found herself back-pedalling away from the Shame Pole. She bumped hard into two bodies. It was Quinn and Folly, who had caught up with her a moment too late.

      “Tell me you didn’t just hit the Constable with a fish,” Quinn said as he carefully eased his helmet over his head.

      Rye looked at the shimmering scales stuck to her palm. “I didn’t just hit the Constable with a fish,” she replied.

      The squire spotted Rye and pointed. The three soldiers leaped down from the pillory.

      “Scatter!” Rye yelled, and the three friends did just that. Growing up together on Drowning’s winding streets, they’d practised this many times before.

      Rye darted down one end of Market Street while Folly and Quinn tore off in different directions. Rye pushed past a merchant and nearly ran headlong into a cow’s rump before glancing back over her shoulder. She saw Folly’s head of white-blonde hair sprinting safely down a narrow lane. But she was shocked to see that all three soldiers had taken off in pursuit of Quinn. That wasn’t how it was supposed to work. The soldiers should have split up to chase each of them. There wasn’t a man in Drowning the children couldn’t out-manoeuvre individually but, once outnumbered, things could get tricky. She saw Quinn’s wobbly helmet disappear down the alley near the remains of the Willow’s Wares. The soldiers had left him with no other option.

      “Pigshanks,” Rye cursed. She knew the alley dead-ended at the canal. With three soldiers behind him, Quinn would be trapped. She changed course and ran back for him.

      Rye turned the corner at full speed and skidded to a stop. She found just what she had feared. The three soldiers stood menacingly in the middle of the alleyway. Quinn had pulled up at the far end, where its cobbles met the foul-smelling canal that drained swill from the village to the river. The shallow water was filled with more pigs than Rye could count, their heads rooted up to their ears in the run-off. Each looked heavier than a full-grown man. Quinn glanced from the soldiers to the pigs and back again, weighing an impossible decision.

      Rye looked around the alleyway. A young piglet snuffled about, having wandered off from the rest of the animals. It sniffed something interesting on her boots. She reached down and scooped him up in her arms. He oinked and squirmed but didn’t seem overly alarmed.

      “Sorry, little fella,” Rye whispered in the piglet’s ear, then gave him the gentlest pinch on the tail.

      The piglet squealed as if jabbed by a butcher’s blade and lurched to free itself from her grasp. The sows pulled their snouts from the murky water and grunted in reply. A soldier looked back at Rye and the little pig.

      “Quinn! Get out of the way!” she called, and set the piglet down. It ran back towards its mother on the opposite side of Quinn and the soldiers.

      Quinn knew exactly what was about to happen – village children were taught early never to get between a sow and her young. He darted to the side of the alley out of the pigs’ path, pressing himself against a building. The soldiers weren’t as quick, and found an army of wet, angry hogs bearing down on them with their tusks.

      Rye and Quinn didn’t stop to catch their breath until they’d made it to where Bramble was waiting at Dread Captain’s Way. Shortstraw had climbed out from his hiding spot in Bramble’s cloak and now perched on his shoulder, his furry arms crossed impatiently.

      Folly arrived just behind them. “There you are,” she said, gasping for breath.

      Quinn struggled to remove his helmet.

      “What happened back there?” Bramble demanded. He grabbed Quinn’s helmet and yanked it off with a pop. Quinn rubbed the red welt it had left across his forehead.

      “Rye hit the Constable with a fish,” Folly said.

      Bramble looked at Rye in disbelief and shook his head. “Perhaps we need to discuss the meaning of inconspicuous.”

      They followed him to an obscure flight of carved stone steps tucked under a crumbling archway. It was called Mutineer’s Alley. No guards or gate blocked their path, but everyone in Drowning knew where those steps led. And it was no place for the unwelcome.

      Rye glanced over her shoulder as they started down. No soldiers followed, but someone was standing in the shadows of the backstreet she and Quinn had taken to reach Dread Captain’s Way. She thought it looked like the Constable’s squire.

      Bramble nudged her with an elbow. “A fish, eh?”

      Rye shrugged sheepishly.

      “That’s my niece,” he said with a wink.

      She looked back again, but the squire, if he had been there at all, was now gone.

      At the bottom of a deep embankment, below the village itself, sat the Shambles. Its black-market shops, grog houses and gambling dens had grown up like persistent weeds on the damp edges of the village, until eventually the Earl had stopped trying to pluck them. The Laws of Longchance weren’t enforced here. The Shambles was not a safe place for allies of the Earl.

      Shortstraw chittered happily as they worked their way down Little Water Street, the snail trail of a dirt road that traced the banks of River Drowning. Dinghies bobbed at the docks. In the distance, where the mouth of the river met the sea, Rye could see the tall mast of an anchored schooner silhouetted against the sky. Rye was sure the invisible eyes of the Shambles were on them, but their faces were familiar here.

      At the end of the street, a four-storey inn squatted in the shadow of the great arched bridge that spanned the river’s narrowest point. Overhead, a black banner with a white fishbone logo snapped in the wind. The thick iron doors of the Dead Fish Inn rose above them like portals to a castle, and they always struck Rye as more suited to withstanding a siege than welcoming guests. But at that moment, there was no place she would rather be.

      

      HE AIR WAS stale with stout and sailor sweat, which made perfect sense since a small fleet of grog-swigging boatmen had congregated at the centre of the inn. They’d pushed aside the tables and chairs and huddled in a large circle around two blindfolded, bare-knuckled combatants. The men traded wild, flailing punches over the cheers and groans of the onlookers.

      Folly’s two oldest brothers, the twins Fitz and Flint, leaned against a heavy beam and watched with interest from under their manes of white-blond hair. The twins, each massive individually, had been born conjoined at the hip, giving them the formidable aura of a two-headed giant. Their matching glowers and otherworldly appearance ensured even the surliest patrons of the Dead Fish behaved themselves.

      So it was that Rye, her uncle and her friends arrived relatively unnoticed. Rye pulled her hood from her head and the inn’s roaring fireplaces immediately warmed her chilled cheeks. A woman bustled past balancing a full serving tray of empty glasses on her round belly with one hand. She paused at the sight of the children, blinked in disbelief, and abruptly dropped her tray on to a table. The woman’s hair was as white-blonde as Folly’s except for a single streak of silver that she pushed behind her ear.

      “Riley O’Chanter!” Faye Flood exclaimed. “What in the Shale are you doing here?”

      Before

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