LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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