LITMIR.BIZ

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      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 any more. 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 ear-splitting 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 a 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 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.

      

      ARMLESS TRIED TO make Rye promise not to follow him out on to 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 got to know her well enough to realise 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 on to 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,

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