Paul Durham - Dishonour Among Thieves

YE SAT ALONE on a cold, black rock jutting out from the sea. She counted in her head as she stared at the violent, churning waves. Two hundred and eighty-nine . Two hundred and ninety . Rye hated being alone. She liked waiting even less. But she didn’t dare move for fear of slipping on the barnacles and being dragged out by the current.

A dusky brown gull struggled to fly against the wind.

Rye squinted at the bird. It gave her the sudden sense that she’d been in this spot once before, which was odd, since she had never travelled outside of Village Drowning. She shook off the unnerving feeling and resumed her count.

Two hundred and ninety-nine . Three hundred . Five minutes now.

A gale sent the gull hurtling off in the wrong direction and it disappeared into a brightening sky that had been grey with fog and snow since Rye’s arrival.

Rye pulled her new seal-leather coat tight at the collar, its thick hood snug over her head and its long hem covering her to the knees. Even in an ocean storm it kept her remarkably warm and dry. The seal whose hide it was made from met no harm. The reclusive northern salt seal was the only mammal in the world known to shed its skin. Harmless had given her this coat as a belated twelfth birthday present. He’d missed that birthday over this past winter, just as he’d missed all the others before it.

Harmless might seem like a strange name for a girl to call her father, but Rye’s father was – to put it nicely – an unusual man. Rye hadn’t even known that she had a real live father until last autumn. That was when he appeared like a wisp of smoke out of the ancient forest known as Beyond the Shale. He’d been gone for over ten years.

Not everyone had been happy to see him. Harmless was a Luck Ugly. An outlaw so notorious that he and all of his kind had been driven into exile by Earl Morningwig Longchance. But, with Rye’s help, Harmless was able to summon the Luck Uglies and once again save Village Drowning. It had been under attack by a fierce clan of Bog Noblins – vile, swamp-creeping beasts who had threatened the lives of the villagers. One would think that such an achievement would have earned a certain degree of appreciation from the Earl, but Longchance’s hatred of Harmless only grew. It was Harmless’s threat – that the Luck Uglies would be watching – that had kept Longchance at bay ever since.

Rye pulled her knees into her chest to avoid the whitecaps that snapped at her oversize boots like frenzied sharks. 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.