Paul Durham - Dishonour Among Thieves

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 rule of all. And as brothers, we will settle our differences in our own way.”

“And what way is that?” she asked.

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.