The Fork-Tongue Charmers (7 page)

“B
ramble?” Rye asked in disbelief.

The man lowered his hood. “It's good to see you again, niece,” he answered warmly.

Bramble Cutty was her mother's brother. That made him Rye's uncle, of course. Not that she really knew him at all. They'd met ever so briefly the prior autumn, and it was quite some time before her mother got around to telling Rye who Bramble actually was.

Bramble also happened to be the Luck Ugly who had given her the black swatch of fabric that she kept in her pocket. The Ragged Clover.

A furry head with round, dark eyes popped out from the folds of Bramble's cloak. Rye leaped back. The small black monkey shrieked and bared its teeth. She knew him, too. The little ape had never been particularly pleasant to her.

“Quiet, Shortstraw,” Bramble hissed, and stuffed the monkey's face back under his cloak with a shove of his palm.

“He's not fond of the cold,” he explained. “Makes him ill-tempered.”

Bramble handed the charred tin box to Rye. “This is for your mother if you see her before I do. It's all I could find.”

Rye ran her fingertips over it, turning them black with soot. She slipped the box inside her coat.

“Tell me, Riley,” Bramble said, “what are you doing back in Drowning?”

Rye looked up at the burned beams and rafters around them. The lump returned to her throat. “Folly told us about . . . this.”

Bramble nodded gravely. “Well, now you've seen it for yourself. Abby's been in quite a twist, as you can imagine. It's a brazen gesture on the part of Longchance and his Constable—especially given the warning he's under.”

Rye vividly remembered the warning Harmless had given Morningwig Longchance. She'd been there in
the courtyard of Longchance Keep along with the small band of masked Luck Uglies. Harmless spared Longchance's life but promised that the Luck Uglies would be watching—and he would show no such restraint if Longchance were to ever trouble his family again. The Earl had either forgotten the warning—or no longer feared it. Had the new Constable emboldened him, or were the Luck Uglies too preoccupied with their own differences to be bothered?

“And where in the Shale is your father?” Bramble asked. “Surely he hasn't sent you back here alone?”

Rye told Bramble of the sniggler and Harmless's pursuit into the culverts. Bramble's face darkened.

“That man would drop everything for the thrill of the hunt,” Bramble muttered, then seemed to catch himself. “Not a problem, though. I'll see you to the Dead Fish myself.”

It wasn't the first time she had heard Bramble express frustration with her father.

“Bramble,” Rye said, lowering her voice out of habit, “what do you know about Slinister and the Fork-Tongue Charmers? Have they been heard from since the attack on the Mud Sleigh?”

Bramble narrowed an eye. “These are complicated times,” he said, in a manner that seemed dismissive of her question. “I won't miss Silvermas anyway. I've
gotten one too many potatoes . . . and mouse turds . . . in my boots.”

Whether Bramble missed Silvermas wasn't exactly her point.

Bramble cast his attention to something over her shoulder. Rye turned to see Folly and Quinn stepping through the debris, hurrying toward them.

“There you are,” Folly said, and then paused at the sight of Bramble. “And . . . hello.”

“Greetings young Flood,” Bramble said. “Floppy is it?”

“Folly.”

“That's right. Hard to sort out your lot with all the names.”

Folly frowned.

“You're back,” Quinn called to Rye, his kind face bright. “When I heard about the Mud Sleigh I was . . .”

He pursed his lips tight as if grasping for the words, then simply threw his long arms around her. She awkwardly accepted his hug. He had a steel helmet tucked under his elbow. It poked Rye in the ribs.

“Sorry,” he said. “I smithed this one myself,” he added proudly. “Or started it anyway.”

“You're the blacksmith's boy, no?” Bramble asked.

Quinn nodded. He lived alone with his father, Angus, the blacksmith, and always did his best to please him. That sometimes made him a bit of a rule follower
like his father, but, for the most part, Rye and Folly had broken him of that bad habit.

“It's not the worst work I've seen,” Bramble commented. “But your hands may be better suited to the quill than the forge.”

Quinn looked at his blackened hands and sighed in agreement. All of his fingers were swollen, bandaged, or both.

“Enough chatter then. Let's be on our way to the inn,” Bramble declared, casting a wary eye around them. “Before the villagers begin to wonder what's so interesting in here.”

“I'm coming too,” Quinn said eagerly.

“We'll split up and meet at Mutineer's Alley. I'll go first—I'm most likely to draw attention coming out of this place. You three wait a few moments then head out after me. Just try to look like nosy little scamps. Can you manage that?”

Bramble looked them over. They just blinked back at him.

“Perfect,” he said.

Bramble pulled his hood over his head, climbed through an empty window frame, then paused and looked back at them. “Step lively and stay inconspicuous,” he warned, before disappearing.

Rye, Folly, and Quinn waited for several minutes,
then pulled their hoods tight and ventured out onto Market Street.

The Constable was still reading from his list. “James Whitlow. Guilty of fouling the Earl's private privy at the Silvermas Eve Feast. Fine of ten silver shims and one hour on the Shame Pole.”

“We missed you at Silvermas,” Quinn whispered as they moved quickly down the cobblestones.

“Yes, we should talk about that,” Rye said with a frown. “Next year, let's save our coins and buy our own candy—”

Rye stopped abruptly. The Constable's words had caught her ear from the pillory.

“And now for the most egregious offenders,” he said, running his finger down the length of the scroll. “Abigail O'Chanter,” he read. “Guilty of trafficking in stolen goods, harboring known criminals, and conspiracy to commit treason. Punishment is seizure and destruction of the guilty's property and imprisonment in the dungeons of Longchance Keep for not less than . . .”

Rye's head instantly flushed with a rage so great she couldn't hear the rest of his words. Someone whispered to her to ignore it, to keep on moving. She thought it might be Quinn. They were in front of the fishmonger's stall. Rye thrust her bare hand into the trough of ice and pulled out a stiff, frozen
mackerel by its tail. She couldn't feel the cold.

Rye marched toward the 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 backpedaling 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 practiced 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-blond 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 outmaneuver 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 runoff. 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 toward 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 they 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-story 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.