Read Online Soul Splinter by Abi Elphinstone - Free Book Online

now to help plan the raid slick, I’ll see you a bigger cut of the booty.’
    He turned and left the yard, weaving his way between the lobster pots and boats. The boys grinned at each other, then hurried out of the shipyard.
    Siddy stared after them, wide-eyed with fear, and Moll thought of Gryff and Oak suddenly, wishing that they were there beside her. Surely they’d beaten back the owls by now? Oak was quick as lightning with his pistol and Gryff was as fierce an animal as she’d come across. Why weren’t they here already?
    Moll shook herself; she couldn’t let Siddy know how scared she was. ‘He’s a smuggler, that’s all. We’ve faced much worse than him.’
    Siddy looked down. ‘When Gryff was with us – and Alfie.’ He paused. ‘I wish I’d brought Hermit.’
    Moll tightened the laces on her boots. ‘Well, we haven’t got Gryff – or Hermit thankfully.’ She glossed over Alfie’s name completely, as if Siddy hadn’t even mentioned him. ‘We’re going to have to make do with each other.’
    ‘The Gloomy Tap sounds like an inn – or a pub,’ Siddy mumbled.
    ‘Exactly what I was thinking,’ Moll said, which was a lie. She’d been thinking about boiling Hermit up in a very large pan. ‘We’ll creep to the edge of the shipyard, then, once we’re sure Grudge and his bootlegger friends are inside The Gloomy Tap, we’ll nip out and run across the harbour. Then we’ll go up The Crumpled Way and look for the amulet.’
    Siddy nodded. ‘Do you think this amulet will be like the first one?’
    Moll considered this. ‘Dunno. Maybe. Though I’m not sure magic happens the same way twice.’ She thought back to the sparkling blue jewel they’d found inside a hollowed tree in Tanglefern Forest and grinned. ‘And the Dreads thought
they
were dealing with valuable goods on their smuggling raid! They should have seen the size of the jewel we found in the forest . . .’
    Moll crept out from behind the boat, glanced left and right, then tiptoed forward. Siddy followed.
    Neither of them noticed the figure crouching behind a barrel a few metres away. He lay low for several minutes, thinking, then he smiled to himself and disappeared from the shipyard without a sound.
    Moll and Siddy peered out from behind the last of the boats in the shipyard to see a cobbled road running between a row of houses and the harbour wall. The sky was overcast now and villagers were starting to wake. An old man opened his front door, let his dog scamper over the cobbles, then picked up some firewood from a stash beneath his porch and hobbled inside again with his dog. Moll scanned down the row of houses until she came to a weather-beaten sign hanging from a building over the street:
The Gloomy Tap
. And, to Moll’s relief, there was no one outside it.
    She turned to Siddy. ‘If we wait any longer, the whole village will be up.’
    Siddy nodded, clutched his talisman hard, a smoothed stone with a hole in the middle, then shot out from the shipyard and ran over the cobbles after Moll. They raced past the first few houses, holding their breath as they pelted by The Gloomy Tap, but when they were halfway down the street the commotion began.
    ‘Stop, thief!’ a voice screamed from somewhere behind them. ‘Two children stealing firewood from old Mr Weaver!’
    Siddy shot a sideways glance at Moll. ‘What?’
    Moll grabbed his arm. ‘Just run!’
    A shuttered window above them burst open. ‘Thieves!’ a woman shrieked. ‘Down by the harbour wall!’
    More shutters clattered open as men, women and children caught on and leant out of windows, hollering abuse.
    ‘They were trying to take Mr Weaver’s firewood!’ a man bellowed. ‘Somebody stop them!’
    The village was suddenly alive with hysterical villagers screaming from their windows and, in minutes, the inhabitants had stormed downstairs and were pouring out of their front doors into the street. Moll and Siddy charged over the cobbles, tearing past the