Read Online The Fork-Tongue Charmers by Paul Durham - Free Book Online Page A

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 hishiding 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.
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œRye 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.
    â€œThat’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.

8
Where Nobody Knows Your Name

    T he air was stale with stout and sailor sweat, which made perfect sense since a small fleet of grog-swigging boatmen had congregated at the center of the inn. They’d pushed aside the tables and chairs and huddled in a large circle around two blindfolded, bare-knuckled combatants. The men traded wild, flailing punches over the cheers and groans of the onlookers.
    Folly’s two oldest brothers, the twins Fitz and Flint, leaned against a heavy beam and watched with interest from under their manes of white-blond hair. Thetwins, each massive individually, had been born conjoined at the hip, giving them the formidable aura of a two-headed giant. Their matching glowers and otherworldly appearance assured even the surliest patrons of the Dead Fish behaved themselves.
    So it was that Rye, her uncle, and her friends arrived relatively unnoticed. Rye pulled her hood from her head and the inn’s roaring fireplaces immediately warmed her chilled cheeks.