“Yes, but this is different,” Rye explained, looking down again. “Something will happen. It always does.”
“You can make it. Come on,” Quinn said.
“I’ve been told that I’m a little bit clumsy.”
“Nonsense,” Quinn said, without conviction.
“Absurd,” Folly scoffed unconvincingly. “Now jump.”
“He’s a poet,” Rye said. “How bad could it be?”
“He’s angry,” said Quinn.
“And big as a humpback,” Folly added.
As if waiting for just such an introduction, the poet in question pulled his ample belly on to the far side of the roof. He was indeed angry – for a variety of reasons, Rye supposed. For one, nobody paid much attention to poets any more. Most villagers wanted to hear words sung over harps or stomped out by actors in tights and feathered caps. Plus, as far as Rye could tell, books weren’t exactly flying off the shelves in Drowning, its residents more partial to fishing, fighting and fortune hunting. In fact, the Earl who oversaw the affairs of Drowning had not only banned women and girls from reading, but went so far as to outlaw certain books altogether. None was more illicit than the book Rye now pressed close to her body, Tam’s Tome of Drowning Mouth Fibs, Volume II – an obscure history textbook that had been widely ignored until the Earl described it as a vile collection of scandalous accusations, dangerous untruths and outright lies. Even an eleven-year-old could work out that meant there must be some serious truth to it.
The Earl’s soldiers had collected and destroyed every copy they could find. Rye had heard rumblings that the poet kept a copy of Tam’s Tome in a secret back room. On certain nights he would hold private readings for rebellious nobles with inquisitive minds. Rye and her friends had no silver shims to buy their way in, so they had held their own secret reading in the shop’s broom cupboard. Unfortunately, the poet had picked an inopportune time to sweep the floor.
The poet seemed none too pleased that they’d now made off with Tam’s Tome, accidentally or not.
“Come on, Rye,” Quinn and Folly yelled together. “Now!”
Rye took a deep breath. “Here goes.”
She took five steps back to prepare for her run. She adjusted her leggings. She puffed her cheeks, clapped her hands together and then made a critical mistake.
She glanced over her shoulder.
The poet had cleared the ridge behind her. The roof shook with his heavy footfall as he steamed towards her, and Rye narrowly escaped his lurching grasp as his momentum carried him right past her. Rye froze wide-eyed as the enormous man hurtled to the edge of the roof, flailed to regain his balance, teetered on his toes and somehow managed to avoid plunging off the side. He glared accusingly at Rye.
Rye turned and darted over the next gable to the village’s tallest bell tower. Its rusted whale weathervane loomed over her as she crouched among the stone gargoyles and grotesques under the tower’s shadowed eaves.
Quinn’s and Folly’s urgent calls were muffled by the throbbing pulse in her ears. The gargoyles stared with gaping mouths as they waited for her next move. A rook perched on the shoulder of one gargoyle, grooming its inky-black feathers with a sharp grey beak. This was no place to hide for long.
Rye could hear the wheeze of the poet’s gasps as he made his way towards her. She knew she had to move. She wiped her damp hands on her leggings, but her muscles refused to budge.
The solitary rook cocked its head at her and made a clicking sound with its beak. Rye twisted her face into a scowl and shook a fist, hoping to threaten it into silence. Drowning was overrun with the ugly black birds. The locals had taken to calling them roof rodents.
That was when she noticed that the bird’s perch was not like the other gargoyles. If this gargoyle had wings, they fell over its shoulders like the folds of a cloak. Its angular black eyes and long pointed nose jutted forth from its cheeks, its face more leathery than stone. Like a mask.
Rye did not come from a home with many rules, but the ones she lived by were absolute and unbreakable. The first House Rule flashed through her mind.
House Rule Number One: Don’t stop, talk or questions ask, beware of men wearing masks.
Rye swallowed hard. An agitated warble vibrated in the rook’s throat. Then, inexplicably, the gargoyle raised a gloved finger to its masked, lipless mouth, as if to tell the bird, “Shh.”
Now that got Rye moving.
She burst from the eaves, the poet himself jolting in surprise as she rushed towards him. Throwing Tam’s Tome at his feet, she sped past and called to her friends.
“Folly! Quinn! I’m coming! Get ready to catch me!”
Rye heard Folly’s shriek and the throaty caw of the rook. She timed her jump as she ran and, with great focus and concentration … snagged her boot and fell off the side of the roof.
RYE WAS AN expert when it came to falling. Landings, not so much. They could be bone crunching if you slipped backwards on to frozen ground. Or piercing if you tumbled headfirst into a thicket of thorns. They were seldom soft. Falling from such a height, Rye assumed this landing would be her last. Much to her surprise, it was just wet.
Rye swallowed hard to make sure her heart wasn’t actually in her throat, and promptly coughed up a mouthful of run-off that tasted worse than bog water. Dragging herself to the edge of the shallows, she hiked her dripping dress past her leggings and up round her chest. The first clothes line had left an angry red welt straight across her belly. She quickly looked above her. For the moment, neither poet nor gargoyle had followed.
“Riley, put your dress down, please,” a woman’s voice scolded. “The whole village can see your business.”
Luckily for Rye, her fall from the rooftop was slowed by several clothes lines full of laundry before she landed in the foul-smelling canal that drained swill from the village to the river. Not so luckily, that’s where Mrs O’Chanter had found her. Rye dropped her dress back into place and tried to flash a smile as the thin green stew flowed around her feet. Mrs O’Chanter frowned and extended a hand.
Mrs O’Chanter suspected that Rye must have swallowed a horseshoe as a baby – she would have been a cripple ten times over if not for her otherworldly luck. She took the opportunity to mention this to Rye once again on their walk back to her shop, The Willow’s Wares. Rye glanced warily at the rooftops as they went.
After Rye had changed her clothes and was good and dry, and just when she began to think she was out of hot water, Mrs O’Chanter sent her down to catch the basement wirry that haunted the crawl space under the shop. Rye didn’t believe in wirries, and neither did Mrs O’Chanter from what she could tell. Still, she seemed to assign Rye this task once or twice a week, often after Rye had cartwheeled into a shelf of glassware or asked one too many questions about the jug of cranberry wine kept under the counter. Apparently, stealing from local merchants and plummeting from rooftops amounted to a similar offence.
Rye left her dress in a neat pile and opened the trapdoor to the dark crawl space below the floorboards. She wore her sleeveless undershirt and tight black leggings so she wouldn’t further scrape, bruise or otherwise scar her well-worn shins. She tied her hair in a short ponytail and stuffed it under a cap to avoid accidentally lighting it on fire with her lantern. That was something you didn’t want to happen more than once. She insisted on wearing the damp leather boots that had belonged to her father when he was her age – in case she stepped on anything sharp or hungry. They were far too big and probably contributed to some of the