Runemarks Read Free Page A

time?”
    “I need to see him,” Maddy said.
    “Who? The one-eyed scallyman?”
    “Please,” she said. “I won’t be long.”
    Mrs. Scattergood pursed her lips. “Not on my penny, you won’t,” she said. “I’m not paying you good money to go gallivanting around with thieves and beggars—”
    “One-Eye isn’t a thief,” said Maddy.
    “Don’t you start giving yourself airs, madam,” said Mrs. Scattergood. “Laws knows you can’t help the way you’re made, but you might at least make an effort. For your father’s sake, you might, and for the memory of your sainted mother.” She paused for breath for less than a second. “
And
you can take that look off your face. Anyone would think you were proud to be a—”
    And then she stopped, openmouthed, as a sound came from behind the cellar door. It was, thought Mrs. Scattergood, a peculiar kind of
scuttling
noise, punctuated by the occasional thud. It made her feel quite uncomfortable—as if there might be something more down in that cellar than barrels of ale. And what was that distant sloshing sound, like wash day at the river?
    “Oh my Laws, what have you done?” Mrs. Scattergood made for the cellar door.
    Maddy put herself in front of it, and with one hand she traced the shape of
Naudr
against the latch. “Don’t go down there, please,” she said.
    Mrs. Scattergood tried the latch, but the runesign held it fast. She turned to glare at Maddy, her fierce little teeth bared like a ferret’s. “You open this door right now,” she said.
    “You really,
really
don’t want me to.”
    “You open this door, Maddy Smith, if you know what’s good for you.”
    Maddy tried once more to protest, but Mrs. Scattergood was unstoppable. “I’ll wager you’ve got that scally down there, helping himself to my best ale. Well, you just open this door, girl, or I’ll have Matt Law down here to take you both to the roundhouse!”
    Maddy sighed. It wasn’t that she
liked
working at the inn, but a job was a job, and a shilling a shilling, and neither was likely to be forthcoming as soon as Mrs. Scattergood looked into the cellar. In an hour or so the spell would wear off, and the creatures would crawl back into their hole. Then she could seal it up again, sweep up the mess, mop up the water…
    “Let me explain,” she tried again.
    But Mrs. Scattergood was beyond explanations. Her face had flushed a dangerous red, and her voice was almost as shrill as a rat’s.
“Adam!”
she shrieked. “Get in here right
now
!”
    Adam was Mrs. Scattergood’s son. He and Maddy had always hated each other, and it was the thought of his sneering, gleeful face—and that of her long-absent friend, known in some circles as
the one-eyed scallyman
—that finally made up her mind.
    “You’re sure it was One-Eye?” she said at last.
    “Of course it was! Now open this—”
    “All right,” said Maddy, and reversed the rune. “But if I were you, I’d give it an hour.”
    And at that she turned and fled, and was already on the road to Red Horse Hill by the time the shrill, distant screaming began, emerging like smoke from the Seven Sleepers’ kitchen and rising above slumbering Malbry village to vanish into the morning air.

2
    Malbry was a village of some eight hundred souls. A quiet place, or so it seemed, set between mountain ridges in the valley of the river Strond, which flowed from the Wilderlands in the north through the Uplands and the Inlands before finally making its way south toward World’s End and into the One Sea.
    The mountains—called the Seven Sleepers, though no one remembered exactly why—were bitter and snow-cloaked all year round, and there was only one pass, the Hindarfell, which was blocked by snow three months of the year. This remoteness affected the valley folk: they kept to themselves, were suspicious of strangers, and (but for Nat Parson, who had once made a pilgrimage as far as World’s End and who considered himself quite the traveler) had