Page 12 of The Deadliest Candidate

They stopped suddenly, and the man took the woman’s face in his hands with a surge of tenderness so fierce it startled Fern back against the icy stone wall behind her.

“And have we ever failed?” the man asked.

His sister shook her head. Her eyes never left his. “Of course not.”

“And what do we do?”

She answered softly, so softly Fern almost missed her reply. “What we must.”

“And what’s the only thing that matters in the end?”

“Only us.”

“Only us.”

They walked away, disappearing in the direction of the inn, but Fern stood frozen for a long time, with the strange feeling that she had just witnessed a great and terrible oath.

“Strange business, Miss, andno mistaking it. I didn’t see the body myself, mind, but my two sons, they were collecting driftwood when the commotion happened. A frightful sight it was, they said, and my boys are not so easily affrighted—the sea’s not for the faint of heart, and we live in the shadow of the Library; what should come of us if our nerves were as easily startled as those of you city folks—without meaning to cause offence.”

The fisherman tugged on the floppy edge of his hat. He sat near the door of an open hangar on the edge of the quay, greasing the mechanism of his harpoon gun without even looking at it.

Despite his age, despite how frayed the sleeves of his thick woollen jumper were or how salt-crusted his boots and hair seemed, there was a certain liveliness to the man that Fern rather liked.

“Is it possible the body might belong to someone from East Hemwick?” Fern asked.

The fisherman shook his head, paused and took a sip of tar-black coffee from the paper cup resting precariously between cracks in the ancient cobblestone.

“Not on your life, Miss. Around here, we know the sea too well to let her take us, and our children learn from us. Corpses in East Hemwick belong to the earth, not to the sea. My boys—they’re eight-and-twenty and four-and-twenty—they’ve never once seen a body like this one. The sea washes up all sorts of things on our shores, Miss, but not bodies, not like that.”

“Do you think the ostary will learn the identity of the body?”

“No, Miss, he never will.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s investigating East Hemwick, but the truth of the matter is that the osta—the oss…”

The fisherman had looked up at something behind Fern, the word cracking then fading in his mouth. His eyes had widened then narrowed, and his calloused hand tightened around the barrel of his harpoon gun. Fern turned.

A new figure had appeared on the other side of the quay.

Fern took an instinctive step back, her heel catching on the cobblestone. Silence had fallen over the small port, a silence so heavy it seemed to even send the crashing waves receding back into the horizon.

The figure was short and slim in stature, but it needed neither strength nor height to send people stumbling out of its path. It wore plain white robes; a simple mask of silver covered its face. Pale light emanated from the twin almond-shaped holes of the eyes, glowing faintly.

The unmistakable eyes of an ostary.

Fern’s jaw clenched shut, and a shiver ran all the way through her body despite the warmth of her woollen clothing. She wrapped her coat tighter about her and said, “Thank you, I should—”

The fisherman gave a quick nod. “Go. If you round the hangar, you’ll see stairs leading to the seastrand. Follow it around and you’ll find a stone path back up to the village.”

Fern expressed her gratitude with a deep nod, and then she turned swiftly and left, following the fisherman’s instructions. She imagined the quay workers hoped they could do the same, but the ostary had already approached one of them, and all the others scattered. It reminded Fern of watching mice run away after one of them had been caught in the jaws of a cat—part saviour, part sacrifice.

She descended the set of steep stone stairs leading down to the seastrand, which lay like a thick ribbon of dull gold between the crashing waves and the village.

The tide was low, and in their wake, the waves had left all sorts of little forgotten treasures. Driftwood and chips of seashells, shattered by tide and time, tangles of seaweed, brown bladderwrack bubbling with vesicles and dulse gleaming gelatinous red.

Was this where the body had washed up? Fern walked slowly alongside the tidemark, searching the sand and seaweeds without meaning to. She found nothing, of course. There was nothing her eyes, sharp though they were, would find that the ostary’s magically enhanced ones would not have detected in mere seconds.

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