The Folk Keeper by Franny Billingsley Read Free Book Online Page B

time.
    “She’d spend hours in the Cellar, too,” said Finian, “and never bring a candle.”
    “She must have had a candle!” I said.
    “To hold off the Folk, you mean?” said Finian. “I have always wondered how she survived them.”
    I nodded, but there was more to it than that. Without a light, how could she have chiseled her name into the walls?
    “I love to gossip with Mrs. Bains,” said Finian. “I tell her she’s my sweetheart, and she gossips all the more.”
    “I thought the
Windcuffer
was your sweetheart.”
    “I lie sometimes,” he said. “You do as well, don’t you, to get what you want?”
    I had a very nasty feeling that Finian could see more without his spectacles than most people could who needed none.
    Finian spoke over my silence. “I’ll have my Conviction now.”
    “You must avenge yourself on people who mistreat you,” I said. “You must destroy what they love.” I thought of the Valet, of his love for himself, and how I’d squashed it.
    “So bloodthirsty, Corin!” said Finian. “Perhaps I’m too weak for your Convictions.” He unfolded his body from the stool. “There’s Mrs. Bains with the cakes, and I’ve always been partial to pink icing.”
    “Wait!” I said. “I have another Conviction, and I need another Secret.” I knew now that Lady Rona was a proper descendant of the owners of Marblehaugh Park, but what of the unnamed person beneath the tiny gravestone?
    “But I can’t digest your Convictions,” said Finian. “Give me something gentler next time. Just remind me it’s worth fighting for my dream of building ships and having a life with the sea.”
    Have I ever felt so dreadful in my life? So squirmy inside, so like an insect or a worm?
    “Think on it, Corin. Come sailing with me and give me a new sort of Conviction then.”
    “I haven’t time for sailing.” The more time I spent in the Cellar, the more likely it was I’d catch the Folk in a moment of mischief and draw off their anger.
    “But you want to know the Secret?” said Finian.
    He knew I did. He had his own way of getting what he wanted. “Very well,” I muttered. “I’ll come sailing.”
    “Promise?”
    “Promise.” I offered my fingertip, so we could swear on blood, but he said he’d believe me without.
    Why does he insist so on my promise? They are inconvenient things, promises. I rarely keep them, myself.
     
    February 17
    I didn’t tell Mrs. Bains why I wanted the pins. No one saw me last night when I slipped off to the Cellar, hundreds of pins stuck crosswise in my clothes. No one, that is, except the mournful old dog, Taffy, who followed me to the Kitchens, where I filled a bucket with very fresh and bloody meat.
    “It’s not for you!” I shut the Cellar door in his face and heard him sink to the floor, wheezing like an ancient bellows.
    The pins held the Folk off only a moment. Their cob-webbed energy paused, then struck. My bones echoed with their screams; the pins burned with cold.
    There came a howling from the world above. I fastened on the sound to suspend myself above the tightening round my muscles, the cramping that pulled every nerve to the outside.
    Think of nothing but the time, Corinna, the passing of the hours. A quarter past midnight. Twenty-three minutes past two. Eight minutes past three.
    It was half past four when I opened my eyes. My cheek lay pressed to the floor. The pins were stuck into my flesh, and at all angles. I was twenty-five minutes picking them out.
    As for the meat, the Folk had eaten it, every scrap. Only bones remained, and even those were marked with shapes that looked like nothing so much as a legion of large square teeth. The Folk in Rhysbridge were never so fiercely ravenous.
    I came up the Cellar stairs into the smell of baking bread. I’d forgotten about the old dog, with his watery yellow eyes, who flapped his feeble tail at me. He hauled himself up from his station beneath the ever-burning candle.
    “Go away!” Those blunted