The Luck Uglies (9 page)

The villagers on Mud Puddle Lane did not hear him amid their own commotion.

“Whose house is that?” he shrieked, loud enough now that the din subsided and Rye's neighbors took notice.

The Constable grabbed a soldier and thrust him ahead, pushing through the masses, stomping toward the far end of Mud Puddle Lane. They stopped at a ramshackle cottage at the farthest end of the street. Its windows were broken. Creepers grew in tangles over its collapsed roof.

“Whose house is this?” Boil screamed again, with a ferocity that couldn't be ignored.

“Nobody's,” someone volunteered, which was the truth. The cottage had been abandoned for as long as Rye could remember.

But now, over its hollow doorframe, hung an ominous, tattered black flag and emblem—crossed swords behind a four-leaf clover.

“Get it off of there,” Boil commanded. “Pull it down.”

A soldier gave it a hard tug and pulled the flagpole from the door, splintering it in two over his knee.

Rye turned around to ask Harmless what all this meant, but he was nowhere to be found.

 

That night, Rye curled up in bed with her head on her mother's shoulder. They both watched the fire crackle in the fireplace. Lottie snored between them, sleeping upside down so that her scratchy little toenails pressed against Rye's chest. Shady snuggled in a warm, furry pile at Rye's feet. The wind had kicked up outside, and the banging of loose shutters echoed in the night.

“Mama,” Rye said. “Are we safe from the Bog Noblin?”

Shady rustled around at the foot of the bed, licking a paw and cleaning himself. Abby smiled at him.

“The doors are bolted and the windows shuttered. There's no safer place in the village than where we are right now.”

“Then why aren't you sleeping?” Rye asked.

Abby sighed. “There are others I worry about. But there's nothing we can do at the moment. Let's both close our eyes and get some sleep.”

Rye wondered if she meant Harmless. Her eyes were still wide open when Abby spoke again.

“Riley, tomorrow I'd like you to come with me to the Willow's Wares in the morning. I'm bringing Lottie, too.”

“Okay,” Rye said.

“It's been many years since there was a Bog Noblin scare in the village,” Abby said. “You were just an infant the last time. Toward the end it got bad. Truly awful. . . .” Abby's voice drifted off. Rye felt her mother's body shudder against her. “People can sometimes lose their heads. The shop, well, bad news tends to be good news for our business. Too good sometimes. I may need your help.”

“Catching wirries?” Rye said.

“No,
real
help,” Abby said with a chuckle. “Besides, I'll feel better knowing you and Lottie are close by.”

They both closed their eyes. Rye wanted to ask her mother if she'd seen Harmless again. She wished she could tell her mother about her conversation with him in Miser's End. But Abby had yet to speak another word about him. Why did Rye have to ask all the questions?

Rye resigned herself to get some rest. Eventually the gentle hum from her mother's nose told her Abby was asleep, but the far-off banging of shutters kept Rye awake for a long time.

12

Longchance

“T
his one,” Harmless said, pointing to the small white scar that peeked through his eyebrow, “came from the teeth of a fearsome beast.”

“Really? What kind?” Rye asked, eyes wide.

“I was bitten by the family dog when I was about your age.”

“That's not a very exciting story,” Rye said.

Rye and Harmless sat on headstones in Miser's End Cemetery. Rye had brought him breakfast, as promised—a chunk of bread and some porridge Rye had slow-cooked in the fireplace embers overnight. She'd also brought a jug of fermented cider to wash it down. Abby had been preoccupied all morning and Rye was able to sneak it out without too much trouble.

Harmless rolled up his sleeves and showed her some smooth pink welts around his elbows. “What about these? This is where I was lit on fire.”

“You jest,” Rye said.

“I'm afraid not,” Harmless said. “How about this one?”

He pulled the hair back over his left ear. More accurately, his left earlobe. The rest of it was missing.

“That one is from when I had to jump from a bell tower into a farmer's hay wagon,” Harmless said. “Unfortunately, I missed the wagon and landed on his plow.”

Rye cringed.

“It was a good ear. I'm not sure where it ended up—hopefully planted in a nice orchard somewhere. And then there's this.”

He held out the pinky on his left hand. It was half an inch shorter than it should be.

“What happened to it?” Rye asked.

“Snarklefish. A whole school of them. Fortunately, that's all they got.”

“What about that one?” Rye said, pointing to the one on his chin.

“Broadsword,” he said.

“That one?”

“Shillelagh.”

“And that one?”

“Copper kettle.”

“A kettle?” Rye said.

“I once made an insensitive remark about a young woman's cooking. I won't make that mistake again,” Harmless said. “By the way, this bread and porridge is quite delicious. Will you not join me?”

“I can't,” Rye said. “My mother is leaving for the shop any minute and I need to go with her.”

For once, Rye was actually disappointed to be going to the Willow's Wares. It was her first breakfast with Harmless and she wouldn't even be able to ask him all the questions she'd thought up. She had come to drop off his food so he would know that she intended to keep their deal. They hadn't even covered all his scars, but Rye had learned you needed to ease into questions with grown-ups. Start them off with easy ones before you got to the good stuff.

“Have you ever broken a bone?” Rye asked.

Harmless laughed. “Most of them. Haven't you?”

“No,” Rye said. Not that she could remember, anyway.

“I see a healer in Trowbridge—Blae the Bleeder,” Harmless said. “He says I've broken all the major ones anyway. Legs, arms, ribs, my back, neck, cracked my skull—Blae says there are nine bones in my body that I haven't broken, shattered, bruised, or cracked in some way.”

“You seem to get hurt an awful lot,” Rye said.

“What's life without a little adventure?” Harmless said.

Rye could hear her mother calling for her from the other side of Troller's Hill. Her eyes darted toward the hill and she shifted nervously from one foot to the other. Abby always looked for her at Quinn's first, then Miser's End. She turned back to Harmless, who raised an inquiring eyebrow.

“What is it you do exactly?” Rye asked quickly.

Harmless scraped the bottom of the porridge bowl with his spoon.

“Well, that varies. It depends somewhat on who's paying,” Harmless said. “I've tracked things, trapped things, retrieved things, delivered things. Certain things I will only do during certain seasons. Piracy, for example, is strictly a summertime affair. Frozen in the ice with fifty unwashed sailors is not how you want to spend February, believe me. I could show you my toes from the frostbite—”

“Did you say piracy?”

“It's a broad term,” Harmless said. “Most of the time, though, what I do is collect things. Then I look around until I find someone who might need them more than me.”

“Do you ever
collect
things that belong to other people?”

“You mean steal? Pilfer? Rob?”

Rye nodded.

“Riley,” Harmless said, his face aghast, “that would be wrong.”

Rye was taken aback. Then Harmless raised an eyebrow, scratched his stubbly chin, and asked, with a hint of a smile, “Wouldn't it?”

Rye was pretty certain he was teasing her. Still, it left just enough room for doubt that she hesitated to ask about the Bog Noblin's pouch.

“Yes,” she said flatly. “I suppose it would.”

Again, Rye heard her mother call her name—closer now. She knew there'd be big trouble if Abby had to call a third time, but she had one more question to ask. She shifted nervously on the headstone and adjusted her leggings.

“Shouldn't you be going?” Harmless said.

“So what are you doing now?” Rye said, ignoring him. “And I don't mean eating breakfast with me.”

The cheerfulness in Harmless's tone seemed to drain.

“I'm following something,” he said.

“Following?” Rye said.

Harmless nodded.

“What are you following?” Rye asked.

“His name is Leatherleaf.”

Rye became very still. She had a pit in her stomach. Given all that had happened over the past week, the strange comings and goings, she just knew, deep in her gut, what Harmless meant.

“That's the Bog Noblin, isn't it?” she said very quietly.

Harmless nodded and reached into the folds of his cloak. He removed a large steel fishhook and held it up between his fingers. Rye's mind jumped back to the rook at the Dead Fish Inn. She recalled the pierced, bleeding hole in the Bog Noblin's eyebrow—its face burned into her memory forever.

“It is, Riley. And between you me, I'm afraid he may be the least of this village's worries.”

“
Riley Willow O'Chanter!
” her mother yelled. She was standing at the entrance to the cemetery, her hands on her hips. “RIGHT NOW!”

“Pigshanks,” Rye muttered to herself. Then, quickly to Harmless, “Return the bowl and jug whenever you can.”

She turned and ran out of the cemetery. Rye wasn't sure who was getting the uglier look from Abby—her or Harmless.

 

Rye and Abby completed their long walk to the Willow's Wares in silence, Abby not uttering so much as a word about Harmless, or anything else for that matter. For Rye, her mother's silence was always a far worse punishment than being yelled at.

As soon as they opened up the shop, it became clear that Abby hadn't been joking about bad news being good news for business. The Willow's Wares was busier than Rye had ever seen it. Villagers filled the small shop, bumping one another to get to items that were rapidly disappearing from the shelves. They had already sold out of licorice root and graveyard dust, two key ingredients in a homemade concoction said to repel Bog Noblins.

Rye's mother sent her to the back to fetch another crate of beeswax poppets—crude candles fashioned into the shape of a Bog Noblin to be lit at sundown and left on the doorstep overnight. Gentle snoring came from a little body curled on a pile of old sacks in the storeroom. Lottie was having her afternoon nap. The crates were heavy and the poppets were moving fast, and Rye loosened her collar to cool off.

When Rye returned to the shop, she saw her mother talking to a woman with three small children whom she had never seen before. The woman and the children were dirty and disheveled, and their toes poked through their shoes. The woman was looking at the dragonfly jars. The Willow's Wares sold live dragonflies, collected from the bogs themselves. It was said that for so long as a dragonfly remained alive in its jar, no bog creature would harm a resident of the house. Of course, most people had no idea how to keep a dragonfly alive, and were back within a couple of days to buy another.

The woman clutched a few bronze bits in her hand, and Rye saw her mother lead the family to a small corner of the shop that went largely ignored by most of the other customers. Abby O'Chanter handed the woman a tied bundle of sage and pine needles, and whispered a few instructions in her ear. Rye knew the sage was for smudging—burning it in each corner of the home and then smudging the ashes on the front door. It was one of the few items in the Willow's Wares she had ever seen her mother use in their own cottage. The woman held out the bronze bits but Abby gently closed the woman's hand without taking them, sending her and the children on their way.

“Oh good, Riley,” her mother said when she saw her. “Be a dear and put those poppets on the shelf over there.”

“What was that about, Mama? With the woman and those children?”

Abby smiled. “Oh, nothing, darling. I just hate to see some people throw their money away.”

Her mother was soon tending to another customer while Rye stocked the shelves with the beeswax poppets. As she did, Rye couldn't help but wonder if, of all these people scrambling in and out of the shop, she was the only one who had actually even seen the Bog Noblin that Harmless called Leatherleaf. No sooner had Rye finished her work on the shelves than Folly rushed through the front door of the Willow's Wares. Her cheeks were flush from running.

“Have you seen him yet?” she asked.

“Who?” Rye said. “Did you run all the way here from the inn?”

“Earl Longchance,” Folly said.

Rye had forgotten it was Assessment Day, probably because the Willow's Wares had already paid through the nose during the Constable's visit last week.

The Earl almost never came down into the village from the old castle at Longchance Keep. Rye had seen him once or twice for big events—he'd had a procession through town after his fifth wedding. But each year on Assessment Day, he made his annual pilgrimage to Market Street to check in on the merchants who kept his coffers well lined with gold grommets and silver shims. Occasionally he deigned to enter a shop or two and exchange pleasantries with the shopkeepers. He'd never taken much interest in the Willow's Wares, though.

“With all the Bog Noblin talk, I'm surprised he's coming at all this year,” Rye said.

“My father says he's trying to make a point,” Folly said. “Show the villagers that it's still safe to walk the streets, go about their daily lives.”

“Why would he care? My mother says the Earl has never been one to fret about the well-being of the villagers.”

“My father says it's taxes. People are staying in, not spending money anymore. Although you wouldn't know it here,” Folly added quickly, looking around the busy shop. “I stopped by to see Quinn. The blacksmith shop is doing well too, but that's about it.”

Folly peered through a smudged windowpane. “Come on,” she said. “Let's go see if we can spot him.”

Rye decided her mother could spare her for a few minutes and slipped outside with Folly. The street was already thick with people. They huddled in doorways and hung out of windows. The middle of Market Street had been cleared of horses and wagons and a dozen armored soldiers had taken up posts on the corners. Rye and Folly stood in the doorway under the Willow's Wares' flag. Today her mother had hung a plum-colored flag with a horseshoe logo.

From the far end of Market Street, rows of heavily armed soldiers marched on either side of the road. As they approached, Rye and Folly could see the two figures walking leisurely down the middle of the street. The Earl was tall and gangly, well over six feet tall, and he carried himself with an air of great importance. His shiny leather boots stretched past his knee and his clothing was made of fine fabric the tailors in Drowning didn't sell, in rich, peacock-like colors they were discouraged from delivering to anyone else. He had an enormous belt buckle made of gold that matched the basket hilt of his sword. His cloak was made from the soft fur of gentle woodland animals.

The girl who was with him wasn't much older than Rye or Folly. She wore a black dress made of fabrics as richly appointed as the Earl's. Her jet-black hair was tied in an elaborate braided bun atop her head. Her skin was as pale as the moon on a winter's night, and she wore a frown so tight it looked like her lips might crack.

The Earl gave halfhearted waves to the gawkers who lined the street while the soldiers glared menacingly at everyone.

“Easy to say it's safe on the streets when you have an army by your side,” Folly said. “He still wouldn't go parading through the Shambles like this, though,” she added, with a touch of pride.

“Is that the daughter?” Rye said.

“That's her. Lady Malydia Longchance,” Folly said. “She looks like she sat on a tack.”

It was well known that the Earl had married five times but had fathered only one child thus far. Marrying Morningwig Longchance had proven to be a hazardous activity, as each of the five Ladies Longchance had either disappeared or met a rather untimely demise. In fact, there was an illicit little rhyme that was sung around the Dead Fish Inn.