The Luck Uglies

by Paul Durham

  “Some of your questions I cannot answer,” Harmless said, shaking his head, “because I don’t know myself. What I do know is that Morningwig Longchance is putting this entire village in grave danger so long as he keeps Leatherleaf here.”

  “Because Leatherleaf’s clan will come after him?”

  Harmless nodded. “Yes.”

  “The Earl’s men captured Leatherleaf. Maybe they can defend us from the rest of the Bog Noblins as well,” Rye said.

  Harmless sighed. “As I said, Leatherleaf is young and small. He’s not much older than you—in Bog Noblin years anyway. He’s also injured. A healthy Bog Noblin, even one as young and frail as Leatherleaf, would never have been captured by the soldiers that way.”

  “How was he hurt?” Rye said.

  “He was injured in a fight. Last week. It was the night of the Black Moon, in fact.”

  “Was it you?” Rye whispered.

  “No.”

  “Was it the Clugburrow following him?”

  “Not this time,” Harmless said.

  “What, then?”

  Harmless clasped his hands and leaned forward. “It is somewhat difficult to explain. There are ancient creatures. They’ve been called many things over the years. These days, humans call them Gloaming Beasts.”

  “Gloaming Beasts,” Rye repeated.

  “That’s correct,” Harmless said. “Gloaming Beasts are the only known predator of the Bog Noblin. Their hide is thick and their bodies immune to the Bog Noblins’ infectious bites. Their own claws are laced with toxins that are poisonous to Bog Noblins. To all other creatures, the effect isn’t much more than a mild itch.”

  “Why do they hunt Bog Noblins?” Rye said. “They don’t look very appetizing.”

  “Oh, Gloaming Beasts don’t eat Bog Noblins,” Harmless said. “Well, they may snack on them, but Bog Noblins are not their food. They hunt them for sport. For the sheer joy of it. Even a well-fed, content Gloaming Beast has an insatiable desire to slaughter Bog Noblins. They are curious beasts indeed.”

  “They sound dreadful,” Rye said. “What do they look like?”

  “They aren’t as bad as they sound,” Harmless said. “They are mostly docile, although fiercely independent creatures. They walk among humans nearly invisible, blending into everyday life. However, to the informed eye, clues of the Gloaming Beast are everywhere. You just need to know how to look.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?” Rye said.

  Harmless looked surprised. “Because we made a deal, of course. I’ve done many things I’m not proud of, Riley, but I have never broken a deal.”

  Harmless certainly seemed to know a lot about Bog Noblins. Rye paused before asking the next question.

  “Are you a Gloaming Beast?” she whispered.

  Harmless smiled and slapped his knee. “No, no. Certainly not.”

  “But Leatherleaf seemed very frightened of you last night,” Rye said.

  Harmless did not say anything. He just stared at her, and she couldn’t tell if he was surprised or upset.

  “That was you on the street last night,” Rye said. “Wasn’t it?”

  “It was,” Harmless said quietly.

  “Why was Leatherleaf so scared of you? I mean, you are a little scary. To me. But that was a monster running from you as if his life depended on it.”

  “Let’s just say that I, too, have a history with creatures of his kind.”

  Now that Rye was rolling, she had no intentions of stopping.

  “What was that around your neck?” Rye said.

  “I’m sorry?” Harmless asked.

  “Last night. Something was glowing around your neck.”

  Rye found that she wasn’t waiting for an answer. She was stepping closer to Harmless, probably closer than she should. What did she really know about this strange man who had appeared out of the cemetery—a man covered in scars and tattoos with a history that included things like piracy and chasing mythical beasts through the forest? Well, she knew that her mother had called him harmless, and a friend. She also knew her mother would never put her in danger.

  When she was just a step away, she extended her hand toward his neck. He did not move. With a finger, she carefully pushed aside the collar of his cloak. Around his neck, she saw a black leather necklace strung with stone runes.

  Rye swallowed hard. She looked to his eyes for an explanation.

  “Rye!” voices were yelling.

  “Rye, are you in the cemetery?”

  She recognized them as Folly and Quinn. She still wasn’t ready to share Harmless with them.

  “You’ll be back tomorrow?” she said.

  “Of course. I always keep my deals,” Harmless said.

  Rye ran off to meet her friends.

  Grim Green was the great swath of open, unplanted field just west of the village, separating it from the craggy hill that was home to Longchance Keep. It seemed like an enormous waste of tillable soil, but Earl Longchance did not want his view to be obstructed by crops of any kind. Grim Green earned its name because it was little more than a depressing field of mud during the spring thaws. On some April days you could sink hip-deep in the muck. The winters and summers weren’t much better, when it was either covered with two feet of frozen snow or teeming with mosquitoes and biting flies. The fall wasn’t so bad though, and Rye had heard that long ago Grim Green hosted fairs, festivals, and even jousting contests, back when anyone was interested in those sorts of things.

  That day the Green was active again as volunteer laborers toiled in the field. The Earl’s “volunteers” were almost always villagers who couldn’t afford to pay their Assessment—voluntary work duty being the best of several unpleasant options. Tents were erected. Overgrown grasses were cut and cleared. Rats were chased from the weeds.

  Rye, Folly, and Quinn made the long walk from Mud Puddle Lane to see what all the fuss was about. It seemed most of the village’s children had the same idea.

  “What are they doing?” Quinn asked.

  “I heard Earl Longchance declared a new festival,” Folly said. “The Long Moon Festival—two days from now.”

  “The Long Moon?” Quinn wondered out loud.

  “I think he named it after himself,” Folly said. “It marks the tenth anniversary of the night of the Purge. That’s what the announcement said anyway—I think his math is a little off. Anyway, the Bog Noblin will be the guest of honor. I guess he wants to remind everyone that the village doesn’t need the Luck Uglies to keep us safe.”

  “What do they have planned for the Bog Noblin?” Quinn said.

  “Nobody knows. Maybe it’s a secret.”

  “Do you think there’ll be jugglers?” Quinn asked.

  “Jugglers are boring,” Folly said. “What about fire eaters?”

  “What do you think, Rye?” Quinn said.

  “Oh, I like both,” Rye said, her mind swimming elsewhere.

  Rye was thinking about her secrets. One of them anyway—she seemed to have been collecting them lately. The one troubling her at the moment smelled like swamp cabbage and currently resided in the best hiding place Rye could think of—inside her dried lizard collection, a spot much reviled by her mother.

  Rye was still staring at her boots when the afternoon sun sent shadows creeping across her feet. She looked up. The shadows were cast by the tall, spidery towers of Longchance Keep, rising up like skeletal fingers digging out of the earth.

  Groups of children and several adults wandered along the path to the Keep.

  A boy shouted, startling them as he skipped toward the hill. “Don’t you want to see the Bog Noblin? The Earl’s got it in a cage outside the gates.”

  Quinn and Folly both got to their feet.

  “No one’s ever captured a live Bog Noblin before,” Folly said.

  “Maybe that was a good thing,” Rye said.

  Folly and Quinn exchanged curious glances.

  Rye leaned forward. “Did you ever stop to think that where there’s
one Bog Noblin, there might be more? What if it has friends?” Or enemies, she thought. She still hadn’t told them about her discussions with Harmless.

  “They don’t strike me as the friendly sort,” Folly said.

  “Come on, Rye,” Quinn said. “Let’s go see.”

  After all she’d heard about Leatherleaf, Rye didn’t feel like being part of the spectacle. She’d been thinking about monsters. What was a monster? Many villagers still believed Folly’s twin brothers were monsters. Just because they were different. She’d heard that when the twins were born, soldiers came to the Dead Fish Inn to take them away. Needless to say, the Floods didn’t let them. Soldiers hadn’t been welcome in the Shambles ever since.

  She’d also been considering what Harmless had said—about what could have been so compelling that it kept Leatherleaf here. Leatherleaf surely didn’t want to be in Drowning. He was alone, running from the unimaginable cruelty of his own family, and now he was trapped. He must be terribly frightened himself. Could it have something to do with her? The pouch she took from his camp on the night of the Black Moon?

  “You go,” she said. “I need to get home.”

  “Okay,” Folly said. “We’ll see you tomorrow?”

  “Of course,” she said, and the three friends parted ways.

  Rye trudged across Grim Green alone, the shadow of Longchance Keep now heavy on her back.

  Rye cut through town and made it to Mud Puddle Lane by late afternoon. Her neighbors were cleaning up Leatherleaf’s mess from the night before, and Mr. Pendergill was busy repairing his roof. Inside, Abby was cutting carrots into a pot with Fair Warning. Its sharp blade was as useful for making supper as it was for chasing thieves out of the Willow’s Wares. Abby had let Rye chop leeks with Fair Warning once. It took fishing line and a sewing needle to eventually stop the bleeding. Rye still had the crescent-shaped scar across her thumb.

  Rye helped Abby with some of the safer supper preparations while Lottie and Shady took turns swatting a goose feather they’d torn loose from Rye’s pillow.

  They were all interrupted by an unexpected—and not entirely friendly—knock at the cottage door. Abby wiped her hands on her dress and set Fair Warning on the table. She opened the door carefully. Staring back at them was the unpleasant face of Constable Boil. He was joined by the two burly soldiers who seemed to accompany him everywhere he went.

  Boil raised a dust-ball eyebrow.

  “Miss O’Chanter,” he said, by way of greeting.

  “It’s ‘Mrs.,’” Abby said. “How can I help you, Constable?”

  Rye and Lottie both pressed themselves to Abby’s legs and stared from behind her hips.

  Boil squinted at Rye, as if he recognized her, but continued on to the business at hand.

  “We were hoping to have a word with you, Mrs. O’Chanter,” Boil said. “Inside.”

  He placed a leathery palm on the door. With a pang of disgust, Rye noticed the blue hair ribbon tied around his bony wrist. It was the one he’d taken from her mother at the Willow’s Wares.

  “You may certainly have a word with me, Constable,” Abby said. “Right here.”

  She adjusted her stance in the doorway, making it clear that the Constable and the soldiers were not welcome in her home. Boil did not seem to like that one bit. Across the street, Mr. Pendergill stopped repairing his roof to watch. The other neighbors took notice as well.

  Boil raised his voice and spoke sternly. “Mrs. O’Chanter, it has come to the Earl’s attention that last night, during the altercation with the Bog Noblin, multiple eyewitnesses sighted yet another troubling thing here on Mud Puddle Lane.”

  “Really?” Abby said. “Did someone report the soldiers stealing my neighbors’ hens or napping in our doorways? Because I can assure you that those accounts are absolutely true.”

  “No, Mrs. O’Chanter,” Boil said coolly. “It has been reported that a Luck Ugly walked these very streets.”

  “How exciting,” Abby said, without enthusiasm. Rye, on the other hand, could not believe her ears.

  “That’s right, Mrs. O’Chanter,” Boil said. “And we have reason to believe that it was not just any Luck Ugly. No, indeed. We very much believe that it was one of the most notorious of their kind.”

  Abby just stared at the Constable.

  “No witty response, Mrs. O’Chanter?” Boil asked.

  Much of the neighborhood had now gathered on the street. Constable Boil raised his voice in his most authoritarian, Constable-like way.

  “Mrs. O’Chanter, by declaration of the Earl, you are hereby ordered to produce the criminal sometimes known as Gray the Grim, or Gray the Ghastly, or Gray the Ghoul, or Gray the Gruesome—”

  “I have no idea who you speak of,” Abby said matter-of-factly.

  “Son of Grimshaw the Black,” Boil continued, “brother of Lothaire the Loathsome, and last known High Chieftain of the outlaws known as the Luck Uglies.”

  “Are you finished?” Abby asked.

  “I can continue if you need further clarification,” Boil said.

  “I know not who you speak of and therefore I cannot produce him.”

  “We have good information,” Boil said, “that you are harboring said criminal in your very home.”

  “Your information is not only bad, it’s preposterous.”

  “In that case, Mrs. O’Chanter,” Boil said, “you won’t object if we look inside—to clarify the misunderstanding.”

  “You shall do no such thing,” Abby said. She pulled Rye close to her.

  “Mrs. O’Chanter, my patience for pleasantries has run out,” Boil said. “Step aside or these men will knock both you and your scrawny boy out of the way.”

  “Hey,” Rye said.

  “You are not welcome in my home, Constable,” Abby said, “lest you’ve forgotten where you are.”

  Boil laughed and gestured to a soldier.

  “Move them aside—aaaaaaagh!”

  Boil let out a blood-curdling scream and looked toward the ground. Abby, Rye, and the soldiers did too. Lottie O’Chanter had wandered off and retrieved Fair Warning, and she was in the process of slowly burying it three inches deep into the Constable’s foot.

  “You mean! Mean! Mean!” Lottie said.

  Boil wrenched his foot away and grabbed it with both hands, Fair Warning still impaling his boot.

  “Grab that red-headed bog spawn,” Boil yelled, gesturing to Lottie. “She’s coming to the Keep for a lesson she’ll never forget.”

  “Me no spog bawn, me Lottie,” Lottie clarified, with a stomp and a pout.

  The first soldier lurched for Lottie. Both Abby and Rye jumped in front of her. Abby put a thumb in his eye and Rye left teeth marks in his shoulder before he roughly knocked them aside with swats from his thick arm.

  He grabbed Lottie hard by her little shoulders and her face went from anger to sheer terror. Lottie’s eyes welled with tears.

  Struggling to her hands and knees, Rye saw something large fall from the roof. It landed with barely a sound behind the Constable and the two soldiers.

  “I prefer Gray, thank you very much,” it said.

  The Constable and the soldiers all turned around. It was Harmless. Both of his hands were empty and he pointed a finger.

  “Put the child down,” Harmless said.

  The first soldier looked to Boil but held Lottie fast.

  “That wasn’t a question,” Harmless said, and hit the soldier with such speed and ferocity that Rye barely saw him move. She did see the soldier’s head snap back and his feet sweep out from under him. Harmless landed on top of him with a bone-crunching crack, and he safely deposited Lottie within arm’s reach of Abby. The next soldier quickly advanced upon Harmless with his saber drawn. Harmless’s two swords appeared in his own hands and he nearly disappeared behind his cloak as he whirled and slashed. In an instant, the soldier was disarmed and lay in a moaning heap on Mud Puddle Lane.

  Constable Boil had extracted Fair Warning from his foot but qui
ckly dropped it to the ground when he saw Harmless eyeing him with bad intentions. Harmless cleared the ground between them in two strides and contorted the Constable’s arm behind his neck in a way that looked like it might snap right off.

  “Two men?” Harmless hissed into Boil’s ear. “On top of everything else, Longchance tries to insult me? Next time bring twenty. Or don’t come at all.”

  He released the Constable from his hold with a shove that sent him stumbling. The soldiers picked themselves up and all three crawled, shuffled, and limped away from Mud Puddle Lane as fast as they could. The neighbors watched with mouths agape.

  Harmless dusted himself off, although he did not seem the least bit rumpled from the scuffle. There was a fury in his eyes Rye had never seen before. It seemed to fade when he saw them. Harmless offered a hand to Abby. She ignored it and got both Rye and Lottie to their feet. Abby pushed her hair back behind her ears and wiped a smudge off Lottie’s cheek.

  “Riley,” Abby said, “there’s no easy way to explain this so I’ll just say it. Please invite your father inside for dinner. We have many things to cover and little time to do it.”

  16

  The Spoke

  Words could not adequately describe what Rye was feeling. After all, for her entire life she had been told that her father was a soldier of the Earl who had disappeared Beyond the Shale. Now, it turned out, her father was a mysterious stranger named Harmless, or Grim or Gruesome, among other not-so-nice things. He skulked around in the night and chased monsters through the bogs for fun and profit. He was called a criminal and an outlaw by the Earl and seemed to prove it by pummeling the Earl’s soldiers in the streets. And not just any criminal—no, he was the High Chieftain of the notorious Luck Uglies. It was certainly more interesting than having a father who fished for cod or shoed horses. But what did that make her? It was all just too much, too fast. The fact was, deep down, excitement stirred in Rye’s stomach, but it was buried beneath waves of confusion and frustration.

  Lottie, on the other hand, was swinging on Harmless’s arms as if they were vines and began to climb up his back as nimbly as a tree squirrel. Harmless smiled awkwardly. His eyes bulged as Lottie threw her arms around his neck and hung there with her full weight.