LITMIR.BIZ

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was so black and wide it seemed it might swallow her. She took a step away. When he didn’t move to follow her, she took another.

      “You may go,” Slinister said, waving a dismissive hand. “Perhaps we’ll have a chance to meet another day.”

      Rye’s steps quickened as she moved along the ice, never taking her eyes off the man named Slinister. She found Good Harper struggling to regain his feet. She grabbed him by the shoulders and helped him up, then hurried him across the frozen river. His plum-coloured scarf dragged behind them.

      “Remember my name, Rye O’Chanter,” Slinister called as he watched her go. She glanced back over her shoulder just once, and was relieved that the night now shrouded his fiendish mask.

      As Rye and Good Harper took refuge in the safety of the woods, Slinister’s cohorts slipped from the shadows and plundered the Mud Sleigh, loading their own sledges with every last gold grommet and silver shim. They unhitched the horses and led them away. Finally, when the sleigh was stripped to nothing more than an empty shell, the looters lit a raging ring of fire around the camp. Their sledges had disappeared far downriver by the time the sleigh broke through the melting ice and sank beneath the frigid water.

      Rye and Good Harper huddled under a tall pine. Rye shivered, more from the shock than the cold. She couldn’t comprehend what had just happened.

      “A pox on the Luck Uglies and their bargains,” Good Harper muttered. “Mouse droppings for the whole lot of them.”

      No sooner had he uttered his curse than a spectre clad in black leather and fur appeared like a flickering shadow. In the moonless night, Rye could have mistaken it for a massive wolf rising up on its hind legs, but in its hands, two blades glinted in the light from the fire. Rye pressed her back against the tree. There was nowhere to run.

      “Come to finish the job?” Good Harper called defiantly.

      The shadowy figure loomed for a moment then, stepping forward, violently thrust its swords downward. Rye pinched her eyes tight. She heard the steel sink into something moist. Perhaps she was just too numb to feel their bite. But when she cracked open one eye, fearful of what she might find, she saw both blades embedded in the ground.

      The figure pulled off its wolf-pelt hood and clutched her by the shoulders.

      “Riley,” the man whispered, his familiar grey eyes wide in a face of faded scars, “what in the Shale are you doing out here?”

      “Harmless!” Rye exclaimed. She blinked in disbelief. “You tell me – you’re the one who sent for me!”

      He gently touched her cheek. His hands, like the rest of his body, were etched with tattoos, and while Rye didn’t think there was anything magical about the circular patterns on his palms, whenever he did this it seemed to warm her whole body, his night-chilled skin notwithstanding.

      “Make no mistake, I’m always glad to see you,” he said softly. “But I did nothing of the sort.”

      Rye shook her head as if she didn’t hear him correctly.

      “Three Luck Uglies came to our cottage with a message. And here, on the river, there was a man – a Luck Ugly, I thought. He called himself Slinister.” She shuddered at the thought of his split tongue. “He said he knows you well.”

      Harmless’s jaw hardened. A darkness seemed to creep through the lines of his scarred face. Rye had only seen brief flashes of that look before and each time it had unnerved her. Harmless must have sensed her unease and pulled her close. His embrace and tender tone shielded her from the fire in his eyes as he scanned the burning river.

      “Don’t fret,” he whispered. “We’ll sort this out in due course. But right now we must be on our way. I know a safe place to spend the night.”

      The hour was late by the time Harmless escorted Good Harper to the closest roadhouse on the path back to Drowning. But to Rye’s surprise he then led her away from the warmth of the inn. They travelled not to the village, but over the edge of a tall bluff and down the jagged coastline. Waves crashed around them as Harmless navigated a rocky shoal that seemed to lead directly into the sea. He only stopped when they reached a mountainous outcropping nestled among the tide pools.

      “Here?” Rye asked in disbelief.

      Harmless put an arm over her shoulder and waved a hand above him. “Here.”

      What looked to be a massive sea stack loomed over them. But now, within spitting distance, it became clear that it was nothing of the sort. The battered rocks had been hollowed out and rising from the waves were two enormous doors. Each the width of a castle’s drawbridge, they were wide enough to sail a ship through with the tide out to sea, but would once again become a submersed secret when the water rolled back in. A towering, weatherworn mansion seemed to grow out of the craggy rocks, its crooked gables, twisting turrets and jumbled archways slinking upwards like coral in search of sun.

      Rye shot Harmless a wary glance from under the folds of his fur cloak.

      “You’ll like it. It’s a secret – even from the Luck Uglies,” he said, appealing to her insatiable curiosity. “We won’t stay long. I promise to return you to Drowning in short order.”

      But as luck would have it, the lingering hand of a stubborn winter delivered one last blow the next morning. And no one, not even Harmless, the High Chieftain of all the Luck Uglies, was going anywhere at all.

      

      YE SAT ALONE on a cold, black rock jutting out from the sea. She counted in her head as she stared at the violent, churning waves. Two hundred and eighty-nine. Two hundred and ninety. Rye hated being alone. She liked waiting even less. But she didn’t dare move for fear of slipping on the barnacles and being dragged out by the current.

      A dusky brown gull struggled to fly against the wind.

      Rye squinted at the bird. It gave her the sudden sense that she’d been in this spot once before, which was odd, since she had never travelled outside of Village Drowning. She shook off the unnerving feeling and resumed her count.

      Two hundred and ninety-nine. Three hundred. Five minutes now.

      A gale sent the gull hurtling off in the wrong direction and it disappeared into a brightening sky that had been grey with fog and snow since Rye’s arrival.

      Rye pulled her new seal-leather coat tight at the collar, its thick hood snug over her head and its long hem covering her to the knees. Even in an ocean storm it kept her remarkably warm and dry. The seal whose hide it was made from met no harm. The reclusive northern salt seal was the only mammal in the world known to shed its skin. Harmless had given her this coat as a belated twelfth birthday present. He’d missed that birthday over this past winter, just as he’d missed all the others before it.

      Harmless might seem like a strange name for a girl to call her father, but Rye’s father was – to put it nicely – an unusual man. Rye hadn’t even known that she had a real live father until last autumn. That was when he appeared like a wisp of smoke out of the ancient forest known as Beyond the Shale. He’d been gone for over ten years.

      Not everyone had been happy to see him. Harmless was a Luck Ugly. An outlaw so notorious that he and all of his kind had been driven into exile by Earl Morningwig Longchance. But, with Rye’s help, Harmless was able to summon the Luck Uglies and once again save Village Drowning. It had been under attack by a fierce clan of Bog Noblins – vile, swamp-creeping beasts who had threatened the lives of the villagers. One would think that such an achievement would have earned a certain degree of appreciation from the Earl, but Longchance’s hatred of Harmless only grew. It was Harmless’s threat – that the Luck Uglies would be watching

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