LITMIR.BIZ

       A WORD ABOUT VILLAINS …

      Mum said the fiends usually came after midnight. They’d flutter down silently from rooftops and slither unseen from the sewers under a Black Moon. Luck Uglies, she’d call them, then quickly look over her shoulder to make sure they weren’t listening. Father said the Luck Uglies weren’t monsters. Outlaws, criminals, villains, certainly, but they were men, just like us.

      I still remember the night the Earl’s army marched through the village, forcing them north into the toothy shadows of the forest. Soldiers were sent to follow, but none ever returned. With time, the Luck Uglies faded into ghosts, then whispers. And finally, after many years, it was as if they had never existed at all.

       Anonymous Villager

      RYE AND HER two friends had never intended to steal the banned book from The Angry Poet – they’d just hoped to read it. In truth, it was nothing more than curiosity that had brought them to the strange little bookshop wedged between a grog shop and the coffin maker. But the shop’s owner overreacted so strongly that they fled without thinking, the illicit tome still clutched under Rye’s arm.

      The accidental thieves tore back out on to Market Street, bouncing off villagers who shared the winding, cobblestone road with horse-drawn carts and pigs foraging in the sewers for scraps. The street was narrow and congested at the noon hour, its alleys clogged with foot traffic blocking their escape. The poet himself, hefty and determined, ploughed through everything in his path. With a quick nod as their unspoken signal, the children changed course. Their escape turned vertical as they scattered in different directions, each searching for footholds in the jagged bricks and mortar of the Market Street shops.

      Rye had never been comfortable on the rooftops. They had scaled them once or twice before, but only as an avenue of last resort. She scrambled up the steeply pitched timbers, darting between the twisted chimneys, scowling gargoyles and leaking gutters of Village Drowning. Black smoke billowed up from the shops and markets, fogging her cloak with the smell of cured meat and birch bark. She didn’t pause to look back at her pursuer – she’d been chased enough times to know better than that. Clearing the ridge of a gable, her momentum plunged her down the other side, legs churning uncontrollably to keep up. She stopped hard at the edge of the thatch and shingle roof, peering down past the toes of her oversized boots to the unforgiving cobblestones far below.

      In front of her was freedom. Quinn Quartermast had already made it across a narrow alleyway on to the neighbouring roof. He was all arms and legs, built perfectly for jumping.

      Somewhere not far behind Rye was a poet with bad intentions, one who had proved to be a remarkably agile climber for someone of such large proportions.

      “I don’t think I can do it, Quinn,” Rye said.

      “Of course you can,” Quinn yelled and waved her on.

      “No, really. I’m not very good at this sort of thing.”

      Rye looked out at the village around her. Drowning was more of a sprawling town than a village, one built on a foundation of secrets, rules and lies, but mostly just mud. It straddled the edge of the brackish River Drowning, close enough to the sea for residents to smell the tide in the mornings and watch the brash gulls waddle into the butcher shop and fly off with a tail or a hoof. North of the river and the town’s walls were creeping bogs blanketed in salt mist, and beyond that was the vast, endless pine forest rumoured to harbour wolves, bandits and clouds of ugly luck. Villagers referred to it only as Beyond the Shale. Nobody respectable believed it to be full of enchanted beasts any more, but old rumours died hard, and there was still a general notion that the great forest teemed with both malice and riches for those brave or foolhardy enough to go looking.

      Footsteps pounded the roof behind Rye. They belonged not to the angry poet, but to a small, cloaked and hooded figure that stormed right past her, arms pumping. It leaped into the air and landed with a thud and a barrel roll on the opposite roof next to Quinn. The figure popped to its feet and pulled off its hood to reveal a crazy nest of hair so blonde it was almost white. Her big blue eyes shone like marbles.

      “He’s right behind me,” Folly Flood said between gasps.

      “Just run and

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