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REED

The saying goes, bad luck is when perfect timing and a lack of preparation meet reality.

Growing up in Dogwood Glen, Moonglade’s neighboring slum, Reed didn’t believe in luck.

Believing in luck would only get you empty pockets at a gambling tavern.

No, there were those born with privilege and those born in squalor, who made their own privilege.

Tragedy and struggle just happened, sure as the sun rose and set. It was nothing personal.

Dogwood Glen had once upon a time been a quiet village filled with dogwood trees, their flowers decorating its swampy forests in white lace.

Today it was nothing but a maze of muddy lanes between ramshackle huts of rotting wood.

Lanes that grew narrower by the day, a stench-infested serpent winding its way past the masses of those born in squalor.

Sure, the occasional tavern made of slightly less rotting wood could be visited—if one didn’t mind a fight with an unmuzzled codpiece of a drunkard and questionable cuisine.

And on Sundays the market, full of shouting vendors, smelled slightly of decaying fish.

The Glen was surely not what it used to be.

Reed left Dupont’s apothecary that afternoon wondering if he should change his stance on luck.

It was beginning to seem he might have the worst luck of all the unfortunate moldwarps in the Glen.

One thing after another went wrong, until it felt as if his brand of bad luck had particularly good timing.

If a fresh leak in the roof wasn’t enough, his brother Philip let himself be pickpocketed out of the rent by walking through a crowd of reeky children at play, an activity any dimwitted toad knew to avoid, and then—in a fit of regret over the loss, no doubt—he went and got himself sick by insisting on hanging around Dankworth’s, knowing full well the pestilence had taken the tavern’s main chef only the week before.

Admittedly, it was hard to be too angry at his brother while the poor man lay whey-faced and sweating on his bed, his tongue the color of a putrefying aubergine well past its date. He could scarcely drag himself to the chamber pot and hardly eat more than a few bites of treacle porridge.

Still. Now Reed had two problems to solve.

The rent money, such as it was, had to be paid in no more than twenty hours, or the Leper’s ruffians would start collecting fingers.

Or ears. One of them preferred noses, he’d heard, and Reed touched his own protectively at the thought.

He was rather fond of his nose. His second problem was acquiring the remedy against the pestilence, a tonic that must be administered before Philip’s eyes filled with blood, a sure sign the plague’s victim had reached the point of no return.

The only known cure was a mysterious concoction of herbs Reed had just discovered was by no means cheap, thanks to the Glen’s bull’s pizzle of an apothecary and his colossal greed.

Reed thought of his brother and tried not to panic.

Philip was the only family he had left. The only family he had ever known.

The two of them survived—that was what they did.

They made their own luck. Losing their parents, along with everything they had, the brothers had scraped by on whatever they earned in the smoky taverns and sunbaked fields of Dogwood Glen.

They had clawed their way to a roof over their heads that they could call their own, clawed their way to something resembling respectability.

Reed would not lose his brother now. Not when Philip still had dreams, aspirations, to one day teach at a school outside the Glen, which proved how completely opposite from each other two brothers could be.

Reed wracked his brain for some solution, forcing himself not to turn around and re-enter the apothecary and punch Dupont in his puke-stocking of a face, the grasping clotpole.

The farms weren’t hiring yet. No one was building anything either.

He could work for the blacksmith, or lend a hand at the butcher’s again, a job he detested, but so did everyone else.

He could bake bread at Rohwedder’s, if he wanted to work before dawn.

But all of these options would still mean waiting to save enough for Philip’s remedy, and waiting was not an option—it would mean his brother’s death.

He knew of no job that would pay on short notice, no employer loggerheaded enough to hand out advanced pay, not if Reed wished to prevent him and his brother from falling deeper into the Leper’s debt.

No job but one.

Reed would just have to fight for the coin. What were bruised knuckles and a few broken ribs, all things considered.

Passing through the market, Reed heard nothing but talk of the beloved librarian who’d died tragically from the pestilence the day before. How her family couldn’t afford her a proper burial.

Old Mrs. Mason was even crying about it, her considerable bosom heaving like some spongy sea beneath her many chins, and Reed halted for a moment to eavesdrop.

“Tansy was the kindest lass here in the Glen,” she sobbed into her stained handkerchief. “No one gave as much time to helping the children here as her. She will be greatly missed—that I can promise you. Greatly missed.”

“She deserved a funeral to make even the sprites cry,” Miss Atkinson called while she stirred something in a bowl, her skeletal arms moving like branches in a strong wind.

“Like the funeral Oscar attended in Moonglade this morning,” Mrs. Mason sniffed.

“He wasn’t invited, but he delivers horseshoes to one of the shops near the manor where the funeral was held.

The shop’s owner is a cousin of the widower, and the dead bride was an heiress .

Alexandra Josephine Bancroft. Her husband will inherit everything she owns. ”

What a name , Reed thought, rolling his eyes.

“Oh, Reed!” Mrs. Mason exclaimed, noticing him. “She was around your age. I believe only nineteen.”

Plenty of women died in the Glen around nineteen and far younger every day, but he only nodded.

“Oscar mentioned the widower will be fine,” Leopald chimed in beside Mrs. Mason.

“Apparently there are many a wagtail lass glad to see the swollen parcel of a husband of hers back on the market. Cornelius Hale is akin to a prince to the women in Moonglade.” He fell into a fit of coughing as his wife smacked the side of his head.

“Don’t forget Oscar also said the bride looked beautiful as the spring day when they buried her in her mother’s garden,” Mrs. Mason continued. “Wedding gown, jewels, and all. So very regal.”

Reed shook his head. Such a waste of jewels .

“She was called Dulce,” Leopald added proudly, as if he were close to the heiress himself. Reed tried not to roll his eyes again. If anyone from that house ever set foot in the Glen, he’d bet a year’s rent they wouldn’t last a day. The smell alone.

“That poor, poor man…” Miss Atkinson lamented.

Reed had heard enough. They were more worried about this rich heiress than the beloved librarian they were originally mourning.

He gave a final nod to Mrs. Mason before leaving. His last fight had saved her husband from the pestilence, and she would not soon forget it. Reed could usually expect to receive some of whatever it was she cooked every Friday evening.

But it isn’t close to Friday now , he thought with a pang of hunger.

Past the tangle of huts, Reed walked in blessed silence along the river’s edge, the stench of its murky water pushing in the opposite direction by the morning’s northerly breeze.

He kept an eye out for anything edible and found a batch of penny bun mushrooms concealed in the weeds, fungi he promptly gathered into his jacket’s deep pockets.

Next he discovered, nearly hidden behind a box hedge, that the whortleberry bushes were at last full of fruit.

Reed filled the small sack he carried in his other pocket, hoping as he did that he could make it back home before the berries were crushed.

With the Leper’s clay-brained toads, one never knew.

“Well, well, well,” Tobin called in his lazy drawl when Reed approached the Leper’s arena. “If it isn’t his fen-sucked majesty Mr. Reed himself. Come to grace us with his royal, pribbling pompous presence.”

“Tobin.” Reed nodded, ignoring the drivel that always spewed from the man in a generous stream.

An unremarkable building from the outside, the arena was made of worn dark oak with no signage and surrounded by the only trees and dry land left in the Glen.

Inside, the building’s central feature was a fighting ring of stretched canvas and bloodstains, its railing of knotted branches and frayed ropes encircled by half-broken benches.

Its secondary feature was the many tables to make bets on the fights.

The Leper lived somewhere within the structure’s shadowy hallways, but few knew where.

The arena was the only place the Duke’s enforcers left alone when they scoured the land for treasure and bribes, all the while pretending to crack down on crime. A fact Reed found interesting.

“Or maybe,” Scott answered, standing slowly to lean on the porch’s worn railing and look down at Reed, his greasy hair falling over his shoulders, “our pretty ivory-headed pumpion has decided to come work for us. What do you say, eh? Are you through mewling about with respectable pignuts who refuse to pay a decent wage?”

“Will I still have to wear one of those lumpish hedge-pig bonnets?”

The trio crossed their arms in unison, which maybe would have been intimidating but for the ridiculous hats the Leper made them wear. Red velvet Breton caps with gold ribbon. Most offensive hats to ever offend, especially on a pack of stuffed puttocks as these three.

“I need a fight,” Reed called before they could defend their boss’s mangled fashion sense. “Today, now.”

“No can do,” Tobin stated, scratching his chin. He actually appeared regretful—a sentiment Reed happened to know was beyond the man’s very limited emotional capacity. “The boss says no fights for a fortnight.”

Ford spit something green over the railing and said, “We’re all in mourning for Tansy, you see. It’s a shame I didn’t get to tumble her first.”

“She was betrothed,” Scott corrected, looking offended.

“Shut it,” Ford snapped. “No one cares.”

“How much do you need?” Tobin called, his eyes dancing with the only real thing Reed knew he felt. Greed. “ You know we’re always here to help out a fellow Glenny, right? You can pay us back in a fortnight. After you win, that is.”

With interest. These plague sores would make sure Reed had no choice but to work for them. For the Leper.

The notion of that turned his stomach, and it wasn’t just the hats. He reached into the sack he held and ate a handful of whortleberries, pretending to be grateful for the offer.

Reed thought of Philip, slowly dying in their dilapidated hut unless he stopped it, along with his own fingers, his ears, and his nose, all things he very much wished to remain intact. There had to be another way.

He turned to leave, waving at the trio.

“I’ll think about it,” Reed lied.

He knew what he had to do. The solution to all his problems had been given to him not long ago. A bride lay buried in jewels only two short leagues away. Her house would be in mourning, black drapes drawn across every window. Nightfall was nearing.

It was a hanging offense, graverobbing, this was true enough. But Philip was dead if he did nothing, as good as dead if he began working for the Leper, his dreams crushed to ashes.

There was no choice.

Reed had a grave to rob.