Free The Hero's Guide to Being an Outlaw by Christopher Healy, Todd Harris Page B

to provide answers—they were all familiar with the reputation of Ruffian the Blue.
    “Those posters?” one lobster trapper asked as he unloaded buckets of shellfish from his boat. “Yeah, everyone’round here has heard about the ‘Horrible Princess Murder.’”
    “Wow,” said Lila. “Even in Yondale they thought Briar was horrible.”
    “I was referrin’ to the murder as horrible,” said the lobsterman. “Not the princess. The lady was Sleepin’ Beauty! Lovely girl by all accounts.”
    “Hah!” Lila scoffed.
    “We have reason to believe the princess might have met her fate here in Yondale Harbor,” the bounty hunter said, eager to change the topic.
    “Well, it’s not exactly uncommon for people to disappear from these wharfs,” said a wool-capped shrimp wrangler. “But it’s unlikely a princess woulda been wandering around here at night.”
    “Could ya give us a description of her?” the lobster trapper asked.
    “Bony,” Lila said. “Big, ridiculous pile of reddish hair. Skin like an albino clam. Face all scrunched up like this. . . .” She pursed her lips and wrinkled her nose as if she smelled rotting fish (which she did).

    Fig. 8
INVESTIGATION, salty
    “Sounds an awful lot like that passenger who went out on the Dreadwind ’bout ten nights back,” said a squid rustler, wiping his ink-stained hands on his apron.
    “ Dreadwind ?” asked Ruffian.
    “It’s a ship,” the squid rustler said. “Pirates—nasty ones.”
    “Wait,” said Lila, furrowing her brow. “So Briar was kidnapped by pirates? Is she even dead?”
    “The lady you’re describin’ was certainly alive when she got on that ship,” said a nearby krill herder. “I saw ’er, too.”
    “As did I,” added the shrimp wrangler. “Only I wouldn’t call it a kidnapping. She just walked aboard like nothing was wrong.”
    “Yeah, there were two guys in black walking with her,” said the squid rustler. “But just walking. Not grabbing or pushing or carrying or anything. They walked her up to the Dreadwind , she got on, and they walked away.”
    “I wonder if they were the same fellas in black who hung up the Wanted signs the next morning,” said the lobsterman. “I figured ’em for Avondellian soldiers.”
    “They couldn’t have been,” said Lila. “Avondellian soldiers wear blue-and-silver pinstripe. Those thugs you saw were probably Briar’s secret henchmen.” She tugged at Ruffian’s cowl. “Ruff, do you see what this means? Briar faked her own death! And then she framed the League for it.”
    “We have no proof of that,” Ruffian said. “We don’t even know for certain that the woman in question was Princess Briar.”
    “You know who could tell you?” the shrimp wrangler said, kicking away a seagull that was nipping at his bait-filled pockets. “King Edwyn.”
    “Why would the king of Yondale know anything about this?” Lila asked.
    “Because before the strange lady got on the Dreadwind ,” he explained, “she was in the royal palace. She came down to the harbor straight from there.” He pointed up to a ramshackle old castle sitting atop a nearby cliff, overlooking the harbor. Squawking seagulls circled its crumbling towers.
    “Come,” Ruffian said to Lila. “We need to have an audience with the king.”
    The inside of Yondale’s royal palace was just as shoddy as its exterior. Grimy footprints dotted once-elegant carpets in hallways where crooked portraits dangled from fraying wires. It had been Yondale’s queen who had kept on top of the staff and made sure the castle was spotless, but ever since she got chased off a cliff by some angry dwarfs, the place had fallen into a state of neglect. There was nothing stopping King Edwyn from having his home fixed up; he just didn’t care enough. His daughter had moved away, and his wife turned out to be a homicidal witch. He wanted some time by himself, so he sent all his servants on indefinite vacations.
    When Lila and Ruffian found the