Fly by Night by Frances Hardinge Read Free Book Online Page B

that she would not end the day dangling from the Kempe Teetering bridge as a new scaregull. It was probably the new clothes, she decided. She felt as if she had borrowed somebody else’s body and somebody else’s life, and would probably find herself back in her own before very much longer.
    The sun pricked holes in the weave of her hat and danced from ripple to ripple as the Maid eased its way through a haze of midges and a chase of jewelled damselflies. As the barge approached, moorhens abandoned their gossiping in mid-river, and in the green darks among the nettles coots crouched and stared down their white beaks.
    Each vessel they passed flew a flag proudly announcing its royal allegiance. In theory, everybody in the country agreed that the Realm needed a monarch again, and was on tenterhooks to discover who the Committee of Kingmakers would choose to fill the throne. In practice, the Committee had been on the brink of a decision for twenty years, and many of the would-be kings and queens waiting in exile had died and handed on their claims to their children. In the meantime the Realm had broken up into a series of smaller city-states, each avowing allegiance to a different distant monarch, and leaving only the Capital truly under the control of the Parliament.
    In theory, Chough lay in an area where everybody supported King Prael. In practice, Mosca knew nothing about him except that all the carvings of him looked rather old, and gave him a long chin.
    As she watched, a barge painted with the Weeping Owl heraldry of King Cinnamon the Misjudged passed by a wherry that flew the crossed crimson swords of the Parliament. To Mosca’s slight disappointment, everybody seemed more interested in hauling ropes than engaging in naval warfare. Each crew made a brief offensive gesture towards the other boat, but no one seemed to have their heart in it.
    Mosca was also fascinated with the hauliers of the Mettlesome Maid , partly because she had never been able to watch anyone hard at work without being expected to do her part. Compared to the water-whitened villagers of Chough, they seemed tawny and terrible as tigers. Sun and sweat had left them hard and conker-brown, and they seemed to think nothing of the python-thick ropes they dragged as they strained their way along the bank. The jokes they exchanged were like clods of earth thrown at the face, meant good-humouredly – but meant to bruise as well.
    The captain was a grim-smiling river-king named Partridge. There was something crooked in the make of his right wrist, as if it had been broken and never quite healed, and something crooked in the corner of his smile, as if that too had been broken and put back together slightly wrong.
    ‘I could never have stomached one of the Watermen’s little passenger wherries,’ Clent remarked, waving a dragonfly away from his face. ‘They are always in such a hurry, and one finds oneself rubbing elbows with so many undesirables.’
    For a mad moment, Mosca almost believed that she and Clent had deliberately chosen the barge as the most elegant way to travel, and not because they were fugitives from the law. He seemed so comfortable and glad to have her company that she almost believed that he had not meant to desert her after all, that there had been a mix-up with the purse, that Mistress Bessel had lied about the goose . . .
    Clent offered her some of the mellowberries, and she took them. Leaning over the edge of the boat to spit pips at the ducks, she caught sight of Clent’s reflection as he watched her with that queer, lean, calculating look she had seen on his face before. The taste of the berries bittered in her mouth, and she knew that he still meant to leave her or sell her to the authorities at the first opportunity.
    For a savage moment, she thought of slipping ashore with his mysterious burlap package when the boat moored, and running away on her own. But she knew that she needed him. She had never been further than five