Fly By Night

until it seemed to circle his head like a halo. With a throb the highwayman remembered that, as the man challenged, the Duke would be allowed to take the first shot.

As Blythe willed himself to stand firm, the Duke carefully polished a slender, girlish pistol with a flared muzzle, then turned to regard his enemy shoulder-on, and brought his pistol down to bear. The other coffee-house was close enough for Blythe to see the flash of the powder before the surge of smoke. There was a bang so loud it seemed as if someone had slapped their palms hard against the highwayman’s ears. He took a deep breath, and found that his lungs were still whole. The Duke had missed.

Blythe raised his own pistol and slowly lowered it, until he stared down the barrel at the figure of the Duke, bright as a damselfly. With a single shot he could take the Duke’s madness out of the world. But on either side, hundreds watched, and he felt the bating of their breath like the silence before thunder. Their eyes and hearts were full of Captain Blythe, the hero for whom villagers had risked the scaffold and the stocks, for whom the radicals would fight to the last man, for whom skippers of little boats would hazard fire and musketball. If he took mean advantage of a now unarmed man, the Duke of Mandelion would die, but so would the Hero.

Blythe raised his gun to aim far above the Duke’s head, and pulled the trigger, sending a bullet through the string of the pursuing coffeehouse’s master-kite. As he lowered his smoking gun, Blythe heard a roar of applause erupt from the banks. There were cheers nearby from the lighters and dugouts, the dinghies and sculls.

He was turning away from his opponent when the applause changed to a gasp. Blythe saw shock on the faces of the Bower’s crew, and turned to see the Duke pulling from his coat a second pistol, identical to his first, and levelling it with one smooth gesture. The beating of Blythe’s heart suddenly seemed too loud for one chest, as if he were hearing the heart of every watcher pounding for his peril. There was no time to throw himself flat. There was time only to think, so this is how it feels to be a hero…

Then the frozen second ended, and from the skies swooped the severed master-kite, its canvas juddering with a sound like a mighty wingbeat. It struck the Duke on the back of the head with a chopping-block thud and tumbled him overboard. After the splash, nothing rose to the surface but a seethe of bubbles and the Duke’s three-cornered hat.

Why have his men stopped firing at us? Blythe wondered, as he leaned against the chimney for support. A glance over his shoulder answered his question. The sky was thick with kites, all bearing the Watermen’s insignia. The swift wherries had slipped in among the other river traffic, only now throwing up kites to declare their presence. There would be no more gunfire on their patch.

Skin me, thought Blythe, that girl must have got her message through to the Stationers after all. The far cries of the crowds were as shrill and gleeful as gull calls over a ploughed field, and Blythe looked about him, dazed, as distant hats were hurled into the air, and little boats ran up flags of celebration.

Among the figures thronging the Ashbridge, Blythe thought for a moment he saw a short and slender figure in an olive-green dress, a point of stillness amid the jubilation. But a fit of light-headedness came over him again before he could be sure whether it was Mosca, and by the time it cleared the figure was gone.

U is for Undefended

So this is what living honesty is like, Mosca thought as she waded through bristling, rustling plants. The thick green seedpods that patted the skin of her arms were as cool and rough as the pads of cats’ paws. The riverside paths had been easy enough to follow in daylight, but now the light was starting to dim. Her only hope of finding the ragman’s raft again was to follow the river, so she struggled along within sight of the water even when the bank became overgrown.

Ugly Mr Toke had told her that the high tide would cause wild water. The ragman’s raft was tethered by just one mooring pin in the soft bank. She needed to moor it more safely so that the river would not drag it loose and chew it to pieces, the way he had described. And she needed to find a better hiding place for it so that the Stationers did not find it.

No, she did not want the Stationers to find it; she knew that now. She had realized that while she was staring into Toke’s clever little eyes. The Stationers would cage the press like a wild animal, and break its spirit. Suddenly she had known that the printing press should be hers and hers alone.

There was a terrible excitement in the thought of the press lurking in its darkened lair with its iron grin and ink-stained teeth, ready to whisper forbidden secrets to her. If there is paper, there may be books, whispered a voice in her head. Dangerous books, gunpowder books, books that could burn away the castles of the mind and change the colour of the sky.

Of course it was madness to be out alone in the woods, let alone at such an hour. Mosca had read of Wry Petchers, the Manhandler of Scumpy Bank, not to mention countless other footpads, cut-throats and gangs preying through the waysides and wild places. Even an ordinary pedlar might snatch the chance of robbing a small and solitary girl. But somehow these thoughts and the tingling scratches left by the briars only made her more determined. Besides, woods made sense. Woods were home.

On two occasions Mosca noticed a convoy of Watermen boats sail by, kites high. The first convoy was a flotilla of small, fleet boats. The second was a glide of larger tideboats and barges, flanked by wherries. Each time, she hid in the undergrowth until they had passed. By the time a nibbled moon was climbing the treeline, Mosca’s clogs were heavy with black mud and her stomach was a blank, demanding hole.

By the time a nibbled moon was climbing the treeline, Mosca’s clogs were heavy with black mud and her stomach was a blank, demanding hole.

The river’s voice changed, and Mosca realized that it was struggling with a foaming tangle of boughs which chafed in the drag of the current. Her heart somersaulted as she recognized the dead tree where she had narrowly escaped the Birdcatcher ragmen. But surely it was foolish to imagine that they would still be waiting here in such a desolate place?

Using the ripple of roots as rungs, she climbed up on to the trunk of the fallen tree, and kicked her heels against the bark to knock off the mud. She pulled a few blackberries from the nearest bush, but they were still hard and bitter to chew, and she could feel their tiny hairs tickle her tongue and throat as she swallowed them. She was just thinking of climbing further up the fan of roots to reach a dark spray of elderberries when a firm hand was placed over her mouth and she was pulled backwards off the trunk. Despite her shock, Mosca made hearty use of her elbows until her attacker set her on her feet and released her. She turned, fear hammering in her chest.

‘Mr Kohlrabi!’ Mosca was flooded with relief. ‘I looked for you an’ couldn’t find you an’ lots of things ’ve ’appened an’ you weren’t at your coffeehouse where you said to look an’ Mrs Nokes couldn’t say…’ Mosca’s voice dropped to a whisper as Kohlrabi shook his head and raised a finger to his lips.

‘Hush… Mosca, you are being followed. You have been followed all the way from Mandelion. And I do not think you wish to lead them to the printing press, do you?’

Mosca shook her head silently.

‘Let’s see if we can lose them, then, shall we?’

Kohlrabi seemed to know the paths of the wood where moss would silence their steps. He appeared much taller in the dark, or perhaps, Mosca’s tired brain wondered, perhaps he wore daylight in a way that made him seem shorter and more ordinary.

‘Who are they?’ whispered Mosca when they had been creeping in this way for some time.

‘Stationers.’ Kohlrabi’s whisper was a little louder than hers, as if he thought Mosca’s pursuers had probably been left behind. ‘Little god, you have been crashing through the undergrowth like a wounded boar, and they have been following the sound. I in turn have been following them. They were quite worried when you stopped walking, and they started arguing about which one of them should creep forward and get a sight of you. I thought I would try and reach you first.’

‘An’ how did you know I was goin’ after the printing press?’