Frances Hardinge - Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

It was not Brand Appleton. It was not Skellow. It was Laylow, the crop-headed girl with the clawed glove.

‘Fffsst!’ The girl cast a glance up and down the street, and then ventured to the edge of the roof to peer down at Mosca. ‘Below there! Teacher!’ It took a moment for Mosca to remember that this was what she had told Brand Appleton to call her. ‘Wait down there!’

What to do now? The last time Mosca had met Laylow the older girl had helped her escape back to Toll-by-Day, but now everything was different. If Laylow was running errands for Appleton, perhaps she was in the kidnapping conspiracy too. And Laylow had met her as Mosca Mye; she might recognize her… Could she outrun the older girl? Mosca doubted it.

Think Seisian , Mosca told herself as the older girl let herself down from the roof and advanced. Think spices and silks and people eating birds’ nests and monkey fingers .

As she got close, Mosca realized that the older girl looked as nervous as she did. Laylow seemed to be much more interested in staring up and down the alley than examining her green companion in great detail.

‘Come on,’ Laylow’s unclawed hand gripped Mosca’s arm with painful urgency, pulling her down the alley. ‘Brand’s a-waiting for you.’

‘He said he’d meet me here!’ squeaked the ‘Teacher’ as she found herself being propelled down the lane. ‘Him, and nobody else! I’m not a piglet to be dragged off by the nose!’

Without warning Laylow grabbed Mosca by the shoulders and shook her roughly.

‘You come with me.’ Only now that their faces were close could Mosca see the desperation and frustration contorting Laylow’s features. At the corner of her mouth a new cut was drying, and a swelling above her eyebrow had ambitions to become a bruise. ‘You hear me? No bleating. No running. No fun. Or I’ll hush you.’ Laylow was shaking, and Mosca could feel the hard points of the claws trembling against her shoulder blade, not quite piercing her clothes.

It was the bristling, dangerous desperation of a fox in a gin-trap, and Mosca knew better than to argue with it. She let herself be pulled like a mannequin down lane after lane, all the while watching her captor with hard black eyes, ready to pull free and run should the other girl’s grip slacken for a second. But Laylow’s grasp did not weaken, and before Mosca could form another plan Laylow was fumbling a key in a lock, then dragging her into a narrow, reeking room.

The air was clogged with fumes of different sorts: smoke from the dulling fire, spitting fat on the rushlights, vinegar and the acrid, stormy smell of injury. There were no windows, and the room was narrow enough that the straw mattress at the far end reached from wall to wall. The blankets draped over the figure on the bed were too short. They reached only halfway up his chest, and his feet and shins in their blotchy stockings jutted out below them. His pallid skin was now ghastly against his red hair.

Mosca did not need to be a physician to see that Brand Appleton was far from well. Indeed, if his eyelids had not kept up a feverish, moth-wing tremble she might have thought that he had escaped Toll-by-Night by leaving both the world and his body.

A dig in Mosca’s back. She turned to find Laylow staring past her at the prone kidnapper.

‘Can you…?’ Laylow swallowed awkwardly and grimaced, as if her throat was dry, or the rising words knobbly. ‘Can you physick him, then?’

‘What, me?’ Mosca stared in horror at the greasy pallor of his face, and the hand clutching at the folds of blanket.

‘You’re from the spice islands. Seisian or something, he said…’ Laylow was breathing quickly, and her claw-tips were gingerly, furtively tracing lines across the calloused palm of her ungloved hand. ‘Can you not… put him right with spices? Nutmeg or the like? Or… or rub him with tiger spittle or unicorn powder – something to put the claret back in him?’

Drawing closer, Mosca could see that Brand Appleton’s ribs were clumsily wrapped in yellowing bandages through which something dark red was painting rosettes. They looked sodden, and Mosca guessed they were soaked in vinegar. She pulled back, clamping a hand against a sympathetic tingle in her own side as if she was the one that had been bleeding. Prickles flowed up her face, and her head felt light, the smells stifling and sickening her.

‘So what put that hole in him?’ she snapped, unable to keep a creak of fear from her voice. ‘Moths?’ Even as she spoke, however, she guessed the answer. She remembered the collision between the Sheep-Skull and the Horse-Man, and the Horse-Man driving his knives into the forequarters of the Sheep-Skull. So Brand Appleton must have been inside the Sheep-Skull horse, at the front. But that had been a two-man horse. Who had been his partner?

Another easy question. Mosca remembered the gloved hand that had lashed out as she scrambled over the fallen Sheep-Skull horse, a hand that had slashed three parallel grooves through blanket and cloth and skin. A glove with claws. For whatever reason, Laylow had been playing horse’s tail during the grim Clatterhorse gavotte.

‘He thought you would help,’ intoned Laylow numbly, watching Brand Appleton. His breaths were audible. They rose, fell and whistled to their own private rhythm. ‘Told me to fetch you. Thought you would help.’

‘You need a proper sawbones, you do.’ Mosca clenched her fists and stared at the wall. She had a sudden sick horror that the wounded man might shudder and die right in front of her. ‘What would you have me do? Slap on a cobweb and tell him to mend?’

Laylow shook her head. Her face was numbly crumpled as she stared at the patient, her lips in motion like a child struggling to read. Perhaps the Locksmiths kept track of all the doctors.

As if her gaze had grazed his skin, Appleton’s breath briefly halted in its murmuring meander, and his eyes opened a straw’s breadth. His exposed hand stirred on the blanket, then the fingers curled and twitched in a feeble, clutching beckon. With some trepidation, Mosca drew closer and crouched beside the invalid’s bed, lowering her ear to hear his whispering.

‘Need… get me out of here… that girl over there… damned harridan… keeping me locked up here…’ His eyes were cloudy and unfocused, but there was still that blazing, bewildered stubbornness, like firelight behind a misted pane. Mosca could not stop her hand flinching away when his trembling fingers moved to grasp it. His breath smelt of some searing back-room brandy brewed from beetles and dregs. ‘I must get back… nobody to protect her… cannot leave her in their hands if I am not there…’

He was trying to sit up. Laylow sprang forward and shoved him back roughly.

‘Doddypoll!’ she spat, sounding almost tearful. ‘Ninny! What are your wits worth? Lie down and stay there, or I’ll break your pate!’ Mosca could not help feeling that Laylow’s bedside manner lacked a little polish. Appleton fell back with a thump, and a groan of pain and frustration.

‘Witch-kitten!’ Appleton sounded not far from tears himself. ‘You infernal haglet! If you had an ounce of heart…’ His eyelids drooped shut again, and his breath returned to its feverish murmuring.

Laylow gave Mosca another knuckle-nudge in the ribs, and drew her away from the bed to a distance where their whispers would not disturb the sleeper.

‘No doctors.’ Laylow’s eyes rested fully on Mosca’s face for the first time, and for an instant Mosca thought she saw a wrinkle of perplexity, a shade of recognition. But it passed. After all, how could a green foreigner possibly look slightly familiar? ‘There’s no trusting the doctors in this town. But once he’s outside Toll… Can you get him out, by magic or such? A sailor told me a story of a Seisian who had a flying carpet -’