Chapter One
Pipistrel was deep in the Choke Alleys. It was black night, blacker than the inside of a cash box, so black you couldn’t see your hand in front of your eyes.
This suited Pip. He didn’t want to be seen, and when he didn’t want to be seen, even a witch’s cat would have trouble spotting him. He scuttled through tiny alleys, some little wider than his own body, making his way unerringly with senses other than sight. Up and down broken and slimy steps, through courtyards the size of wardrobes where even in summer only a few shamefaced rays of sunlight ever visited, along streets that were no more than tunnels of blackened brick and stone, past windowless walls and doorways like decaying mouths exhaling rottenness.
Pip knew the Choke Alleys like the back of his hand. Better, probably: it was so long since his hands had been washed that he might have had trouble recognizing them clean.
Tonight he was proceeding with rare caution. He’d slither into a passage only when he was sure beyond all doubt that it was empty. When the rubbish stirred and snored, some drunkard sleeping off his last flagon of gin, the boy started and ran as if a demon were at his heels. A cat fight that exploded by his ear made him jump out of his skin. If he saw any shadow that looked vaguely human, he retraced his steps and went another way.
When at last he reached his destination — a doorway that looked no different from any of the other doorways, its lintel cracked, its wood battered and discolored — he studied it doubtfully from a distance and decided to use the back way. He climbed a pipe, slipped in silently through a third-floor window, and stood in the tiny bedroom that belonged to him and his sister, breathing fast, his bony chest going up and down.
God’s nails! he thought.
By the Ghost of the Holy Mother, that was wild. There was no sign of El’s sleeping form. She was waiting up for him, and he’d said he’d be late, he’d
said.
When he recovered his breath, he stole down a short passage until he reached another door. A dim light wavered through the gap underneath it. He wiped his hand over his nose, squared his shoulders, and entered.
In the main room stood a girl maybe a year or two older than he was — fourteen, fifteen, it was hard to tell. Even in the kind light of the oil lamp, her face looked pinched and pale, and her mouth was drawn down in two deep lines.
“Where’ve you been, Pipistrel?”
Using his whole name meant she was angry.
Pip shrugged. He didn’t feel like a fight tonight, after all he had been through. “None of your business.”
“Don’t you give me face like that. I’ve been sitting here eating out my heart for hours and hours. I thought you were dead.”
“You always think I’m dead.” Pip shrugged past her and into the room beyond, and flung himself on one of the two rough stools that, with an old chest that served as a table, were its sole furnishings. “I’m dead tired is all.”
The girl looked at him, her lips pressed together, her eyes blazing. Her face was eloquent with all the things she wanted to say, but instead she shut the door and sat down next to Pip.
“I don’t want to fight,” she said.
“Me neither,” said Pip.
They sat in brooding silence for some seconds while he pondered whether to tell El what had happened. The problem was he was bursting with it. He had to tell someone.
“I’m hungry,” said El dolefully.
“Listen, I didn’t get anything to eat. I got something else. Something precious.”
“Gold?” said El in a whisper, her pale face lighting up. For El, gold conveyed a picture of impossible romance and adventure. One of her ambitions was to someday make her way to the Royal Plaza in Clarel, where nobles lived in airy palaces with carriages of gold and jewels in their hats.
“I don’t know. It’s something precious, something very precious.” Pip was leaning forward, talking low. He didn’t want anyone else to hear, and the walls here were thin as burlap. “I robbed the wrong person. He didn’t look like a noble, but he was.” For a moment his voice rose indignantly. “Nobles have got no call going around dressing like commoners. Anyway, I reckon that if we play our cards right with what I’ve got, we might end up eating like kings every night off plates of gold.”
El, her anger forgotten, looked at Pip, her eyes glowing with hope. It transformed her: suddenly she seemed like an angel, with her fair hair standing out all around her head like a halo.
Pip almost turned away. It broke his heart when his sister looked like that. She was older than he was, but he felt that he was more grown up. There was something too innocent about El. He often feared for her. Sometimes she was very like a small child, and it often took her longer than most people to understand things. But there was a light in El, the way her face would glow when she was happy or hopeful, that made your heart lift. She saw things that other people didn’t, because they were in too much of a hurry. And her word was always true.
He reached into his shirt and pulled out a silver box. El’s face filled with awe. The silver was tarnished, and it was a little battered, but she had never been so close to anything so beautiful. The lid and sides were molded in a relief design of dragons studded with amethysts, and in the middle of the lid was engraved a coat of arms featuring a bird with a woman’s face and another dragon embellished with red gems.
“That’s a coat of arms, the sign of the noble,” said Pip. “As clear as clear.”
Slowly, as if she hardly dared to touch it, El reached out and stroked the lid with the tip of her finger. The metal felt smooth and soft and cool.
“What’s inside it, Pip?” she whispered at last. “It must be something very valuable, to have a box like that.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Let’s look.”
Copyright © 2020 by Alison Croggon. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
