Mosca was fascinated by the leather waistcoats of the farming men, their broad, black-buckled hats and loose, shabby white shirts. The women all wore coarse print frocks, far fuller than Mosca’s sand-colored dress. Over their white mobcaps they wore wide straw bonnets, tied under the chin with ribbons of different colors. Like all the other women and girls of Chough, Mosca wore a tight-fitting cap of waxed linen which smelled of old fat but kept most of the water out. It seemed strange to her to wear two hats instead of one but, to judge by the way the farm girls tittered at her, they thought quite the opposite.

Kempe Teetering could be heard long before it could be seen. At the heart of the wind’s bluster there was a throaty fluting, like a hundred people blowing into the necks of bottles. There was a click, clack, clatter like loose machinery. There was a keen and steely yodeling.

The hills fell back, and the tumbling tributary which the people of Chough had always thought of as The River joined the real river. This was no shallow treacherous bandit of a river, ragged with foam. This was a sleek and powerful lordling, some thirty feet wide. This was the Slye.

Across the Slye, rippling and fluttering like a carnival carriage, stretched Kempe Teetering.

Most of the town was built across the great two-tiered bridge, the little shops and houses flanking the main thoroughfare. Rope ladders trailed from window and rooftop, and wooden stairways zigzagged between bridge and jetty. A web of clotheslines crisscrossed every available space, so that Mosca’s first impression was of a flutter of brightly colored cloth—saffron, mauve, sky blue, mint green. It was the first real town Mosca had ever seen, and it seemed too big and bright and busy to hold in her head all at once.

Above, the gulls spun and floated like tea leaves in a stirred cup. They followed each boat along the river, tearing off narrow strips of sound with their sharp beaks. They squabbled over spillages, and tried to scare the errand girls into dropping something. Every roof was decorated with a brightly painted wooden windmill, or a whistle in the shape of a bird, or clattering dolls on strings, in a vain attempt to scare away the gulls.

And the boats! Grim, old barges being loaded to the waterline with bales and boxes, while the hauliers bellowed laughter and spat tobacco juice into the water. Coracles like a row of turtle shells, keel upward for careening on the waterfront. Sculls and wherries, some with great kites reclining on their decks, each emblazoned with the colors of the Guild of the Watermen.

Clent led the way up the wooden steps to the bridge proper, and paused before the door of a shop.