Mosca was also fascinated with the haulers 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-humoredly—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, 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 farther than five miles from Chough—without a guide she would do little better than a tumbled fledgling. A twelve-year-old girl traveling alone, furthermore, would be an easy mark for footpads, gonophs, and con-men. She had no contacts, no money, no friends. All she had was a homicidal goose . . . and Eponymous Clent.