Fly by Night by Frances Hardinge Page A

had been chosen, and the Duke admitted that he had chosen Peri because Meriel’s extra finger frightened him. After this confession, Peri ended the engagement. Some say that she was angry at the slight to her sister, but others say that she still felt the finger to be part of her, and would not marry a man who could not accept it.
    ‘Even now, back in his homeland, it is said that the Duke spends every waking moment dwelling on thoughts of the Twin Queens. At mealtimes he arranges his chicken bones and cherry stones into pairs, and he sighs over the coins that display the queens’ identical heads: Meriel on one side, facing right, Peri on the other, facing left. And he still dreams that if he rebuilds Mandelion with a beautiful symmetry worthy of the Twin Queens, they will forgive him, and come to rule the Realm with Mandelion as their capital.’
    ‘Will they ever come to Mandelion, do you think?’ Mosca asked.
    ‘Perhaps, on a day when the sun turns to soup,’ Clent remarked drily. ‘In the meantime, it looks ill for the Duke’s line, for he will marry none but they.’
    ‘But Lady Tamarind might have children! Is she married?’
    Clent gave Mosca an astute glance, and she blushed, fearing that he would see how the noblewoman had left her spellbound.
    ‘No, nor can I find that she has any suitor or favourite.’
    ‘Why? Is it because of her scar?’
    ‘Lady Tamarind wears her scar like a flower,’ Clent said softly. ‘If she is unwed, it is because she would have it so.’
    ‘Where did Lady Tamarind get her scar?’
    ‘That I do not know, though I believe she was already marked when she came back from Jottland as a child of thirteen.’
    Lady Tamarind was at that very moment nearing the end of her long journey home from the Capital to Mandelion’s Eastern Spire. She had disembarked from her carriage, and a sedan now bore her through the Honeycomb Courts towards the spire. Although she was quite unconscious that she was the subject of fascinated discussion in the marriage house, her thoughts also happened to be focused upon the scar that marked her cheek.
    The scar was not something she could easily ignore. On the few occasions when she smiled, it pulled taut against her cheek, as if trying to pull her back into solemnity. In winter she could feel the cold through it, as if a real snowflake had landed on her skin. The nearest she knew to fear was a throbbing flutter behind her scar, and as she recalled the events of the carriage ride she could feel it, like a moth’s wing beating at her cheek. Ah , she thought without emotion, I suppose that episode must have frightened me .
    As one footman handed her from the sedan, his fellows busied themselves with unfastening the six great locks to the door of the Eastern Spire.
    ‘My business in the Capital is concluded,’ Tamarind explained. ‘Kindly send a letter to Mr Kohlrabi’s lodgings, telling him that I require his presence as soon as he is back in the city, then bring me a dish of tea, the latest issue of the Gazette and a bag of dead cats.’ Five minutes later her ladies-in-waiting were at her side with the requested items, and together they entered the spire.
    One by one the locks slid to behind her with smooth, liquid clicks. The great locks bore the Guarantee of the Locksmiths. This meant that they were of the very finest quality. It meant that if they were broken, the Locksmiths would pay a small fortune in recompense. It meant that word had been put out across the underworld that the Eastern Spire was a no-go area, so that no clear-thinking thief would consider milling the locks, in case the Locksmiths’ dreaded Thief-takers were sent after him.
    All of this might have reassured Lady Tamarind, if she had been hoping to lock out anyone but the Locksmiths themselves. She had resorted to other measures to make sure that the Locksmiths could not wander into her apartments and search them at will.
    As she climbed the stairs she slid on a long leather