Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

Goodlady Melnieck, Concealer of the Thorn within the Rose

Of course, most of the welcome waiting in the lighted room above was for Beamabeth. Her father was there, along with Sir Feldroll and the family physician, to make sure she had contracted nothing too dreadful. Her fears had now caught up with her, and her ensuing fit of faintness had the whole coterie running to and fro with cut-glass bottles. However, in the midst of this frenzy people did find time to whisper, ‘Well done,’ in Mosca’s ear.

‘Fissure!’ barked the mayor, who seemed to have recovered a little of his grit and bristle. ‘Tend to Miss Mye next!’

Mosca watched numbly as the mayor’s physician came over and examined her bruises and scratches, and the reddened marks on her wrists left by her bonds during her imprisonment at the bastle-house days before. Beamabeth had managed to avoid all such marks – apparently the rich even got a better class of kidnapping.

The candlelight seemed very bright, and Mosca was too dazzled for a little while to realize that Eponymous Clent had quietly sat down next to her.

‘Hello, Mr Clent. We… did it, didn’t we?’

He nodded. ‘We shall be free to leave Toll tomorrow. It is done.’

Mosca drooped her head against Clent’s arm, suddenly exhausted.

‘Technically,’ Clent continued with a twinkle, ‘you will be under arrest when the sun rises, as a nightling trespassing in Toll-by-Day. But I have been assured that your “custody” will involve a good deal of actual custard – not to mention rabbit pie, dumplings and jugged pears. Tomorrow you can expect to be “evicted” from Toll, alongside myself, through a gate of our choice. In the meanwhile, however, you will be sentenced to a long deep sleep in a nice soft bed.’

Mosca did indeed wake up in a very comfortable bed.

She had only the dimmest recollection of nodding off against Clent’s arm, hearing the conversation around her dull to a drone. Somebody must had carried her to a bed, removed her remaining shoe, stockings and bonnet, and tucked her under cotton sheets and three soft woollen blankets that smelt of lavender. She opened her eyes, and saw peach-coloured curtains around her bed. She closed her eyes again, and there was a warm and weightless sense of comfort, and the cool of a clean pillow against her cheek.

It was after an hour of such drowsing that Mosca roused herself enough to sit up. She drew back the curtain and stood, squeezing at the chocolate-coloured rug with her toes. The shutters of the little bedroom had been thrown back, and through the window she could see the ice-pale sun in a sky of eggshell blue. Mosca’s eyes hurt, but she realized they were watering from more than the light. Until this moment, in the deep, cold roots of her being, she had not believed that she would see the sun again. Walking to the window, she discovered that it looked out upon the green castle courtyard and realized that she must be in the mayor’s house.

For a little while she sat in a small wicker chair, watching golden dust motes chase each other slowly and futilely in the shafts of sunlight, and the birds string themselves like beads along the roofs of Toll-by-Day. Then she looked at herself in the mirror on the dresser, noting the dirt and bruises she had not noticed in the netherworld of cut-price rushlights. She splashed water on her face, cleaning the last hints of green crusting from her cheeks and eyebrows. There was no doubt about it, she was paler than she had been before entering the town, and there was a touch of shadow under each eye. Four nights in Toll-by-Night had, in keeping with its name, taken its toll.

I’m going to get out. Her spirits lurched unsteadily into the air like a wounded pigeon. I’m going to get out of this wormpit of a town. And I will never, never come back here again.

As she found out before long, a lot of other people had similar plans.

Shortly after a maid had brought Mosca a tray with a bowl of hot rabbit soup and a golden-crusted loaf of fresh bread, Eponymous Clent arrived with news of the town.

‘Stories of Miss Beamabeth’s daring escape from her captors are all over town, of course, and the citizens of Toll-by-Day are itching to see Brand Appleton aloft on a gallows.’ Clent stood by the window, peering down into the castle grounds market, plump fingers tap-tapping impatiently at his waistcoat pocket. Evidently he was eager to shake the dust of Toll from his shoes and write something curt and cryptic about it in his little black book of never-come-back. ‘However, it would seem that word of the missing Luck has got out… and now a number of notables are also trying to get out. The Guilds, mostly.’

‘The Guilds?’ Mosca halted her attempts to cram as much bread into her mouth as possible without her cheeks exploding.

‘The Stationers left first thing this morning. All of them. The Playing-card Makers were half a step behind them, and I notice that all the Goldsmiths seem to have shut up shop.’

‘What? Surely the Guilds do not believe that Toll will fall in the river if the Luck is took from the town?’ Mosca boggled.

‘I am sure not all of them believe that… but they see the way the wind sits. I think there is little doubt now that Toll-by-Day will fall to the Locksmiths just as Toll-by-Night did before it. The mayor’s spirit is broken. He is terrified that if the Locksmiths are angered they will take the Luck away, and that Toll will suddenly fall off the cliff like a pie off a sill. And so he has taken on new advisors – Locksmith advisors. From this day forth, I do not think he will be seen without them.’

Mosca’s blood ran cold. Toll was now a sinking ship, and she could hardly blame the Guilds for their rat-like scamper away from it. The subdued urgency in Clent’s manner was starting to make more sense too.

‘How long we got, Mr Clent? B’fore the Locksmiths take over?’

‘I, ah, have no idea. None at all. It might not happen for a fortnight, or, ah, for all I know by dusk today…’

‘Today? ’

By now Aramai Goshawk would know that Beamabeth Marlebourne had been snatched from under his nose, and since Mistress Bessel was spying for him he might have a shrewd idea that Mosca and Clent were responsible. If they were still in Toll-by-Day when Goshawk took control of it, she had a feeling their future careers would be limited to a very long drop followed by a brief and lethal swim.

‘Precisely,’ answered Clent. ‘And since it is currently such fine weather for travelling, I, ah, thought I should drop by and find out how quickly you were recovering.’

Mosca jumped up. ‘I jus’ got a lot better. Where’s my blinkin’ bonnet? And where’s Saracen?’

Over the next ten minutes Mosca made short work of her lunch, scrambled into the lilac gown that had been laid out for her, then flung herself into hurried packing and goose-retrieval, after which Mosca and Clent were almost ready to make their hasty adieus.

‘Typical,’ muttered Mosca as she fitted Saracen’s muzzle. ‘After all the trouble we went to, rescuing Beamabeth from one Locksmith town, and now she’ll be trapped in another.’

‘I think not,’ Clent remarked wryly. ‘In all probability she will leave and marry Sir Feldroll – a gentleman that stormed out of Toll in the highest dudgeon this morning, by the way. The mayor, on the recommendation of his new “advisors” has said that even fewer people will be let in and out of the town from now on and all tolls will be raised from tomorrow. So poor Sir Feldroll will not be marching his army through Toll after all, it seems. Mandelion is safe from that quarter, at least.’ Clent regarded Mosca with a gleam of amusement. ‘Yes, I rather thought that would please you.’

Brave, jubilant Mandelion and its intrepid radical government were safe for now. Yes, that did make Mosca happy. So why did she still feel a strange uneasiness of spirit? Her steps slowed unwillingly and she halted by a window, biting her lip almost to bleeding point.

‘Child! More haste! We are done here. You have even avenged yourself upon the detestable Skellow, who was bent on your destruction – he is no more, I gather? Killed while on the brink of shooting Miss Beamabeth.’

‘Stabbing. But… yes.’ Mosca thought of the last breath hissing out of Skellow’s lean profile and felt queasy.

‘Stabbing, shooting, it is all the same.’ Clent gave a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘Caught on the verge of committing dire damsel-icide. The point is, your nemesis is defeated. There is nothing more for us to do here.’ Clent was squinting eastwards, his mind already on the road.

But Mosca was no longer listening. Looking down through the window into the castle courtyard, she could see a young woman walking to and fro beside her vegetable stall, trying in vain to calm a squalling baby. There was something about its tremble-fisted frenzy that reminded her of Blethemy’s baby, the Gobbet. She thought of Mistress Leap with a hundred desperate mothers, all struggling to have their babies born in a lucky hour so that they could live a better life, all clutching at that one, gleaming strand of hope. That strand was about to snap. Soon Toll-by-Day would fall to the Locksmiths as Toll-by-Night had done before it, and the town would shut up like a clam. Nightfolk and dayfolk alike would be trapped under the fearful rule of the Locksmiths, and escape for either would become all but impossible.

‘Oh… oh, rat-pellets!’ exploded Mosca. ‘It’s their last chance! Wait here a few breaths, Mr Clent!’ She stamped away down the hall. ‘I have to talk to Miss Beamabeth. If anybody can make the mayor listen, it will be her! And she must listen to me, Mr Clent! Drizzle an’ dregs, I hauled her out of Toll-by-Night by her hair! That has to be worth more than spittle!’

Mosca found Beamabeth in the long reception room where they had first met a few interminable days and nights ago. The mayor’s adopted daughter was sitting at a sampler frame. From Mosca’s side she could only see the back of the design, a tangle of cream and fuschia threads. She was, Mosca noticed with relief, entirely alone.

‘How lovely to see you looking so well, Miss Mye!’ There it was again – the utterly disarming kitten smile. ‘That dress of mine becomes you very well. You must take it with you when you go. I can give you a shawl to match it.’ Beamabeth’s hair was back in ringlets, and their colour had come out like the sun. ‘You do not mind if I do not stand? My nerves are still so weak after everything that has happened.’

‘Miss Beamabeth… I wanted to talk to you about Toll. About the things the Locksmiths want the mayor to do. You got your father’s ear -’

‘Oh dear.’ Beamabeth made a pained little moue. ‘Sir Feldroll was talking to me about that sort of thing this morning, and I really cannot bear to hear any more right now. It gives me a horrible headache.’

‘But… your town is running out of time! When your father signs papers with the Locksmiths, then everything goes into the night! Toll-by-Night, but all night and all day! Listen – there is still time to let people out first so they don’t get trapped inside the town! The mayor could do it – he could let folks out without paying toll-’

‘But Father already is making sure the important people can leave. I am certain he said so.’

‘But it’s not just important people here! There’s… there’s the nightfolks. He could save some of them. Reclassify lots of ’em really fast, bring ’em into the day and let them out too before it’s too late.’

‘And have all the nightlings running around loose?’ Beamabeth looked appalled and astonished.

Mosca swallowed her annoyance with difficulty. ‘Toll is a sinkin’ ship, miss, and those left in her will drown.’

‘Yes, it is very sad.’ Beamabeth’s brow puckered as she pushed her needle into the web of threads. ‘That is why Sir Feldroll says we should live at his estates in Waymakem when we marry, instead of Toll.’ She gave a long, heartfelt sigh. ‘It really is very difficult to leave somewhere though, when you have lived there all your life. But it has been getting harder and harder here over the last two months, thanks to the loss of Mandelion trade, and we have been running out of all the essentials one by one – chocolate, coffee, sugar, tea, nutmeg. Of course such things are scarce in Waymakem too, but at least there are not so many rules-’

‘Hard for you to leave, is it?’ interrupted Mosca, forgetting her determination to match Beamabeth’s courteous manners. ‘’Tis a bleedin’ sight harder for those as cannot leave for lack of coin! Toll-by-Day might be running out of nutmeg, but Toll-by-Night is even running out of rats! They been putting owls and robins in the cooking pots!’

Beamabeth pulled her face back, small crinkles appearing in her perfect nose. Now she was a kitten that had smelt something distasteful, or burned itself on something hot. It was a signal to Mosca that she had gone too far and should change her tone and the subject. But she had gone too far indeed, too far to stop.

‘Everybody loves you – everybody’s been risking their lives for you! And now you want to abandon them all to Goshawk’s crew and waltz off to Waymakem with Sir Fidgety-Face Feldroll so you can keep your tea caddy full?’

‘They will all be happy as long as I am happy,’ Beamabeth said simply. And smiled, as if she was saying something self-evident. ‘The town wants me to be safe. I shall be doing it for them as much as myself.’

Mosca’s mouth fell open. The surge of bitterness she had felt when she first met Beamabeth was back, and now there was no damming it.

‘You spoilt, selfish, soft-headed hoity! I thought you were supposed to be some kind of angel! Just because everybody talks to you like you’re the most precious thing in Toll, that doesn’t mean it’s true! You’re not the only person who bleeds when they’re cut, or bruises when they’re struck. But nothing ever does bruise you, does it?’

Outside the birds hushed, and the market noises seemed to recede. Toll itself seemed to have halted in shock. The impossible had happened. Something more incredible than horses of bone or green-skinned foreigners. Somebody had shouted at Beamabeth Marlebourne.

Beamabeth’s face froze, and she lost a little of her sunny rosiness. For a moment Mosca thought that the older girl might faint outright, but there was no tremor in her small pink mouth. Instead, Beamabeth’s big blue eyes just stared and stared between their dark gold lashes, not even seeming to blink. At last she spoke, still in the same gentle, lilting tone.

‘You really are a horrible little thing, do you know that? The way you look, the way you talk… No wonder you disgust everybody. You have no place here. The sooner you are gone the better.’

Mosca stood there stupidly in her borrowed dress, stunned and winded. She had been ready for tears or flight, perhaps outrage, an attack of nerves or a call for assistance, but not this strange calm venom – not from the girl she had rescued from Toll-by-Night by the skin of her teeth.

Mosca had been so busy working the oars of her little plan that she had failed to see the iceberg upon which it was doomed to founder. And now here it was in front of her, a towering glacial mountain of selfishness, and she could not understand how she could have missed it. How vast was it? How far beneath the surface did it go?

‘No. Nothing ever touches you, does it?’ Mosca whispered. ‘Look at you – not a scratch, not a bruise. Not even marks on your wrists where they were tied.’ She rubbed at the bruise-lines round her own wrists. ‘If you struggled – the way I struggled when they tied me – there would have been some. Why weren’t your wrists marked when we rescued you?’

Some instinct stilled Mosca’s tongue, but her last sentences hung in the air like smoke, curling and forming misty shapes.

Beamabeth’s hands had been tied behind her back when Skellow had held her hostage to cover his escape. As the image danced before Mosca’s eye again, she recalled what Clent had said about Skellow.

… killed while on the brink of shooting Miss Beamabeth… Stabbing, shooting, it is all the same.

But stabbing and shooting were not the same. Skellow had been holding Beamabeth at pistol point, but then when surprised in the hidden passage he had been holding a knife. For some reason, mid-flight, he had tucked his pistol away and pulled out a blade, despite knowing that his pursuers were armed with pistols. A knife was certainly quieter if he had murder in mind… but why had he decided to kill Beamabeth right there and then?

Mosca shook her head slowly. ‘Makes no sense,’ she whispered. ‘Skellow was a viperous, flint-hearted old villain, but he weren’t stupid. You were the only thing keepin’ him alive! Why would he try to kill you before he got to safety?’

Two pairs of eyes remained locked in a stare, one pair black as gunpowder, the other as blue as a summer morning. And yet it was in the black eyes that there came a dawn of realization and fear.

We got it all wrong, thought Mosca. We got it all topsy-turvy.

‘No marks on your wrists,’ Mosca said slowly, ‘because… before we got there to rescue you… your hands weren’t tied.’

Nothing. Not a flinch, nor a flutter of lashes. Just wide, blue eyes, as warm and pitiless as a drought.

‘But Skellow heard a cry from downstairs in the cooper shop, so quick as stitch he must have slipped a rope round your wrists and given it a quick knot. Then we burst in, so he held you hostage and pulled you through a secret door. And then he got his knife out.’ Mosca swallowed. ‘But not to kill you. To cut through your ropes. So the pair of you could run faster.

‘But you didn’t run. You waited till he had a knife in his hand, then you dropped to your knees and screamed – so we’d come burstin’ in through the wall and find him like that, looking like he was about to cut your throat. So that we’d shoot him down like a dog before he could get a word out. So that he’d never have the chance to tell any of us the truth. “Little witch” – that’s what he said as he died. And maybe he said it to me. But he wasn’t talkin’ about me, was he?’

Mosca was breathing quickly now. Her anger was returning, filling her ears with a furnace roar. She could not hold back the rush of words.

‘Money. Everything’s all about money in Toll, ain’t it? Everyone thinks about it all the time – most of them because they want to get out of the town, or pay their tithes, or eat this week. But maybe some people decide they need more money because they’re runnin’ out of chocolate and tea and silk handkerchiefs, and they can’t imagine the world without them, and getting things like that on the black market costs a lot.

‘And you could have just married in the first place and gone off to be Lady Feldroll, but in Waymakem you might not be everybody’s golden girl, everybody’s special angel. No, why would you do that when you could stay here, with Sir Feldroll and everyone else courtin’ you and lettin’ you string ’em along? You wanted to keep your cake and eat it… and eat everybody else’s too.

‘And I bet it was easy, setting up your own kidnap, what with Brand Appleton being half mad in love with you. I bet he was pleased as a pig in slurry when you told him you wanted to elope with him using the money from the ransom. Bringing Skellow into the plan must have been your idea too – Appleton never liked him, never trusted him. Who was Skellow, then? Your black-market man? You must have been thick as thieves with him all along, plottin’ to double-cross Appleton when he’d served your turn and take the ransom for yourselves, so you’d be rich for the rest of your lives. But they were both nightside, weren’t they? You needed somebody dayside to make the kidnap happen. So you gave Skellow some money for tolls, and sent him out to hire the Romantic Facilitator at the Pawnbrokers’ Auction. Only… what you got instead was us.

‘But you put us to good use, didn’t you?’ Mosca could feel all the parts of the truth tumbling into place one after another like dominoes. ‘We got your father out of the way for you, and afterwards, that night, you went off to pray in the chapel – I remember. So when Skellow crept into the salvation hole to report in to you, you was kneeling ready to talk to him. It was you who told him we were imposters, you who told him about the trap we were laying.

‘You threw your trinkets and pins around your room, so it looked like there had been a struggle. Then you just climbed out your window and down Skellow’s ladder and away. And when we found your window open and you gone that morning, we all guessed there must have been a traitor in the mix… but none of us thought it might be you.’

All was quiet, but for the tutting of the clock and a scattering of bird notes like china splinters. One of the two of us, thought Mosca, is in a lot of trouble right now. I wonder which of us it is? She isn’t turning pale or plucking at her handkerchief. Oh draggles, I think it’s me.

‘Some people get a mad sickness from reading,’ Beamabeth said at last, her voice still calm. ‘If I say that your reading has driven you mad, everybody will believe me. If I say that you were in league with my kidnappers all along, everybody will believe me. If I say you came and threatened me just now, everybody will believe me.’ It was true. Mosca could feel it in her bones. Everyone would succumb to Beamabeth’s charm like beetles drowning in marmalade. At long last Beamabeth lowered her eyes and returned her gaze to her sewing. ‘Now I want you out of my sight. And by dusk I want you out of my town.’

‘You’re nothing but a name!’ Mosca clenched her fists. She knew everything, and it was unbearable to know that her knowledge was useless. ‘Without it, you would be nothing! All they love is your name!’

‘Oh?’ Up went the dark gold eyebrows. Out came the dimples and dainty little teeth. ‘And do you imagine that if you had my name you could ever be like me?’

‘No,’ snarled Mosca, tingling from toe to crown. ‘Not in a hundred thousand years.’ The cups on the breakfast table rattled as Mosca stamped out of the room and slammed the door.

‘Mr Clent! We been hoodwinked! By a shuffling, wheedle-cutting, shurk of a-’

‘Child, child!’ Clent raised his eyes to heaven. ‘Four nights in Toll-by-Night, and thus she returns to me,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘Mosca, I wish sometimes that you did not pick up words quite so swiftly.’

However, as Clent listened to Mosca’s high-volume explanation she saw his expression pass through indulgence, incredulity, astonishment and outrage, making its final stop at a greyish shade of mauve.

‘Gambling Fates… and we have been risking gizzard and gullet for this precocious piece of perfidy and perniciousness!’

‘That’s exactly what I said at the time!’ agreed Mosca eagerly. ‘Only… with not quite the same words.’

‘Such treachery behind such a sweet… er, one moment. Did you say “said”? You have spoken of this? To whom? Not to her?’

Mosca looked mulish. ‘There are words I can swallow, and words I cannot, Mr Clent! Not without them turning to poison in my belly. ’Twas all I could do not to take her nose between my knuckles and twist it till the freckles turned blue ow OW! Mr Clent, you are pulling off my arm!’

‘Madam, we are leaving!’ Clent had, with the dexterity of custom, snatched up his coat, Mosca’s arm and a bowl of dried fruit, taking only a moment to empty said bowl into his pockets. ‘May I point out that the last person to pose a threat to Miss Beamabeth’s secrets took a bullet through the vitals last night? For the moment she will be taken aback and out of step, but it will not be long before she realizes that the best way to blunt your blade is to blacken our names before we can tarnish hers. If we are to leave this accursed town, it must be NOW, before the wind changes and we find ourselves under the hatches again.’

‘But… that smirking spit-gobbet! She will get away with it all! We must show everyone what she is-’

‘Child, our credit still stands on the shakiest ground – nobody will believe us! Nobody. Yes, yes, by all means expose her – but perhaps by letter?’ Clent, gripped by his new momentum, had already dragged Mosca halfway across the room, and it was all she could do to pull free and run to collect Saracen. ‘Once we have put some town walls and several leagues between us? Revenge is a dish best served unexpectedly and from a distance – like a thrown trifle. Come!’

Mosca, Clent and Saracen took no leave of the mayor, for that would only have caused delays. Instead they strode purposefully through the curiously quiet and nervous town to the eastern gate, Clent with his best veneer of dapper confidence, Mosca with her arms full of goose, taking only one footman to show that Mosca was in ‘custody’, and the paperwork to show that she was being ‘evicted’.

The daylit streets looked peculiar to Mosca now. She kept glancing around for shortcuts she had learned over the last four nights, or seeing half-familiar corners gilded with sunlight. Could that gentle road full of glovers really be where she had seen the Clatterhorses clash? Could that homely lane full of drapers really lead into the Chutes? And could Toll-by-Day really turn on Mosca and Clent a second time, after all they had done?

Yes, probably.

At the eastern gate they requested passage out, and presented the toll they had taken so many risks to acquire. The guards were clearly suspicious of Mosca’s badge and the pair’s air of dishevelled urgency, and made a point of examining their papers thoroughly and counting the money with care. The presence of a footman in the mayor’s livery, however, seemed to be a point in the favour of the would-be travellers.

The guards brought out a ponderous ring of keys and unlocked a small door set in one of the gates. A rush of cold, moor-scented air hit Mosca in the face, and she almost panicked. She had grown so used to Toll’s reek of closeness, its trapped animal smell, that she had forgotten how the air of freedom tasted. It was too good, it was too close, it would be taken away from her. The door opened to show a craggy rise shivering with weather-bleached grass…

‘Hey! You!’ One of the guards caught her by the arm as she was stepping through the door. Saracen’s neck rose into an ominous curve. ‘Hand it over!’

Mosca stared at the guard in incomprehension, until she realized where he was glaring. With an incredulous snort she pulled off her badge and dropped it in his hand.

‘This? Did you think I was planning to steal it? Do you think I ever want to see that – or your stinkin’ old pit of a town – again?’ She pulled loose from his grasp, staggered out through the gate and then broke into a run. She ran into the very throat of the wind, so her bonnet ribbons whipped against her ears and deafened her, and her lilac skirts were blown back against her legs.

She gave a banshee shriek of sheer glee and whirled about, Saracen erupting from her arms, wings spread for his own little victory glide. There they were, the high walls of Toll, dull and rugged as stale cake, and she was outside them.

Ignoring Clent’s look of entreaty, Mosca caught up a small rock and threw it at Toll with all her might. It rebounded off the stonework above the gate with a ‘pick’ noise, startling a family of jackdaws above.

‘Goodbye, Toll, you old maggot barrel! Hope you fall off yer perch!’ The town’s arrow slits seemed to stretch in astonishment as they peered down at her tiny impudence. She scampered a little further away, snatched up another stone and flung it after the first. ‘Hope all your chimneys clog!’ Thrown stone. ‘And your clock falls off!’ Thrown stone. ‘And your…’ Her voice trailed away.

Her pursuit of better stones to throw had led her in a backwards scramble up the rise. Now, twisting around to stoop for yet another missile, she at last saw what lay beyond the rise.

Looking down across the declining plain of wind-whipped moss she could see a long road twisting between the gorsestrewn shoulders of the crags, all the way down into the levelling moors. Up this road, in the direction of Toll, surged a river of people. Hundreds of men, trudging in columns with pikes along their shoulders. Great wagons, laden with sacks and barrels. The stubby black muzzles of mortars, twitching as they were hauled up the uneven path. And behind them a few full-blown cannons, dragged by teams of horses. To judge by the different standards fluttering in the breeze, the three nearest cities had massed their forces to march on Mandelion after all, and it seemed the march had already started, even without Toll’s permission.

Perhaps, like Mosca, Sir Feldroll had lost patience with Toll and decided to throw stones at its walls. However, it looked as if his stones were bigger than hers.