A Riddle in Ruby Read Online Free

turned back to his book. “Your welfare is immaterial. You will sacrifice it for your duty and your mission, if necessary. Your ship leaves at first light. Say your good-byes and be on it.”
    The mouse’s sensitive visual mechanisms barely detected the flicker on Athen’s face, masked by a bow. “I am a Boyle, and my duty is my life. Good-bye, Father.”

CHAPTER 5
    Your spine is tin, and your fire is false. They will never master the heart of a true Frenchman.
    â€”Halvard de Anjou, Bastionado
    R uby turned the weathered page, and for the thirty-first time, the brave Leftenant Capliche shot the dastardly Duc de Nantes in the foot, and for the thirty-first time the villain fell over the edge of the lighthouse, to drop for the thirty-first time into the icy waters and hungry rocks below. France was saved from the chemystral hordes. Well, until five years later.
    The Thrift’ ssecond mate, Pol the Gizzard, had toldher the true story on a late watch one night. The Duc had actually escaped into the mists. Five years later he and some of his tinker friends had used chemystry to smash the entire royal palace right into the ground, flat as a two-penny coin, all in the name of liberty. Anyone who practiced alchemy and tinkercraft (and fortune-smellers and weed doctors and anyone else the mob wanted to be rid of) were hunted and driven from France by the church and those few nobles who escaped flattening. Many refugees, including Pol’s parents, found their way to Philadelphi, where they were taken in by William Penn and the colonial government.
    It was still a good book.
    But Ruby snapped it shut and almost threw it across the tiny cubby. She was thoroughly, painfully, unimaginably bored. She should be climbing yardarms, cutting turnips in the galley, throwing turnips at Skillet from the forecastle. She was doing none of those things. Instead, she was hiding from a rich boy and his noxious servant.
    She grabbed the dog-eared copy of Bastionado andcurled up with a huff against the wall once again, to open her only book in the wide-open world to page 1. “Julien Capliche woke to see his father’s farm ablaze in the valley. The alchemysts had returned. He pelted down the slope, but he knew . . .”
    She was not reading. She was reciting. She knew it by heart. Ruby scrunched up her eyes and rapped her head against the wall, keeping time with the clack of wooden spoons creeping in from the galley. The smuggler’s cabinet built into the hold of the old Portuguese corvette was little more than a windowless box with a hidden door, but it was her refuge, her place. Now, though, it had turned into a cell for true, and she was driving herself mad with dreams of fresh sea air and the sun.
    The narrow slot in the back wall of the hidey-hole snapped open. The back of Gwath’s breeches shuttered into view, followed by his calloused foot and his toes, which grasped a folded slip of paper between them. The cook often served the entire crew with his back to the galley wall, all the while speaking in images to Ruby, drawing and folding up the notes with his feet.
    She opened the paper in the dim blue glow of the tinker’s lamp she had nicked their last stay in Charles Towne. She rolled her eyes. A brilliant caricature of her father and his ridiculous hat stared off the edge of the paper, looking deep into the distance through an oversize chemystral monocle. He was looking for her, and not casually. It was too late to go back to her cabin. She tore up the paper and ate it, just to make sure, and then quickly stowed the lamp and her book in the compartment under the false floor. The Thrift had more secret nooks and crannies within crannies than a weed doctor’s traveling cabinet.
    She opened the view slot on the wall opposite the galley. No one was on the other side. She pressed her fingers to the proper spots, and a knee-level panel opened silently. Slipping into the hold, she closed the door