Moon Princess Read Online Free

show you what happens when you break them.’
    Without Rufus, Sienna felt lonelier than ever before. And what had her invisible friend been about to tell Sienna before Ling had arrived … ?
    ***
    Ling made good her threat. She removed all possible distractions from the ‘study’. The TV, computer, radio, magazines – even the Chinese ones – all the books, and even the two old armchairs that had been shipped over from their living room in England.
    â€˜Too comfortable, it gives you an excuse to be lazy!’ she hissed in Sienna’s ear as Shufang, the cleaner, pulled the chairs into the hallway. The only things that remained were the large dining table with its heavily lacquered chairs, and two wooden painted calligraphies on the walls.
    Breakfast with Ling was the worst part of the day. There was rice soup with dry meat, and when Sienna couldn’t eat it, thinking longingly of the choice of cereals and toast she would eat back at home in London, Ling would say triumphantly, ‘Too good to eat a decent meal, are we? Just wait until your stomach’s rumbling.’
    Unfortunately, Ling was right – as soon as Sienna was sitting in the study with her textbooks, she longed for lunchtime, even if she knew it would just be stringy meat and vegetables and rice again.
    Every day she had to learn new Chinesecharacters. How to write them, how to pronounce them, what they meant. As Sienna swotted up on character after character, she felt like her former life in London had been nothing but a dream. Now she had nowhere to go, and no one to talk to.
    Rufus visited her only on very rare occasions. Most of the time he was somewhere else, although he never told Sienna any details about exactly where he’d been. And he seemed reluctant to share any more information about the boy in the restaurant, or what he had meant by ‘something special’. After a while, Sienna almost forgot about it.
    One day, when Sienna knew Rufus was about to disappear again, she asked him where he was going.
    â€˜Oh, I’m just out and about,’ he said. ‘Getting to know the country and its people, seeing what’s going on. You should get out more often, you know.’
    â€˜Very funny!’ cried Sienna. ‘I’m locked up most of the time, in case you hadn’t noticed?’
    â€˜Where there’s a will, princess, there’s a way. It seems to me you actually prefer being on yourown,’ said Rufus, and then he was gone.
    Maybe he was right. The longer Sienna stayed in the flat, the more she got used to not going outside. Her dad, who she barely saw these days, had asked Ling to take Sienna out to some places of interest. But Ling had been quick to put a stop to that. ‘The little one needs to settle in first,’ she’d said. ‘It’s noisy and dirty outside, and there are criminals lurking everywhere on the streets. There’s no reason for her to leave this flat!’
    Instead, whenever she wasn’t learning characters or practising her Mandarin, Sienna would lie on her bed, looking out of the windows and dreaming of her mum – or reading printouts of her mum’s emails, which she kept in the tin box under the bed, always storing them safely away afterwards.
    The day after her talk with Rufus though, when her dad was home at a reasonable time, she asked him if she could go out to the shops with Lihua. Although Ling wasn’t pleased about it, Dad thought this was a great idea, and now Sienna would be allowed to go with the cook to the market twice a week, and into the little shop at the end of their street.
    That night, Sienna couldn’t sleep – the half-moon was bright and the city alive with electric light, spilling in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. She flicked on her bedside lamp and pulled out the box. She opened the lid and shook the entire contents on to the sheets. Letters, photos, pressed flowers … all the things