Rocco's Wings Read Free

in a topknot just like Wheat Hair’s. Girl had long, loose raven-coloured hair, which bounced around her shoulders and down her back.
    ‘I’m going to go again,’ announced Small One.
    ‘Not your turn,’ said Girl.
    ‘I fell. It didn’t count.’
    ‘Yes it did.’
    They were almost directly beneath Rocco. He had a clear view of the tops of their heads.
    The area where they were jumping was full of closely cropped, very green grass. How did they keep it so trim? Not even any goats around, thought Rocco, looking along the cobbled pathways that ran under the equally green trees. Clay roofs of buildings built out of some kind of shiny white rock stood in the distance. Deeper within the city rose the towering walls of the Queen’s palace. At the top sat the three gold domes.
    Turning his attention back to the game, Rocco watched the girl urvogel run-run-run-jump-and-flip. They sang the phrase aloud. Girl managed a perfect backflip off the wall. She was agile, hardly using her wings. Bouncing down to the ground, she bowed low while the other three clapped. They were surprisingly playful. Not mean at all.
    A knot from the tree limb kept sticking into his stomach. Rocco shifted around trying to find a more comfortable position. As he jostled around, a spray of leaves fluttered off the tree. They blew down. The four urvogels’ heads jerked up.
    ‘What was that?’ asked Middle Boy.
    Rocco shrank back into the foliage, but his sudden movement knocked another cluster of leaves loose.
    Silence below.
    About fifty metres away stood the corner tower. Two Air Marshals had come out. Talking, and watching the white robes at play, they leaned over the waist-high wall. A sloping roof made of the same clay tiles as the city buildings rose over their heads. They were dressed in the same red-trimmed black jackets as the Air Marshals who visited the river villages each year.
    The sight of the Air Marshals made Rocco’s stomach churn. He jerked deeper into the leaves. When he was small, Air Marshals used to raid the villages at any time of the day or night. They would swoop down and seize any goat or sack of grain that happened to be left out in the open.
    After years of being terrorized in this manner, the villagers finally agreed to pay a tax to Queen Harpia. A treaty was drawn up with a term that only permitted the Air Marshals to visit once, on the Eve of the Harvest Moon.
    Rocco had never seen Air Marshals up close before. At his mother’s urging he stayed inside, watching from his bedroom window whilst everyone else attended the Harvest Moon Exchange in the village square. If his mother was away, or down in the square herself, he would throw on his cloak and watch from the top of his steps.
    The Air Marshals, no longer watching, were marching along the top of the wall. They were headed south on the side of the wall that paralleled the cliffs. Were they going to walk the whole way around, and how far was it anyway?
    With the Air Marshals fading from sight, Rocco laid down again, clutching the branch tightly to his chest. Small One needed to win, or at least make a complete flip without falling. The others were older and better at it, but Small One was charming, the way he giggled at each disastrous attempt.
    Air Marshal boots clapped on the wall. Rocco’s spine stiffened. He craned his neck, which was also stiff from lying still in order to prevent any more leaves from falling off. The plumed feathers sticking up from the Air Marshals’ helmets bobbed into view.
    The pair bent low, skirting under a branch before passing out of Rocco’s line of vision. He could hear them still, clap-clapping over the stones. Surely they hadn’t lapped the entire wall in such a short span of time.
    What would the Air Marshals do if they caught him? Would they think he was some sort of spy? No one would believe he came all this way just because he was curious.
    The Air Marshals stepped into view beneath the roof of the corner tower. They looked