Mosca pulled off her boots and slung them around her neck, then hitched and pinned her skirts. Like many of the younger girls of Chough, she wore knee breeches under her skirts, to make wading easier.

She stooped to scoop up Saracen once again. Anyone else taking such liberties would have staggered back with a broken arm. However, Mosca and Saracen shared, if not a friendship, at least the solidarity of the generally despised. Mosca assumed that Saracen had his reasons for his persecution of terriers and his possessive love of the malthouse roof. In turn, when Mosca had interrupted Saracen’s self-important nightly patrol and scooped him up, Saracen had assumed that she too had her reasons.

Beneath them, the white roofs of lower Chough glimmered under a bright moon as if they had been iced.

The milky water of Chough left white bathtub rings on the sides of streambeds. Plants that trailed in the flow grew chalky, until they dabbled in the water with leaves of stone. A sock left in a stream would petrify, until it seemed that a careless statue had left it there after paddling.

Children of Chough were told that if they misbehaved they would be hung upside down by their ankles beneath the drip, drip of a waterfall, so that in the morning they would be stone children, their mouths still making whistle shapes from spitting out the water.

There was no escaping the sound of water. It had many voices. The clearest sounded like someone shaking glass beads in a sieve. The waterfall spray beat the leaves with a noise like paper children applauding. From the ravines rose a sound like the chuckle of granite-throated goblins.

The goblins chuckled at Mosca as she scrambled down the slicked roof of Twence the Potter’s hut. She realized that she would never hear the sound of their chuckle again, and to her surprise felt a tiny sting of regret. There was no time for hesitation, however.

The next house down the slope belonged to the Widow Wagginsaw. Mosca misjudged the leap onto the domed roof and landed heavily. Her boot soles slithered, and she fell to her knees.

Below, a sleep-choked voice quavered a question, and a tinderbox hissed and spluttered into life. Here and there across the cracked surface of the roof, Mosca saw veins of dim, reddish light appear. Someone was moving slowly toward the door with a candle.

Mosca hugged herself close to the chill, wet stone, and started to wail. The wail started deep in her throat, soared like an off-key violin, then dropped into a guttural note. She repeated it, and to her intense relief it was answered by a choir of similar wails below, all tuned to different pitches.

The Widow kept cats—thin, bedraggled creatures that looked like weasels and wailed at anything.