“Hmm. A practical outlook and a concise way of speaking. Both very useful qualities. Very well, you may unlock me.”

Mosca slid down from her stone throne and scrambled up the craggy pedestal to slot the key into the lock.

“Purely out of interest,” Clent asked as he watched her, upside down, “what so bewitches you about the idea of the traveling life?”

There were many answers Mosca could have given him. She dreamed of a world without the eternal sounds of glass beads being shaken in a sieve and goblins chuckling in the ravines. She dreamed of a world where her best friend did not have feathers and a beak the color of pumpkin peel. She dreamed of a world where books did not rot or give way to green blot, where words and ideas were not things you were despised for treasuring. She dreamed of a world in which her stockings were not always wet.

There was another, more pressing reason, though. Mosca raised her head and stared up the hillside toward the ragged treeline. The sky was warmed by a gentle redness, suggesting a soft but radiant dawn. The true dawn was still some three hours away.

“Very soon,” Mosca said quietly, “my uncle will wake up. An’ when he does . . . he’s likely to notice that I’ve burned down his mill.”

B Is for Blackmail

B
IS FOR BLACKMAIL

Mosca was almost certain that setting fire to the mill had not been part of her plan when she had decided to rescue Clent. She had escaped from the locked mill through the hole in its roof with the ease of long practice. The malthouse wall, however, had presented more of an obstacle. She had known she would need Saracen to frighten off Brackle and Grabspite on the Whitewater plain, but the wall was too high to climb with a goose under one arm. It had made perfect sense to grab armfuls from the gorse stacks which the village used as fuel, and pile them against the wall. And when she had clambered up to the top of the wall, ignoring the sweet smell of dying summer and the stems which prickled against her face, it had made sense to light an oil lamp.

She did not remember deciding to drop the lamp, but nor did she remember it exactly slipping from her grasp. What she did remember was watching it fall away from her hand, and bounce so softly from one stack to another that it seemed impossible that it should break. She remembered seeing the wrecked lamp sketch a faint letter in white smoke shortly before the dry stems around it started to blacken and a hesitant flame wavered first blue, then gold . . . and she remembered a rushing thrill of terror as she realized that there was no going back to her old life.