She was aware that as a loyal citizen she should be taking the printing press back to Mandelion to hand over to the Stationers’ Guild, and therefore she was going the wrong way. However, the river seemed to have strong opinions about their route, and it seemed rude to argue with it when it was being so helpful.

The faint whip crack began again, and had just become a furious clack-clack-clack when through the vapor the domed head of a windmill appeared, its aged sails sounding like gunfire. The wind was rising and starting to tug away the mist like sheets from the furniture in an unused house. Beyond either bank lay empty fields and lowlands. At last an autumn sun peered above the gray woods, as bright and cold as a toothache, and little golden fringes appeared along the tops of every treeline.

Mosca had watched the ragmen poling up and down the river, and she was fairly sure that the pole was meant to be driven into the riverbed to push the raft along. Her attempts to master the art, however, left her sodden, exhausted, and floating far from the bank so that the pole could not reach the riverbed at all.

“Well, s’pose that’s just Fate, then,” she said, flinging herself down on the deck. “We’ll just ’ave to be swept to sea an’ hope we get captured by smugglers ’stead of pirates.”

Mosca wrung out her skirts, made herself a heaped rag mattress, and lay down upon it with her hands behind her head. Above, the clouds started to peel away like an old poster and show a sky of crystal blue. As she slid away from Mandelion, her heaviness of spirit also seemed to be peeling away. Would it be all that terrible if she did drift away to sea?

She closed her eyes against the aching brightness of the sky, and in a very short time she did drift away, but into sleep. When she awoke, her sky was fringed with rushes, and the feathery fronds of reeds were brushing her face.

The raft had drifted in among a great bank of reeds on the river’s edge and tangled there. Perhaps Fate did not want Mosca to run away to sea after all, and suddenly she was fairly sure that this was not what she wanted either.

For a moment, Mosca’s mind returned to her fellow traveler, the grim-toothed press beneath the deck. She could almost imagine spider letters and mad thoughts pouring from between its plates and chittering in the darkness. And yet, her dread of the press was not unmixed with fascination . . . No, she told herself. She would not let it lure her into its den.