Lady Tamarind would have been bewitched by the press in the same way. Mosca could imagine her running her hands over the press, wanting to feel a tingle of power from the touch . . .

“She wouldn’t know she had to pull out frames and bend them crookways to get the printed page loose,” Mosca added aloud, “so maybe she just tried to reach inside and pull it out. And so she ended up with a big, black mark printed on her sleeve. She got rid of the dress the way she always did, by giving it to that pinch-nosed maid, only telling her this time to burn it or cut off the cuffs. But the maid was a silly, greedy hoity-toity who thought she could sell it for a better price with the cuffs still on. And so a lady with a flabby mouth and silly laugh bought it, and wore it to the beast fight, and that’s where I saw her in it.”

“But why? What would Lady Tamarind want with a printing press?”

“I don’t know,” answered Mosca. “And I don’t know why she’s been printing all that radical stuff about the Duke’s taxes on the starving poor. She’s not a radical; I don’t think she gives tuppence for the poor. She’s a Birdcatcher.”

I must have given her the scare of her life when I told her she had a Stationer spy in her carriage, thought Mosca with a grim smile. Perhaps Tamarind had never seen anything special in Mosca, only a chance to spy on the Stationers, and make sure they were hunting for the press in the wrong places.

The Cakes shuddered. “What are we going to do, Mosca?”

Mosca realized suddenly that the older girl would follow her lead. If Mosca chose to keep Tamarind’s secret, the Cakes would hold her tongue.

Mosca had never tasted power before. It was a little like the feeling the gin had given her, but without the bitterness and the numbness in her nose. If she went to the Eastern Spire with what she knew, surely Lady Tamarind would do anything and give her anything to keep her quiet.

No wonder Tamarind schemed and spun to garner power, if power felt like this! Perhaps from the lofty rooms of her spire Mandelion always looked small and tame. Mosca imagined Lady Tamarind’s long white fingers reaching down from the sky to shuffle the population like cards. Pertellis, shocked and ill, was nothing but a card. Eponymous Clent, ponderous and perspiring, was nothing but a card. Mosca Mye, black eyes alive with rage, was nothing but a card, to be played or discarded at will . . .