Until now she had visited only the parish church at Hummel, which was little more than a barn sheltering a cluster of shrines. Visitors from a large market town would not have given the Kempe Teetering church a second look, but to Mosca it might as well have been a cathedral.

Several centuries of gull droppings on the domed roof created a white tracery like an ivory fretwork. The great, carved oak doors were a foot too tall for the entranceway, and leaned against the door frame, leaving a gap for visitors to squeeze between them. Although Mosca did not know it, they had been plundered during the civil war from the wreckage of another church farther upstream.

Mosca slipped into a darkness as chill as a funeral morning, and found herself surrounded by the Beloved.

Each shutter was carved with the figures of saints, stiff and identical as playing-card kings. Painted Beloved elbowed for room in the rafter-high murals. Wooden Beloved peered from the pulpit and the altar screen. Stone Beloved bulged like pompous fruit from the trunks of the stone pillars. A goodman of straw had been pulled apart by rats, and a goodlady with a turnip body and potato head was rotting quietly in a corner.

Mosca stared about her, not sure where to offer her confession. She found Goodman Postrophe high on one rafter, but he seemed to be busy talking to Goodlady Prill, Protector of Pigs, so she felt that she would be interrupting. In addition, the carving of Postrophe made him look a little like her uncle Westerly, which gave her pause. Goodlady Prill was plumper than her aunt Briony, but had the same mean, shortsighted sort of stare.

“I told you,” Mosca imagined Prill saying in Aunt Briony’s voice. “I always told you the girl was a wasp in your pocket, and would sting you when she had the opportunity. Small wonder, though, with a father like that. The books spoiled her. I have never known such a knowing child.” Her tone made it plain that “knowing” was something that no self-respecting child had any business doing. Mosca’s fingernails dug into her palms.

She looked around for a carved face resembling that of Quillam Mye, but none of them wore pince-nez, or was bowed over a book. It would have driven him to distraction, she thought suddenly, being trapped on a carving where the Beloved crawled over one another like bees, droning about meal and chaff, when to pick apples, saving candle ends, and mending chicken coops.

Palpitattle? Ah, there he was, carved into a shutter. The fly saint grinned like a mantrap, and his great eyes bored right through the wood and were flooded with sky.