“No! I don’t believe you!” He wasn’t a Birdcatcher he wasn’t he wasn’t he wasn’t . . .

“The hatch is right there. Take a look below for yourself. Or if you are afraid that I might leap onto the raft in a single bound, cast your mind back. Did it never seem to you that your father’s views were . . . uncommon?”

For the hundredth time in her short life Mosca conjured up a remembered image of her father. In her mind’s eye she set his desk halfway between herself and Kohlrabi and saw him writing there busily, despite the reeds tickling against his calves and the feeble light offered by the moon. A moth blundered through his head, but he did not even look up in annoyance. I know you’re busy but this is really, really important an’ I need to ask somink . . .

“Mosca, your father wrote that the Beloved were no more real than the dolls that children give names and squeaky voices. Do you know what he said of them? He said, ‘They are best used as poppets and toys for green young minds while they are learning to understand the world, and it is the most miserable thing that our grown men cannot bring themselves to lock away the Beloved with their hoops and wooden soldiers.’”

The imagined Quillam Mye dipped his pen, and wrote eagerly, silently mouthing the very words the Birdcatcher was speaking. Mosca’s eyes misted. The manner of speaking was all too familiar.

You should have told me, she shouted silently to the heedless figure of her father, and I should have broke your pince-nez, and hid your pipe from your blind, old, black pebble eyes . . .

“He was right, Mosca, can you not see that? The Beloved, with all their nursery-rhyme names, just distract everyone from the Greater Truth, the Brighter Light. Mosca, I believe that in your deepest heart you hunger for that kind of brightness. You looked at Lady Tamarind and thought you saw it: something shining, beautiful, pure, raised above the rest of the world. Of course she disappointed you, for she is only a human woman. She believes in nothing really—except power, in the same way that a pike believes in feeding. You need something sacred.”

“I don’t think I like sacred very much,” Mosca called back. “’Cept maybe Palpitattle . . . an’ he’s not very sacred.”