“’S like this,” he rasped in the voice that Mosca always gave him. “That Mr. Clent’s got you by the scruff, now he knows ’bout the mill. You got to get the dirty on ’im. Somink big. What ’bout those papers he hid from Mistress Bessel? Hid ’em in the shrine before, din’t he? Don’t want ’em seen, do he? Printed, ain’t they? Maybehaps they ain’t got the seal from the Company of Stationers. That’d be enough to buy him a rope cravat.”

If books were feared, the Stationers were feared more. They had started out as simply a guild of printers and bookbinders, but they had become much more. By now they were masters of the printed word, with the right to decree any book safe to be read, or damn it to the flames like a plague carcass. The law gave them full license to crush anyone who trespassed on their rights by printing books, and they exercised this right ruthlessly.

In Chough it was said that the Stationers had special spectacles which let them read books without harm and decide which were safe for other eyes. In Chough it was said that if the Stationers caught you with a book that had not been made legal by a Stationer seal, they took you away and drowned you in ink. In Chough, the only person who never talked about the Stationers had been Quillam Mye, despite the fact that in Mandelion he had once been a Stationer himself.

In Chough there had always been rumors that Mye had been expelled from the Stationers. Within a day of his death, in fear of that ruthless Guild, the villagers had ransacked his shelves and made a bonfire of his books and manuscripts. In Chough it was said that as the books burned, twisted letters were seen fleeing the blaze, like spiders scrambling out of burning logs.

This memory filled Mosca with a bitterness beyond bearing. Most of her father’s books she had never read. He had always promised that she could look through them when she was ten, “when her brain was no longer soft enough to take a careless thumbprint.” They should have been her legacy. Instead, all her father had left her was an inauspicious first name, the ability to read, and an all-consuming hunger for words.

Nonetheless, despite their fear of the Stationers, most people regarded them as a necessary evil. Better the devil we know, they thought, than the devil we have known . . .

The devil we have known. Mosca tipped her head back, one hand holding her bonnet in place. A heart-shaped gape of sky stared back at her.

The Heart had been the reason for the bloodiest ten years the nation had ever known.