When she thought of Lady Tamarind, her heart tried to tug itself in two. She had promised to report the Stationers’ plans to Tamarind, but so much had happened since then. For better or worse, she had signed articles with Clent, and been taken on as a Stationer apprentice. If she gave away Stationer secrets and they ever found out, they would use her hide to bind books. And after all, did she know anything worth reporting? Only that the Stationers did not trust the Locksmiths.

For a while Mosca walked north with the wind at her back, hoping that it would carry her to a busier thoroughfare where she could ask directions to the Ragged School. When the breeze changed direction, however, Mosca lost her bearings. The river she had left behind startled her by appearing on her right. She could not know that it curved around on itself, the city nestling in the crook of its elbow.

This was disappointing. Irrationally, Mosca felt she should have inherited her father’s intimate knowledge of Mandelion. His throwaway comments about the city should have magically meshed in her mind, giving her a faultless instinct for finding her way around.

Eventually she called out to one of the “ragmen” who poled their laden rafts up and down the Slye, bartering for scraps and discarded cloth. He was glad of a conversation with someone who had traveled beyond Mandelion. Mosca traded him some extravagant lies about life in the Capital in exchange for some drab facts about local geography.

“Don’t know that there’ll be much there for you, though.” The ragman stared quizzically at her departing figure, and Mosca concluded that he did not think she looked scholarly.

Only as she neared the right street did her self-confidence falter and her insides start leapfrogging. What if the teachers sneered at her grimy muslin or asked about her background? What if they expected her to be able to read Old Acrylic?

She turned the final corner, and stared.

The school’s weather vane had been fashioned in the shape of a crouching man with a book in his hands, head jutting forward eagerly, and Mosca easily recognized the pointed features of Goodman Whiskerwhite, He Who Searches for Truth.

Unsteadily, Mosca walked forward and prodded the weather vane with her foot. It was half buried among broken, mossy roof tiles. Raising her head, she looked across at the mounds of rubble shored against the few remaining walls of the school, their gaping windows sad and jagged with broken leads. She shrugged both shoulders like a bird settling itself.