To judge by the advance of the moss and decay, the Ragged School had been dead longer than Mosca had been alive. Only as the dream broke and its shards cut her did she realize how close she had been clutching it. She had not hoped the school would accept her, she had known they would. At the back of her mind, she had believed that her father had meant her to hunt down the school, had made plans to ensure her future happiness when he was gone . . .

“Daft old dunnock.” Mosca could hardly recognize her own voice. “What’s the point of sending me here? That’s it, is it? That’s the best you can do?” Quillam Mye’s mention of the Ragged School had not been a clue, or a part of some all-wise and all-knowing plan. He had died and abandoned his daughter without making any provision for her future. The ruin of the Ragged School was a devastating disappointment, but it also felt like a betrayal.

Mosca scrambled across the ruined school, her eyes stinging. The demolition was too complete to be a matter of accident or time, and there were no traces of fire. She found a hiding place beneath the lean of a tumbled timber, and hugged her knees there for a while, while ivy tickled the back of her neck.

While she was glowering numbly at her own clogs, she noticed something square-cornered and yellow-white wedged between two nearby bricks. Mosca wrestled it out, and found herself staring at a child’s hornbook. Gripping its handle, she shook the dust off it, and raised it up to stare into it like a hand mirror. The layer of horn meant to protect the paper underneath was grimy and cracked, and the weather had blotted the letters of the alphabet almost beyond recognition. The backing board was rotten.

As a child she had spent hours sitting with such a hornbook beside her father’s desk, while he wrote and she labored over her lessons. Not a word or a look between them in an hour, just a strange, silent sense of connection. Despite herself, Mosca glowed with the memory.

This was something, at least, and there might be more treasures to be found. She crawled out of her cave, and began searching through the rubble. She was just starting to conclude that dozens of other looters had stripped it bare, when she looked up and found she was not the only forager.

Two other children were picking over the rubble, one a girl of fifteen or so in a bent yellow bonnet, and the other a boy of about six, still in his infant gown. They saw her and pulled themselves upright like startled hares. The girl seemed to be holding a steel pen in her hand.