Something rushed past Mosca, and the hornbook was snatched out of her hand. She could only watch as a boy of her own age galloped, goat-footed, away from her across the rubble, his hand-me-down breeches flapping loosely.

“Hoi!”

She hitched her skirts and sprinted after him, leaping a fractured chimney in a bound. Too much had been taken from her during her short life for Mosca to surrender a treasure that easily to an opponent her own size. The boy sprinted flat out without looking back, and Mosca matched his speed, her bonnet flapping against her back at its ribbon’s limit. Down another alley, and another.

Round a corner, onto a busy thoroughfare . . . and right into a fustian coat and a blow to the gut.

Mosca doubled up and took a step backward. Her hands knotted into fists and readied themselves at her waist to fend off another blow.

Farther down the road, she saw the boy she had chased toss the hornbook to a group of older boys without breaking stride. One of them caught it, and slipped it into his pocket without looking at it. The thief kept running.

Mosca looked up from her crouch to see who had struck her.

It was a boy of about fifteen, dressed in the shabby style of most apprentices, with a pigtail as stubby as a paintbrush. He was arranging rolls of satin across the tables outside a haberdasher’s and, to judge by his manner, had no idea of her existence, let alone the fact that his elbow had just found its way into her stomach. Nonetheless, when she advanced a step to move around him, he moved backward with an insolent nonchalance, under cover of shaking out a length of cobra-green silk. His eyelids flickered as if beneath his lashes he had given her a surreptitious glance. He had a pleasant, pink, rounded face, and the smile of someone who would always find something flattering to say about ugly women’s hats.

It is a very terrible thing to be far smaller than one’s rage. Mosca felt something enormous swell within the knotted stomach that she hid behind her fists. It seemed it must surge out of her like a wild, black wave, sweeping away stalls and strollers alike and biting the plaster from the walls. However, when her vision cleared, her attacker was standing unharmed and unruffled.