A week before, a man named Eponymous Clent had arrived in Chough and talked his way into every heart and hearth. He had bewitched the entire village with an urbane twinkle. That afternoon, however, Chough had fallen out of love with him just as quickly and completely. Word had spread that a visitor to the magistrate’s house had exposed Clent as a notorious trickster and cheat. Dusk had seen him shackled in the stocks and almost friendless.

Almost, but not quite. Since the burning of her father’s books, Mosca had been starved of words. She had subsisted on workaday terms, snub and flavorless as potatoes. Clent had brought phrases as vivid and strange as spices, and he smiled as he spoke, as if tasting them. His way with words had won him an unlikely rescuer.

The magistrate’s house had originally been built on a raised lump of land with two deep cracks cut around it on either side, providing a channel for the water. This had been all very well, until the water had enjoyed one of its wild nights, in which it pulled the hillside into new shapes and threw boulders like dice. In the morning, the magistrate had found a hill of white silt and rubble piled up against the back of his house, and the sweet spring sunlight gleaming upon the streamlets as they poured across his roof and dripped in diamonds from his thatch.

In an attempt to snatch the magistrate’s vegetable garden from the domain of the ducks, a local carpenter had constructed a simple shaduf, a long pole which seesawed on a central strut and had a bucket on one end to scoop up the water. The base stood on four wheels so that it could be moved around the garden.

Mosca slipped to a window of the magistrate’s house, slid a knife into the frame, and levered the window slightly ajar. Against the opposite wall of the darkened parlor hung the magistrate’s ceremonial keys.

Champing furiously on her pipe, she pushed her handkerchief into the bottom of the pail, then maneuvered the long arm of the shaduf in through the window. The machine proceeded in jolts, as the wheels caught on rough ground, and the bucket swayed dangerously, now nearly rattling a pewter plate, now nearly chiming against a warming pan. A jolt forward, another jolt . . . the ring of keys was nudged off its hook and fell into the bucket, its clang muffled by the handkerchief. The metal bucket gonged gently against the window frame as Mosca drew it back, and a moment later the magistrate’s keys were in her hand. The key to his chest of silver plate, the key to the village’s tithe box . . . and the keys to the stocks.