“Read through our ‘ship’s articles’ again, child, if you have not forgotten your letters as well as your duties. You are bound to obey my orders, and you stand to receive a generous salary at the end of the year. Before this explosion of ingratitude, I had even considered recommending that the Stationers grant you a place in a school, as you requested.” It seemed to occur to Clent that their voices had become rather loud given the thin walls of the marriage house, and his voice dropped to a whisper. “If, of course, you would rather throw away all hopes of bettering yourself in favor of buying yourself a mangled old fowl that seems to be harboring all the demons of fable within his moth-eaten breast, then so be it. The choice is yours.” Clent folded his arms, and his mouth became an adamant plum.

A place in a Stationer school . . . Somehow Mosca’s thoughts were not where she had left them; the idea of school had been so real to her. She had imagined the cool of a slate between her fingers, and had seen herself cutting quills for the younger children. She had even puzzled over how she would stop Saracen eating the ink bottles. Now the school seemed a means to an end, and that end was Lady Tamarind and the Eastern Spire.

Two images flitted before Mosca’s eyes.

Mosca saw a woman stepping out of a white carriage, lifting her hem slightly to protect it from contact with the street. Two footmen dusted the cobbles with swansdown brushes so that they could not stain her satin shoes. She swept through a door into a ballroom where the walls were hung with the hides of white tigers. She danced, and, from mahogany tables, stuffed ermine stoats watched her with pearls instead of eyes. She drank from a crystal glass. She was too beautiful to smile or flush, and her eyes were black, black as pepper. They were Mosca’s eyes.

Then Mosca saw the darkened hold of the Mettlesome Maid. Saracen was scrambling unsteadily over a heap of wooden and leaden Beloved, his leathery feet sliding on ridged faces and graven wings. He gave little chuckling noises in his throat, but his neck drooped with weariness and hunger. He nibbled at the pointed nose of the Kind Lady of Fools, and then shook his head disappointedly. Soon, when he was weaker, the sailors would pull up the planks and come after him with spades and boat hooks . . .

“Well?” Clent was waiting with a look of satisfaction on his face. “Have you recovered your senses and made your choice?”

She had.

“I want my chirfugging goose back!”

“Well, you can’t have it!” Clent snapped, scarlet-faced.

“Then you’re a moldy-mouthed liar an’ a cheat an’ I’m not doing nuffin’ for you no more!” screamed Mosca. Before she had finished the sentence, Clent had stormed from the room, slamming the door.