His boots made a very satisfying thud as they hit the wall. All Mosca’s strength was not enough to tear the sleeves of his coat from the body, so she settled for stamping his new wig flat until it resembled a terrier that had fallen foul of a dustcart wheel.

As she was standing, panting, her boots dusted with flour from Clent’s wig, she suddenly saw with absolute clarity what it was that she needed to do. If she could squeeze no reward from Clent and the Stationers, she could think of only one person who might give her money for Saracen’s ransom, and that was Lady Tamarind.

Clent had left paper, quill, and ink bottle in the window seat. Snatching them up, she scratched out a quick letter.

Dear Ladyship,

The Stationers have an antipathy to the Locksmiths, on account of they suspect they are running a printing press to make the Duke go into fits. This is all to help them take over the city somehow.

The Locksmiths are hiding a radical called Hopewood Pertellis who teaches forbidden books to a school in alleys and I seen him do it. They are hiding him in the Gray Mastiff. Tomorrow night the Stationers will go in and arrest him when he is all ringed about with Locksmiths, so the Duke will find out how tricky and toad-spotty the Locksmiths are and slap his head.

MOSCA FROM THE ROAD

She rolled the letter into a narrow pipe, tucked it into her apron pocket, and hurried from the marriage house with her heart beating.

“’Scuse me.” She tugged at the sleeve of a woman with a basket of gillyflowers. “Can you tell me the way to the Plumery?”

The woman’s smile faded. She was of middle age, with a broad, cheerful face that sun and hard work had polished and cracked like wood. She gazed sadly at Mosca as if she had seen a ghost of a dead daughter standing behind her.

“Of course, blossom.” She whispered directions gently, as if she were talking to an invalid, and Mosca left her, feeling more ill and uncertain than before. As she walked, the streets dwindled into alleys, the houses became dwarfish, and then she took a turning into an open square and stopped dead.

Even before Mosca saw the shrines of Goodman Postrophe at every corner she sensed something deathly in the square’s stillness. No sheep or goats cropped the central green. Among the grass, their quills planted deep into the earth, nestled thousands of feathers—pigeon, magpie, dove, pheasant, rook. Most were broken-backed from the wind and ragged from rain. Mosca felt superstitious fear climbing her spine on spider feet.

Mosca had never seen a plumery before. She remembered a peddler talking about the Plumery in the Capital: