“. . . didn’t have room to do it proper, you see, not inside the city walls. ’Sides, most of the time the bodies were shoveled into the same great pits outside the city bounds, and even after the Birdcatchers fell, nobody had the stomach to go pickin’ through the bones all jumbled together and working out what was whose . . .”

There would be a similar desolate memorial in every city in the Realm. Each of those feathers represented a grave, a man, or woman or child killed by the Birdcatchers. This she had already known, but she had not expected to feel as if she were staring into the city’s open wound. Mosca could not guess how many thousands of feathers twitched in the early breeze. There were too many to think about safely, and she decided not to care whether the tiniest downy feathers were children.

She realized that she was not alone. People moved around the green in ones and twos, talking in church whispers or bowing their heads in silence. Some knelt between the feather plots, replacing broken plumes with fresh. The Praymaster chaplains from the cathedral would renew all the feathers on St. Berrible’s Day, but clearly some of the departed had families who liked to keep their graves in fine feather.

On a little pedestal sat a statue of Goodman Claspkin, He Who Carries Our Words to Departed Kin, one hand extended as if to cup the chin of a beloved child. Her knees weak with cliff-edge shakiness, Mosca knelt and reached a trembling hand toward the clump of pheasant feathers at his feet, as if she too had come to renew the plumes on a loved one’s grave.

She tugged at a feather. It slid out, to show a tube of horn fastened to the feather’s stem. Struggling against the urge to look around, she pulled her letter out of her pocket, slid it into the tube, and pushed feather and tube back into the earth. It was done. She had broken the Stationers’ oaths of secrecy, and if they ever found out, they would put her in a printing press and crank it down until she popped like a chestnut . . .

She hurried back to the marriage house, thinking that everybody was wearing gloves and was watching her strangely. She opened the door of the room she shared with Clent, and Clent himself turned to stare at her, a queer and unfocused expression on his face.

“What?” Her hands twitched. Had he seen the earth on her knees? Did he suspect her? How could he suspect her? If he did, Mosca just wanted him to say so. “What?”