“Don’t be going yet,” Graba said. She took a small leather bag from around her neck and held it out to Vass. “Hang this over the chains on the Clock Tower door. Sing the charm I was teaching you last night, and stand back when you do. Take care with this, now. It is a present of welcoming home, and it’s almost ripe.”

Vass took the bag carefully. “What’s in it?” she asked.

“A bird skull, stuffed with other things. Do this well, and I might be teaching you the making of it.”

“Yes, Graba,” said Vass.

“Go,” Graba said. “All of you but the runt, the smallest one. Rownie should wait here with me.”

Rownie waited. He wondered why Graba knew his name. She knew the names of those she kept an eye on, and it was not always a good thing to have Graba’s eye on you.

He listened to Vass, Stubble, and Blotches clamber down the stairs.

“Yes, Graba?” Rownie asked.

“My leg bones have run down,” she told him. “Wind them for me now.” She extended a gearwork leg from under her stool. It was bird-shaped, with three long talon-toes in front and one in back, at the heel. The whole limb had been made out of copper and wood.

Rownie pried the crank out from her shin and wound it up, watching gears turn against chains and springs inside.

Graba always said that Mr. Scrud, the local gearworker, hadn’t enough skill to make legs into human shapes. Vass whispered that Graba needed the chicken legs to hold up her hugeness, that nothing smaller would suffice, and that Graba wouldn’t be able to walk today if she hadn’t lost the ordinary legs she’d been born with.

Stubble said that Graba used to be a sailor, or a boat-witch, and that she’d lost her legs in a pirate attack. He said Graba killed some of the pirates with a look and a laugh and a lock of her hair before they cut off her legs with rusty swords. He always drew out the word “rusty” when he told the story. “Rrrrrrrrusty swords. Ha!” Then he’d hit Rownie behind the knee with a stick to buckle him over.

Stubble told this story often. Rownie had cried the first time, and the rest of Graba’s grandchildren had laughed. On the second telling Rownie had glared up at Stubble from the ground. The third time Stubble told the tale Rownie had fallen backward on purpose, throwing up his hands and imitating Graba’s rusty voice. “Curse you, Pirate King!” (The story had grown by then, and the ordinary river pirates had become a full barge captained by the King of All Pirates.)