She leaned down and laid the quill end of the feather against the empty notch at one end of the domingon’s lower soundboard. It settled in perfectly, as if the domingon had been built to accommodate this exact feather. Then Candle gently coaxed the feather flat.

There was a hasp at the soundboard’s far edge, a leather tooth on a sprung hinge that clamped down hard to hold the pinion end of the tailfeather in place.

Candle turned the pegs, listening to calibrations of tuning too precise for Sister Cook to appreciate. Then Candle flung out both her hands at Sister Cook: Go! Go!

“Ungrateful, the both of you,” said Sister Cook. As she descended the stairs, she heard the first few notes of an exquisite instrument being played by an expert. So suddenly it took her back to school days—when she was a nervous slip of a thing at Madame Teastane’s Female Academy, not the cow she’d become—that she had to steady herself against the wall. She was thirteen, and suffering her first menses. Coming back from a dawn visit to the cold lavatories on the third floor, she’d spotted a red pfenix on the roof of the Master’s lodge. The trees had been airy, just budding, struck with first light, and the bird had looked like red cloisonné set in warm stone. A stab of loveliness unmerited, unexpected. It had cheered her then. She continued down the stairs back to the mauntery’s kitchens, cheered again at the long-forgotten thought, though perhaps she was also happy to anticipate a fine, fine meal that night.

Southstairs

1

THESUPERIORMAUNTmade it her business to get to the infirmary on a daily basis.

She didn’t like what she saw. The young fellow made no discernible progress; indeed, a yellowish sweat rolled off him, hinting of turps. His skin was cold to the touch. He was still breathing, however.

“You may wipe him down when he becomes too clammy,” she said to Candle, and showed her how. The girl seemed reluctant to touch her charge, but did as she was bade.

Holy intuition, the Superior Maunt felt, did not figure among her own administrative talents. She was a common-sensist. She thought the Unnamed God had given her a brain to use, not to ignore as a snare of the devil. She had tried to lift herself up by clear thinking, and others, too, when she could.

Nonetheless, it was intuition as much as charity that had inspired her to call for a musician. This Candle seemed perfect: demure, even of temper, and increasingly proficient at her instrument.

The Superior Maunt wasn’t overly worried that whatever had befallen Liir—whatever it was, those bruises, those broken bones!—would afflict her pair of investigators. The young missionaries from the motherchapel in the Emerald City, whose faces had been scraped—the boy himself—were possessed of the loveliness of youth, youth’s fine ignorance of its own fleeting grace. The same couldn’t be said of Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire. Through long years of dedication and hard work, they had grown wizened and doughy, respectively. They would be safe from the attention of those who wanted to despoil the innocently beautiful. And their training in medicine had fostered keen observational skills; they could protect themselves, if anyone could.