“How much does Old Spiderfingers take of your catch?” Jean-Claude asked. He knew the thief master from her days as master thief. These days she ran St. Josephine’s. She provided food, shelter, education, and discipline to the biggest gang of orphans in the city. The powers that be tolerated her crew of underage pickpockets, housebreakers, and beggars because she was wise enough to direct her charges at foreign visitors, and because she made the orphanage largely self-sufficient.

Rebecca flinched. “Nobody calls her that anymore. It’s Madame Ophelia.”

Jean-Claude wondered when the old woman had started putting on airs.

He said, “You didn’t answer my question.”

“I still owe her indenture,” Rebecca said bluntly, meeting him with the sort of feral stare that suggested further inquiries in that direction would be considered acts of aggression.

Jean-Claude despised orphan indenture, a legal noose that obligated foundlings to pay back their caretakers for the expense of raising them, reducing many to perpetual servitude.

“What would you do if you didn’t owe?”

Rebecca looked wary. “I don’t know.”

“I know a ship that’s leaving soon, and it has need of a cabin girl.” Isabelle’s much-anticipated expedition to recover the Conquest’s lost treasure was due to set sail tomorrow. Isabelle could use someone like Rebecca, someone quick and clever to relieve Marie of her duties as handmaid. Likewise, Isabelle was incapable of not caring about people in her charge.

Rebecca’s eyes went round. She leaned forward, yearning, but caught herself. “I can’t.”

“I didn’t ask if you could. I asked if you wanted to.”

She made a surly face. “What good’s wanting sommat you can’t have?”

“Because every good thing in the world comes from someone doing something they didn’t think they could.”

“That’s why the world’s such a shithole then.”

Jean-Claude shrugged with a nonchalance he did not feel. She must feel he was trying to trick her. Offering bait for a scam she could not see. “It was a thought. I’ll be on the ship. So will Marie and Djordji.”

That gave Rebecca pause. “What about Madame Ophelia?”

“I’ll deal with Old Spiderfingers, get her off your neck even if you don’t want the job,” Jean-Claude said.

“But I don’t know anything about ships,” Rebecca said.

“Neither does Jean-Claude. Difference is, he’s got no excuse,” Djordji said, coming up behind her. He held a long-stemmed pipe in his teeth, and the sweet and sulfurous smoke of dragonweed gathered under the wide brim of his hat.

Marie came with him. The smoke smudges and bloodstains on her clothes slowly faded to white over time.