Her lips, I see with startlement, have turned bluish. I feel the same niggle as when I saw Corliss’s blue lips. But this time, the memory comes into my head, the picture clear and well lit. I know what makes lips turn blue, the body shake, and foam come out of the mouth. It’s not the falling sickness or the flux, though it looks the same for most of its course. That’s why the herbs are so dear to purchase. And why, when the gallipot described them to my Daffrey uncles, it was safe inside their house in the black of night. Corliss and Tilly were poisoned.

I tried my best to forget every moment from my dark year at the Daffreys. But it doesn’t mean I managed to. My uncles were upright men, which in thieves’ cant means top-of-the-heap rogues. Before going to the Daffreys I hadn’t known that rogues and other crooked folk have ranks and orders just like nobles do, with the most cunning of the rogues right at the top. My uncles were the rulers, my granddam the dowager queen.

All manner of rotten men tramped through the Daffrey house considering themselves lords and dukes of roguery. Highway robbers who would kill a man for his calfskin boots, priggers who thieved horses, jarkmen selling begging passports. There were others, but their names I forgot. Or at least tried to during those nights when they’d fill up the kitchen. Me cooking them supper. Them eating my pottage, looking at me through my clothes, though I was only a girl, so I’d shiver even beside the fire. But I do remember a certain type. Gallipots.

Gallipots were men who would have been apothecaries if the herbs and concoctions they sold ever helped a body towards health. Their wares nudged folk the other way. How plain or subtle the nudge was a difference of price.

One night when I’d been at the Daffreys a few months, the rogues came one after the other, first filling the twin benches of the kitchen table, then the stools from the hearth, then the two pails, overturned, then sitting atop the firewood placed on its end, and finally standing all along the wall over to the stove where I was stirring the soup. It was a meeting to divide out territory and collect duties for the right to work it. Rogues pay duties too. But not to the Queen. These duties went to Misgett, my elder uncle, the king rogue.