She reached a dead-end courtyard, bordered by a stone lattice wall in which the faces of many Beloved were carved. Through the holes in this wall she could see another courtyard, its hexagonal tiles gleaming with white marble and gold paint.
‘Vocado, I must entreat you.’ It was the voice of Lady Tamarind. ‘Let me send for my men.’
Peering through an aperture, Mosca glimpsed a woman in an immaculate white mantua gown. She had vividly envisaged finding Tamarind dressed as in the coach and in her dream, and for a moment she thought that this was yet another lady imitating Tamarind’s style of dress. The next moment she saw the scar shaped like a snowflake on the woman’s cheek.
Beside her stood a storybook prince. He seemed taller than any mortal man, aided by the raised heels of his wine-red shoes and the stately proportions of his gold-dusted wig. His floor-length frock coat and waistcoat were patterned with eyes like those on butterflies’ wings. It could only be the Duke.
‘Goshawk has escaped,’ Tamarind continued in the same level, urgent voice. ‘He has almost certainly sent for that boat of Locksmith troops waiting upstream. The Watermen have agreed to delay them, but that buys us only a little time. The ship with my troops is some distance down the coast, and the roads to the ocean are slow and overgrown. Even if we send a messenger now, it will take ten days for the ship to reach us. Vocado – we must send for them now.’
‘Very well, Tammy. I shall sign the order.’ The Duke’s voice was light and musical, but somehow a little off-key.
A young man tripped forward and held out a scroll while the Duke signed it. Mosca was just wondering why he looked familiar when two strong arms seized her round the middle.
‘Your Ladyship!’ Mosca hooked her fingers into the stone lattice and hung on in a quicksilver rush of madness. ‘Your Ladyship!’ Everything she wanted was beyond the wall.
The Duke turned to look at Mosca, and her stomach jolted as she met his dead brown eyes. She remembered a fox she had once seen flopping about in a strange sickness. Don’t go too close, it’ll bite yer…
‘A radical spy,’ he said, in a tone with the same meaningless music to it.
‘No.’ The white lady gazed into Mosca’s urgent, contorted face with eyes the colour of mist. ‘Merely an errand girl. She wants to bother me for money. Give her a shilling and throw her out.’
The young man beside Tamarind raised his gaze to look at Mosca, and his chestnut eyebrows rose in surprise. Although his hair was now brushed and carefully fastened into a pigtail, and though he now wore a smart but simple coat of dark blue wool, Mosca immediately recognized Linden Kohlrabi, the man who had helped her by hiding her under his travelling cloak.
Mosca’s fingers lost their strength. The footman dragged her from the wall and carried her back the way she had come. She had no spirit to fight. She did not blame Tamarind for the way she had spoken – how could she? Instead, she hated herself with a leaden anguish. Tamarind had been busy with something really important, probably something to do with saving the city from the guild war and the Locksmiths. Mosca had blundered in, shouting like a lunatic in front of the Duke, in spite of Tamarind telling her never to seek her out. Talking to Tamarind had seemed like her only chance, but now she realized she had spoilt everything. Lady Tamarind would never forgive her.
‘It’s all right.’ A quiet voice behind her. ‘You don’t have to throttle the girl. She’ll be coming with me.’ Mosca was lowered to her feet, and she reached up a trembling hand to straighten the ribbons the lavender girl had tied so carefully. She did not look into Kohlrabi’s face, but she fell into step with him as he walked back through the gates to the thoroughfare.
There was a great crowd in front of the Honeycomb Courts and Courthouse, but beyond them the streets were all but empty. As the crowd thinned around them, Mosca stole a glance at Kohlrabi.
‘You work for Lady Tamarind.’ Mosca had not intended it to sound like an accusation.
‘And you, it would seem, work for Eponymous Clent.’ Kohlrabi’s tone was tired and a little wary.
‘She told you that?’
‘Lady Tamarind told me that I was to see you safely outside the gates, and tell you that she could not be seen speaking to you, but she would arrange an interview with you once the Assizes had run their course. Until then, she says you should continue as before.’
Mosca’s felt a small surge of hope. She had not been abandoned after all, perhaps. Could she and Clent survive until after the Assizes?
‘I do not know what your dealings are,’ Kohlrabi continued, ‘but I know that Her Ladyship seldom does anything without a reason. Why did you come to the Courts, Mosca? Did Eponymous Clent send you?’
There was a hint of sharpness in his tone, and Mosca gave him a narrow look.
‘You don’t like Mr Clent.’
‘No. I know too much about him to like him. How much do you know about your employer, Mosca?’
Mosca nibbled at her fingertips and stared at him mulishly. ‘I’m just working for him right now, that’s all. I don’t know nothing about him, and I don’t look to.’
‘Mosca…’ Kohlrabi stopped, closed his eyes for a moment, and sighed. ‘You may not believe me, but I am duty bound to warn you – Eponymous Clent is a very dangerous man. I know what I am talking about – I have spent the last month trailing him from post to post, observing the disaster in his wake.’
Mosca’s eyes widened as a memory stirred. Suddenly her nose was filled once again with the smell of damp, and rot, and dove-droppings, and wind-blown smoke. Suddenly she knew where she had heard Kohlrabi’s name before, and she remembered words spoken by a young voice, a reassuring voice like warm milk…
‘You were in Chough, talkin’ to the magistrate!’ The words were out before she could stop them.
‘Dry Stones and Thistles,’ Kholrabi murmured. ‘I wondered where I had heard your accent before. Chough. How could I be so stupid? Of course – you must be the little girl who burned down the mill.’ Mosca must have looked terrified, because he put out a hand soothingly and gave a slight laugh. ‘It’s all right, it’s all right. I have no thought of handing you over for your most heinous crime. But in the name of the most holy, Mosca, of all the people you could have taken up with, why Eponymous Clent?’
Because I’d been hoarding words for years, buying them from pedlars and carving them secretly on to bits of bark so I wouldn’t forget them, and then he turned up using words like ‘epiphany’ and ‘amaranth’. Because I heard him talking in the marketplace, laying out sentences like a merchant rolling out rich silks. Because he made words and ideas dance like flames and something that was damp and dying came alive in my mind, the way it hadn’t since they burned my father’s books. Because he walked into Chough with stories from exciting places tangled around him like maypole streamers…
Mosca shrugged.
‘He’s got a way with words.’
‘You caused quite a sensation, disappearing like that. For a while they thought you had burned to death in the mill, until they found the magistrate’s keys missing and Clent gone. You should go home, you know – I’m sure your family will understand that the fire was an accident. They’ll just be glad to have you home again.’
Mosca gave a little crow-cough of a laugh.
‘You didn’t meet my uncle and aunt, did you?’
Kohlrabi studied Mosca’s face.
‘No, I didn’t.’ He didn’t ask her any more about her family.
They had come to a halt at the edge of a square in which a gibbet dripped sullenly and a set of scaffolds swayed their ropes in the breeze, a patient motion like the swing of a cat’s tail as it waits by a mousehole.