been expecting some radical rantings, or political revelations, but this looked very like an old-fashioned ‘heart’s ease’ prayer. In the time of the civil war many soldiers had marched into battle with a prayer of this sort written out on parchment and folded in the pocket over their heart, in the belief that it would bring them luck and courage.
‘It’s like someone’s getting ready for a battle,’ she murmured under her breath. Why were the heart’s ease prayers being printed, rather than hand-written by a priest? Could it be that there was too little time to write them out – or too many soldiers to supply?
‘… the land has sunk into a sickness of the soul… a poison that can only be removed by letting blood… our figures seem dark for the Light is behind us…’ Mosca read on with new interest. ‘… our glorious brethren of the-’ The next word was hard to read, running as it did across Mosca’s wrist. She twisted her arm about and squinted until the smudged ink revealed its secret to her.
She sat back with a crash. The air was suddenly full of birds. They erupted from the rushes on all sides, their wings beating like frightened hearts, the white undersides of their wings flashing with each beat. The air they left behind them shook and rippled and would not settle.
With urgent eyes she stared at the smudges on her skirts, skin and stockings, tracing the threads of sooty letters that wound about her like snakes.
‘… with a sword of fire… and even their children… purity…’
And there again was the word she had found on her wrist. And there, and there…
The morning air was as golden as ever, the wild rosehips still bobbed gaily on the hedges, but the breeze had a new taste now, and the cries of the birds sounded like tearing metal.
Anything was possible now. Mosca thought she could hear bland hillsides groaning open to release the monsters of the past. The worst of the dead times were rising from their graves, and it would take more than Little Goodman Postrophe and a mountain of mellowberries to stop them coming home.
But no, Mosca realized, the truth was less childish and more frightening. The Birdcatcher army that awaited these prayers would not be a spectral horde. Its soldiers would be flesh and blood, men and women of Mandelion, all waiting through the years for the right moment with a ghastly patience, like the Birdcatcher church attendant in Kohlrabi’s story. The Birdcatchers had never been extinguished at all. They had just remembered how to be invisible.
And now they were ready to act. A battle was being planned, and beyond it Mosca seemed to see a world where trees screamed under the weight of hanged bodies, and the fears that still lurked like bats in the eaves of every mind surged out and blackened the sky.
Before her the clear, black heart on her apron burned into her gaze until it seemed to pulse with the heartbeat she heard in her ears. It was the Heart of the Consequence, the essence of purity, the drum of an unseen army. But it was more than that, and as she stared, Mosca started to see a new meaning in the mark.
Seven hours later, amid the crush of Mandelion’s main thoroughfare, two young girls huddled by a ragged outcrop of the old city wall and talked in low, urgent voices. The taller of the two had red ringlets too unruly for her cap, and she kept her hands bunched in her apron to keep them warm. The shorter had black hair, caked and clinging with earthy-pink powder, and she wore a patched olive-green dress of a style too old for her. On a strap over her shoulder hung a round, red wig box, and her clogs were caked with mud. Looking at the pair, a passer-by might think they were two shopkeepers’ daughters taking a moment out of their errands to gossip. Few would suspect that they were discussing gods, and guilds, and the fate of the nation.
‘I’m still not
‘Plump and peachy,’ muttered Mosca. ‘With a flouncety walk, and a nose stuck up like this.’ With a fingertip she pushed up the tip of her own nose.
‘I never done anything like this before,’ murmured the Cakes nervously.
‘You just got to throw her apron over her head, and hold on. You won’t need to say anything.’ Mosca grabbed the Cakes’ arm. ‘There! There she is! Come on!’
The lavender girl had stopped at the gate to preen the frills at the bustle of her pretty saque-backed gown. She smiled her way past the guards, observing their admiration through lowered lashes, then paused to look for a gap in the ebb and flow of bodies and coaches. This hesitation was her undoing.
The first the poor lavender girl knew of her danger was when she found herself with a face full of linen. Before she could recover or scream, four thin hands gripped her arms, hurried her off her feet into an echoing alley and pushed her against a wall. The Cakes held on to her like a drowning sailor clinging to a beam, while Mosca placed a couple of well-aimed pinches on the prisoner’s plump arms.
‘Who are you? What do you want? Ow!’
‘You weren’t supposed to sell that dress, were you?’ hissed Mosca.
‘What? What dress?’ The lavender girl was still too bewildered to pull the apron from her face.
‘Lady Tamarind give you a snow-white dress, foaming with lace and all over pearls, with a heart-shaped stain on the sleeve. You was told to burn it, weren’t you? But you didn’t – that’s stealing, that is. They’re holding an Assizes right now for people like you.’
The lavender girl gave a whimper.
‘Her Ladyship didn’t say it
‘All right.’ Mosca gave the prisoner one more pinch for luck. ‘You tell nobody ’bout our parley, an’ I’ll tell nobody ’bout the dress.’ She clapped the Cakes on the shoulder, and the red-haired girl followed her out of the alley at a run, leaving the lavender girl quivering under her apron.
‘Did we have to do that?’ the Cakes asked when she caught up.
Mosca shrugged. ‘Don’t have much time, do we?’
‘I suppose not,’ the Cakes answered uncertainly. ‘So… your ’spicion was right, then?’
‘Yes.’ Mosca clapped both hands behind her bonnet, and leaned back to stare up at the Eastern Spire. ‘Lady Tamarind got everyone running mulberry bush after that printing press: the Duke chasing after radicals, the Stationers chasing after Locksmiths. An’ all the time it was
‘So… that mark on her dress came from the printing press?’
‘Yes. It wasn’t enough seeing all the hurly-burly she was causing. She couldn’t help herself, she had to go and
‘Why?’ The Cakes blinked, nonplussed.
‘Power.’ Mosca surprised herself at her own certainty. ‘The press just sits there grinning at you with its metal teeth, like it’s telling you it can turn cities upside down and send dukes mad and cause riots and wars. An’ the thing about power is, it makes you want to get close to it, an’ breathe it in, an’ be part of it.’
She knew now that it was power that had hypnotized her when she met Lady Tamarind. Lady Tamarind
Lady Tamarind would have been bewitched by the press in the same way. Mosca could imagine her running her hands over the press, wanting to feel a tingle of power from the touch…
‘She wouldn’t know she had to pull out frames and bend them crookways to get the printed page loose,’ Mosca added aloud, ‘so maybe she just tried to reach inside and pull it out. And so she ended up with a big, black mark printed on her sleeve. She got rid of the dress the way she always did, by giving it to that pinchnosed maid, only telling her this time to burn it or cut off the cuffs. But the maid was a silly, greedy hoity-toity who thought she could sell it for a better price with the cuffs still on. And so a lady with a flabby mouth and silly laugh bought it, and wore it to the beast fight, and that’s where I saw her in it.’
