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to a branch, and had an appetite—a radiance!—by suppertime the very same day. Remarkable, remarkable…”
    Tom leaned back, studying the wishbones dangling overhead. There was one from every Lumen Night since before Tom’s family had acquired the tavern, and the oldest had furs of accumulated dust. Thirty-eight bones, every one of them intact. Nabby said the wishes remained within the marrow, that the bones protected anyone who boarded at the tavern.
    “Her locket,” Tom said.
    “Contains a tooth,” Benjamin answered. “I examined it while she slept. It is a partial tooth: the fragment, I believe, of an incisor. The reverse of the locket bears the maker’s mark—twenty-two-karat gold, made in Umber—which makes her either a wealthy girl from here in Floria”—Benjamin puffed his pipe—“or a wealthy girl from Bruntland.”
    Three thousand miles overseas, Tom thought. A child of the mother country, floating here alone without a memory of anything but drifting into Root. Wealthy or a thief. Either way, far from home, be it Grayport or Liberty or weeks across the ocean.
    “I have saved the most dramatic fact for last,” Benjamin told him. “When I stooped to unclasp the locket, I had greater leave to examine her breasts.”
    Tom raised his eyebrows. Benjamin frowned, embarrassed and irked, from a strictly professional standpoint, by the misinterpretation.
    “Molly gave birth,” Benjamin said. “I would guess within a fortnight.”
    Tom bit down and cracked the end of his pipe stem. He lowered it and said, “You don’t think the Maimers took…”
    Despite the amber light pulsing from the hearth, Benjamin visibly paled as he considered, lost for words, a possibility that neither of them wanted to admit.

 
    Chapter Four
    C ITY OF U MBER IN B RUNTLAND, C ONTINENT OF H ERALDIA S EVENTEEN Y EARS E ARLIER
    Lord Bell stormed the birthing room, having listened to the cries as long as he could tolerate and now, after battering the door into the wall, feeling staggered by the sight of so much blood. The gunmetal smell of it, the sheen upon the bed. How it glistened in the oil-light, appearing to have carried out a thick, violet clot—a baby, wet and wriggling in the governess’s hands. The muggy air that damped his waistcoat and weighed down his lungs seemed a visceral extension of his young wife’s blood.
    The governess, Frances, almost slipped when she turned. She was slender as a heron, though without a heron’s grace, and said, “M’lord!” at the violence of his unexpected entrance.
    The room was broad and richly furnished with the four-poster bed against the pheasant-papered wall. Lord Bell strode across the floor, gazing at his wife between her wide-spread knees as she lay upon her back, staring up toward the ceiling. Frances stepped in front of him and held out the child, showing how its neck was strangled by the cord. Bell drew his penknife and cut it with a scowl, careful not to slit the miniature throat, and only then did Frances sob, overcome in her relief, quivering and fumbling with the newborn’s limbs.
    “Go,” Bell said.
    Frances hurried to a softly lit corner of the room where a table stood with swaddling cloths, a pitcher, and a bowl.
    Catherine Bell had stopped crying. Finally it was done. She was white, as if her color might be draining with the afterbirth. Lord Bell adjusted her position on the bed—gently, very gently—when her head began to tip.
    He shouted at the hall, where the household servants huddled out of sight.
    “Bring the doctor!”
    “On his way, m’lord,” the butler said without coming in, mumbling something vague about a carriage in the storm.
    Rain beat the roof. Bell knelt beside the bed.
    “Cat,” he said gently, leaning in close.
    She seemed not to recognize his face in her fatigue. He held her hand upon her bosom—there was scarcely any breath—and used his other hand to smooth the ragged hair off her forehead. He still clutched the penknife he’d