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the west bank.’ Mosca was quick enough to catch the purse tossed at her head. ‘A loaf of bread, some cheese – and an apple or two, if it will not ruin us. And, child –’ Mosca halted in the doorway – ‘we have yet to find a way of disguising the goose.’
    Reluctantly Mosca relinquished Saracen, and ventured on to the Kempe Teetering thoroughfare. She was well aware that Clent might be looking for a chance to abandon her, but it seemed less likely that he would decamp without his purse.
    On the far bank, Mosca glimpsed a soft slate-blue dome, and felt something cold slither across her heart like a toad across a stone. She halted, and was butted in the calves by a wheelbarrow of whelks.
    Unsteadily, half willingly, she turned her steps towards the church. If she was likely to be hanged for arson, then this was as good a time as any to scrub at her stained soul.
    Until now she had visited only the parish church at Hummel, which was little more than a barn sheltering a cluster of shrines. Visitors from a large market town would not have given the Kempe Teetering church a second look, but to Mosca it might as well have been a cathedral.
    Several centuries of gull droppings on the domed roof created a white tracery like an ivory fretwork. The great, carved-oak doors were a foot too tall for the entranceway, and leaned against the door frame, leaving a gap for visitors to squeeze between them. Although Mosca did not know it, they had been plundered during the civil war from the wreckage of another church further upstream.
    Mosca slipped into a darkness as chill as a funeral morning, and found herself surrounded by the Beloved.
    Each shutter was carved with the figures of saints, stiff and identical as playing-card kings. Painted Beloved elbowed for room in the rafter-high murals. Wooden Beloved peered from the pulpit and the altar screen. Stone Beloved bulged like pompous fruit from the trunks of the stone pillars. A goodman of straw had been pulled apart by rats, and a goodlady with a turnip body and potato head was rotting quietly in a corner.
    Mosca stared about her, not sure where to offer her confession. She found Goodman Postrophe high on one rafter, but he seemed to be busy talking to Goodlady Prill, Protector of Pigs, so she felt that she would be interrupting. In addition, the carving of Postrophe made him look a little like her uncle Westerly, which gave her pause. Goodlady Prill was plumper than her aunt Briony, but had the same mean, short-sighted sort of stare.
    ‘I told you,’ Mosca imagined Prill saying in Aunt Briony’s voice. ‘I always told you the girl was a wasp in your pocket, and would sting you when she had the opportunity. Small wonder, though, with a father like that . The books spoilt her. I have never known such a knowing child.’ Her tone made it plain that ‘knowing’ was something that no self-respecting child had any business doing. Mosca’s fingernails dug into her palms.
    She looked around for a carved face resembling that of Quillam Mye, but none of them wore pince-nez, or was bowed over a book. It would have driven him to distraction, she thought suddenly, being trapped on a carving where the Beloved crawled over one another like bees, droning about meal and chaff, when to pick apples, saving candle ends, and mending chicken coops.
    Palpitattle? Ah, there he was, carved into a shutter. The fly-saint grinned like a mantrap, and his great eyes bored right through the wood and were flooded with sky.
    ‘’S like this,’ he rasped in the voice that Mosca always gave him. ‘That Mr Clent’s got you by the scruff, now he knows ’bout the mill. You got to get the dirty on ’im. Somink big . What ’bout those papers he hid from Mistress Bessel? Hid ’em in the shrine before, din’t he? Don’t want ’em seen, do he? Printed, ain’t they? Maybehaps they ain’t got the seal from the Company of Stationers. That’d be enough to buy him a rope cravat.’
    If books were feared,