your tongue is worth its weight in silver.”
The man behind Pale forced him to his knees. They held his arms, opened his mouth, and extracted the prize with the tongs. The speaker made quick work with a knife before depositing Pale’s most worthy possession in a bag and galloping away, with the stolen horse and the other four riders, off the road and into the forest.
Pale staggered on, trying to stop the bleeding with his hands and fainting, more than once, on the long walk to Root.
The Maimers had first appeared last year and quickly grown to legendary status—mysterious men who appeared and disappeared, like figures in Nabby’s most supernatural tales, after stealing everything a person owned and then, worst of all, the most valuable part of his or her self. In a single summer, they had taken an old man’s majestic beard, a lady’s golden hair, a scholar’s eye, and a nursemaid’s nipples. They had crippled a farmer’s leg, slashed a dandy’s face, and broken a blacksmith’s elbows. Their attacks had finally ended with the onset of cold, and it had been hoped throughout the winter they would not begin again. But now a lawyer had lost his tongue, and even though Molly had emerged from the river with no apparent mutilation, Tom and Benjamin had spent the day wondering whether she, and not John Pale, had really been the Maimers’ first victim of the year.
“Molly and I discussed Mr. Pale when I returned to the house at midday,” Benjamin said, considering his pipe more often than he smoked it. “She inquired about the blood on my shirt, which I had neglected to change before entering her room. I explained what had happened and it left her quite amazed—as amazed, I would say, as anyone had been upon learning of the Maimers.”
“Could the Maimers,” Tom said, “be something else she forgot?”
Benjamin shook his head. “As I said to you this morning, she appears more frightened than legitimately fogged. My true purpose in inviting you this morning was not to jog her thoughts but to test another theory. I observed her when you came and saw what I expected.”
“What?”
“Trust,” Benjamin said. “I believe she may confide in you. Perhaps in you alone.”
Tom leaned back with a quizzical expression. He drew upon his pipe until it crackled; he exhaled. “Why me?”
“You saved her life.”
“So did you.”
Benjamin sipped his smoak, taking time to think. “She was not in mortal danger once you pulled her from the river. I can scarcely claim credit for the speed of her recovery. The cold should have killed her, yet she bore it and survived, clinging unconscious 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
CITY OF UMBER IN BRUNTLAND, CONTINENT OF HERALDIA SEVENTEEN YEARS EARLIER
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