It was hopeless. She was flawless. She was a sunbeam. Mosca gave up and got on with hating her.

Mosca said nothing. The word ‘damsel’ rankled with her. She suddenly thought of the clawed girl from the night before, jumping the filch on an icy street. Much the same age and build as Beamabeth, and far more beleaguered. What made a girl a ‘damsel in distress’? Were they not allowed claws? Mosca had a hunch that if all damsels had claws they would spend a lot less time ‘in distress’.

Brand a man as a thief and no one will ever hire him for honest labor - he will be a hardened robber within weeks. The brand does not reveal a person's nature, it shapes it.

It did seem hard to be doing something heroic while everyone was too busy to notice.

It was all very well being told that she could do nothing to make things better. Neverfell did not have the kind of mind that could take that quietly. She did not have the kind of mind that could be quiet at all.

Mosca and Saracen shared, if not a friendship, at least the solidarity of the generally despised. Mosca assumed that Saracen had his reasons for his persecution of terriers and his possessive love of the malthouse roof. In turn, when Mosca had interrupted Saracen’s self-important nightly patrol and scooped him up, Saracen had assumed that she too had her reasons.

In Mosca’s experience, a ‘long story’ was always a short story someone did not want to tell.