“Irrationally, Mosca felt she should have inherited her father’s intimate knowledge of Mandelion. His throwaway comments about the city should have magically meshed in her mind, giving her a faultless instinct for finding her way around.”

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

“Mosca felt something enormous swell within the knotted stomach that she hid behind her fists. It seemed it must surge out of her like a wild, black wave, sweeping away stalls and strollers alike and biting the plaster from the walls.”

“Mosca had preferred it when she could hear the edge in her companion’s voice. Now she felt like someone who knows that there is a scorpion somewhere in the room but can’t see where it is.”

“Mosca had come armed with a rich pack of lies, ready to pick whichever seemed to suit Goshawk’s mood best. Under the wintry draught of his gaze, however, she felt most of them wither away in her hands.”

“She could find no purchase on the older woman’s marble-smooth countenance. There were no cracks to give her a view into her soul.”

“This was why he had become a master thief, to achieve this theft of thefts, this masterpiece of larceny. All the time, fascinating and terrible Caverna had been his goal. Whilst other Cartographers had sighed in vain after the beauty of her treacherous geography, he had decided to win her with cunning and threats. All along Caverna had been his opponent and his prize, and she had never suspected it for a moment. He had fooled her, fought her and defeated her. She would be furious, no doubt, would hate him, rail against him and look for ways to destroy him, but he had outmanoeuvred her and now she had no choice but to play things his way. Unlike her earlier favourites, he was her lord, not a plaything to be tossed aside when she was bored. And yet, for the first time in ten years, he found himself at something of a loss. I have succeeded. I have won. I rule the city. I wonder what I was planning to do with it?”