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of innocence that it made him sound much younger.
    By the motion of the rug, I could tell that both boys were swinging around to face Madame Bisset.
    â€œWhere have you come from? Did you see a girl in a nightgown running past?” Madame Bisset asked.
    â€œIn a nightgown , mistress?” the younger boy asked. And somehow he sounded even more innocent. He made even me wonder if it was possible for girls in nightgowns to go wandering about at mid day—and I’d just done that myself.
    I also noticed that he didn’t answer Madame Bisset’s first question.
    The older boy did instead.
    â€œWe’uns are taking this rug from a house over by Downtree to another house in Cordelstaff. The owners couldn’t make payments on it, mistress,” the older boy said. “Begging your pardon, mistress, for mentioning such places as Downtree and Cordelstaff to the likes of you.”
    The front part of the rug shifted, and I could imagine the older boy making an apologetic bow, the kind of motion that would accompany the doff of a cap, if the boy actually had a cap.
    Madame Bisset sniffed loudly enough that I could hear her through three layers of filthy rug.
    â€œThe likes of you should not be in this area of the city,” she said haughtily.
    â€œYes, mistress. We know, mistress,” the older boy said, backing away slightly. I recognized this motion too: It was what servants did in the palace, bowing and scraping to proclaim with their every movement, I am less than you. I am not worthy to be in your presence. I am not qualified to breathe the same air as you.
    Cecilia had practically laughed her head off the first time she’d seen one of these little pantomimes at the palace.
    â€œSeriously?” she’d cried. She’d put her hand on the servant’s shoulder and burst out, “Aren’t you kind of laughing inside every time you do that? The lower you bow—isn’t that secretly a sign that you’re mocking us that much harder?”
    I had never thought of such a possibility. Did servants ever secretly laugh at royalty and courtiers? How could they get away with it? How was it that Cecilia had noticed it immediately, while I’d been totally ignorant my entire fourteen years in the palace? Was Cecilia just smarter than me? Did that mean that she and Harper had managed to escape from the fire?
    Stop thinking about Cecilia , I told myself, because now there was a lump in my throat that threatened to make me gulp noisily. Maybe it was threatening to make me cry.
    And I was missing the older boy’s long, convoluted explanation about how his little brother had wanted to see the palace, and so they’d swung through the royal courtyard, “and how sad is it for my little brother that the day he finally gets to see the palace, it’s nothing but a pile of smoking stones down on the ground?”
    â€œYou better not have been searching through the rubble for items to steal!” Madame Bisset snapped.
    â€œNo, mistress. Of course not, mistress,” the older boy said. “Once we saw the palace was gone, we didn’t even go near.”
    â€œWe didn’t want our rug to catch on fire!” the younger boy added.
    â€œI should have my guards search through your pockets just to be sure,” Madame Bisset snarled. Her voice was harder to hear at the end, as if she was turning around, searching for her guards.
    â€œSay, that girl you be looking for . . . might she have hadblood on her feet or shoes?” the little boy asked. “Because, look, there are bloody footprints coming into this alley, and then you can tell, they go back out . . .” The back end of the rug dipped perilously low, and I had to dig my fingers into the filthy, unraveling cloth closest to my hands, just to keep from sliding down. “Look—feel it. The blood isn’t even dry yet.”
    He touched it? He actually thinks Madame Bisset