“If so, we’ll find them. You! Take off your glove! Let’s see your right hand!” The Duke’s men barged through the crowd, muskets leveled, forcing each man in their path to strip off his right-hand glove. Mosca knew they were looking for the Locksmiths’ key brand.

Not far from Mosca a man in a ragged, brown coat shoved his way free of the crowd and bolted for an alleyway.

“Stop!” A Duke’s man leveled his musket. Footsteps continued to ring out from the alley.

A summer’s worth of thunder in an instant, and a surge of musket smoke. A woman standing next to Mosca screamed and clutched a powder-burned cheek. One petty constable sprinted into the alley.

“There’s nothing but a thief’s brand on the fellow’s hand!” came his cry. Amid the crowd, angry whispers fizzed to and fro like water beads on a griddle.

Perhaps the world has always been like this, Mosca thought as she pushed her way through the crowd. Like a broken honeypot that looks whole, but just holds together because the shards are resting in place and are glued together with honey. You just need to prod it a bit, and it all starts oozing apart. And perhaps, when Clent had cackled on her, the world would come oozing after Mosca in a mass of madness and misheard gossip, accusing her of mill burning and mischief and multiple misdemeanors. She needed to find somewhere to hide.

Kohlrabi.

His favorite coffeehouse was the Hind at Bay. When it drew near to its usual mooring place on Merryhell Row, it became clear that a fracas was taking place on board. Two men had hit the wooden wall with such violence that they had knocked a hole in it, and now their upper bodies protruded through the splintered gash, where they struggled over a tiny pistol gripped between their interlocked fists. The ball rolled out of the barrel and hit the water with a sad little plish, but the combat continued unabated. A plum-faced lawyer shouted a hoarse diatribe against the Locksmiths, while a young apothecary said nothing, happy in the knowledge that a bitten eyebrow was worth a thousand words.

“’Scuse me,” Mosca called out to the two coffeemaidens busy trying to pull the combatants back from the drop, “but is there a Mr. Kohlrabi supping there, please?”

“Not this last hour, me dove,” one called as she wound her fingers into the lawyer’s cravat and hauled him back by force. “Try in the cathedral, I would, dearie. He’s often there at this time.”

But this was no easy matter. The road to the cathedral was full of crowds and excitable voices. Mosca’s legs were weak and her arms were full of Saracen.