The boats nearest the shore sold wares much like those in the market square. One was loaded to the brim with pumpkins and celeriac. Another was heavy with crates of live chickens and rabbits. However, as Mosca drew near to the island of Sussuratch, she noticed a change. The river was the domain of the Watermen, and the usual laws of the land did not apply. Here the other guilds and the Duke had little power, and a different kind of market seller had glided out of the shadows.

Here chemists sold from their little, bobbing stalls without fear of the Apothecaries’ Guild. Cat’s teeth floating in bottled hyacinth water, toadstones, essence of garden tansy to aid childbirth, whole stuffed badgers as treatment against gout, and ground millipedes as a cure for earache.

The triple ball of the pawnbroker’s sign hung from some masts. Mosca saw one such broker haggling with a woman in a tattered black cambric shawl who had spread across her lap a dozen pigtails, all crudely severed. She cast a black look over her shoulder when Mosca paused to peer, and Mosca guessed that she must be one of the notorious scissor women, who would snip the locks off unguarded children to sell to wigmakers. The pigtails lay like fat, silken ropes, their sad little ribbons still attached.

In the next boat, a seller casually tossed a blanket over three sleeping pistols as she passed, and his conversation with his customer fell into a lull.

Around the island of Sussuratch itself, the boats lay flank to flank. This made it easier to step from one to the next, though no doubt if someone had fallen through a gap, it would also have made it easier for them to drown beneath the boats without anyone noticing.

Not far from the island’s jetty, Mosca finally saw the Cakes, the baskets of her carrying yoke laden down with fruit and philtre bottles. When Mosca sidled up to her, the Cakes stiffened, but she continued ladling bloodred juice out of a cauldron into a pot she had brought for the purpose.

“I haven’t seen you,” she said, a little primly. “I’m buying stewed prunes and love apples and payin’ you no mind.”

“All right,” Mosca said with unusual meekness. Paying her no mind did not seem to stop the Cakes talking to her, so she supposed that was good enough. “Cakes—I got to ask you somink.”

“I ain’t talking to you,” the Cakes explained. “I’m just mutterin’ to myself, that’s all.”

“Right—but you might just happen to mutter ’bout the same thing as I’m asking? I’m trying to—I’m trying to fix everything that’s broken.”

The Cakes made a disapproving little mouth as she pushed the cork into her pot, but she seemed to be listening.