The galley was blisteringly hot. Heaps of coffee beans glistened through the steam like burned-out mountains of some volcanic land. Squat little Moscas of different sizes were reflected in the bowls of a dozen ladles. The table was also a cupboard—the top folded back to show everything stowed tidily on hooks and in lined pockets, ready to be “battened down when the coffeehouse was under way.”

“Take these.” Dulcet, the tall girl with honey-colored hair, looped the strings of four heavy leather pouches over Mosca’s wrists. “And some of them snuff bottles. The green ones. Blue ones are snuff, green ones are gunpowder.” The muskets that filled Shrewlie’s arms gleamed with a dull oiliness and smelled of beeswax.

This is more like it, Mosca decided, as she filled her hands with tiny, scarab-shaped bottles. When they struggled back into the main room, the door had been wedged so that it stood open barely the width of a hand. Blythe lay on his belly, aiming a pistol through the aperture. Without the view of the bobbing shore it did not feel so much as if they were in a boat as in a parlor with hiccups.

Another shot punctured the door and tore apart the head of a stuffed fish that decorated the wall, showering bystanders with sawdust.

“How do you come to have so much lead shot, Miss Kitely?” Pertellis seemed bewildered by the laden appearance of the girls.

“Mr. Copperback has been expecting something of this sort for a while. He has been making his own shot, and it seemed most sensible to hide it on the Bower.” Miss Kitely continued to clean out a pistol barrel in a businesslike manner.

“But where in the name of goodness did you find the lead?”

Copperback opened his mouth to say something, but forgot what it was when Miss Kitely gave him a meaningful look.

“It is a long story,” Miss Kitely explained coolly, as she took a snuff bottle from Mosca and began trickling the powder into the pan. In Mosca’s experience, a “long story” was always a short story someone did not want to tell. In this case she thought it probably involved stolen shrine icons.

“Um . . . I could swear that this bullet has an eye.”

“A freak of the mold, Mr. Pertellis.”

Mosca left the last pouch of shot in the eager hand of Copperback, then ran to press her eye to a knothole in the shoreward wall. She could see a gaggle of Duke’s men in black and green standing on the jetty, now a reassuring distance away. There was a downy puff, like a dandelion clock being torn apart by the wind. Only as the smoke unraveled did Mosca glimpse the musket barrel behind it. Just as she was wondering how the gun had fouled, she heard a crack and felt the wall tremble against her cheek.