Her skirts scooped over one arm, the pipe clamped silently in her mouth, Mosca slipped to the thicket’s edge, and found a feathered sea of reeds before her, shivering moonlight like shot silk. Where was the ragman’s raft? Mosca found a gash in the mud where she had anchored the mooring peg, and she knew that the raft must have pulled loose and floated away. But no—there was a strange, squarish clearing among the reeds. The raft had floated, but not far.

Wading through the reeds, Mosca found the ground growing treacherously moist and cloying, the mud welcoming her feet eagerly and giving an annoyed cluck of its tongue each time she drew them out for another step. At last the unseen ground surpassed itself by suddenly becoming river. Mosca found herself up to her hips in icy water, her descent slowed only by her skirts, which spread about her, the muslin seething with bubbles like egg white in a poaching pan.

Mosca grabbed fistfuls of the reeds and used them to drag herself toward the raft. She reached it just before her skirts became sodden enough to drag her down, and she heaved her torso onto its planks. Using her legs to kick, she pulled at the reeds to drag the raft out toward the river. Only when she reached the very edge of the reed forest and pulled herself up onto the timbers did Mosca realize why the raft had not floated away. The mooring rope had pulled taut. Somewhere among the reeds the trailing end with the mooring peg had caught on something.

Almost in tears with desperation and cold, Mosca gave the rope several violent tugs, but it held. The mooring rope was fastened to a metal ring on the raft with a knot that made no sense to her, and her fingers were so numb the bristling rope was painful to twist. She was still struggling with it when she looked up and saw that Kohlrabi was standing on the bank.

He was out of breath, as if he had reached the bank at a run. The moon was full on his face, and he still wore an expression of slight puzzlement. He took a step toward Mosca, before looking down at his feet, up at the raft, and then searchingly at the reeds separating him from the raft. Perhaps he had worked out that he was near the brink. Mosca was fairly sure he did not know how near.

In his left hand he carried his hat, as if he had snatched it off in order to run without losing it. He held it casually, but in such a way that it hid his right hand.

“Little Mosca,” he called out at last, “do you really want to keep the press so much?”