“I’ll have my money, all right,” Partridge said grimly. “I’ll sell your skin to a drum maker and have my money.”

Mosca decided that Partridge was not in the right mood for negotiation.

She twisted like a snake and sank her teeth into his right-hand knuckles, all the while tearing at his fingers with her nails. He shifted his grip and she pulled free, hearing a tick-tack-tack of snapping seam threads. On impulse, she leaped a mess of mooring ropes and sprinted for the coffeehouse, which was making ready to cast off.

As the sailors on the roof braced long poles against the quay in readiness for pushing off, Mosca jumped. Her hands snatched at a dangling rope, and then her feet found support on the crude wooden rungs nailed to the coffeehouse wall. Winded, she could only cling and pray that the Laurel Bower would push off before Partridge’s angry hand could close on the scruff of her neck.

It would not have interested her to know that at this very moment she was dangling between two worlds, each with its own laws. Leaping from the shore, she had left behind the city the Duke controlled. On the river, only the free-and-easy rules of the Watermen applied. The coffeehouses of Mandelion crisscrossed the river to escape the shore laws, so that customers could speak freely. Here sedition and wild conspiracies bubbled like the coffeepots.

Meanwhile, within Miss Kitely’s coffeehouse, the Laurel Bower, the young teacher in blue-tinted spectacles brightened at the sight of a newly arrived friend.

“Copperback!” The teacher pushed forward to take the hand of a man who had an angry question locked eternally into his brilliant brown eyes. “I am so glad to see you—I was hoping that we might discuss the matter of the recent . . . that is, aha, hahow. Ow. Er . . . ow?”

Copperback continued to grip the teacher’s hand with painful firmness until he had watched a man in a crimson waistcoat reclaim his hat and trip out through the street door with a swing of his cane. When the door had been made fast behind him, and the crockery had rattled with the casting off, Copperback’s grip relaxed slightly. Several other men around the room who had been watching the door with earnest interest allowed their shoulders to relax.

“Beloved above, Pertellis,” Copperback muttered at last. “I thought you were going to spill right in front of him.”

Hopewood Pertellis blinked through his blue-tinted spectacles at the room about him, noticing the general tension for the first time.

“Who . . . ?”

“A spy for the Duke’s men. I’d stake my eyes on it. What is become of the world if we cannot even talk safely on the river? He came in yesterday and told us he had just arrived in Mandelion from one of the university towns, and wanted to meet other men of letters who ‘cared for the much-wronged common people.’”