That did leave him some options. Sometimes he could find someone with errands to run; sometimes he could shovel snow or sweep crossings for a pennybit. There was refuse to haul off for the rag-and-bone men if they came up short a man. But none of that was to be counted on as a source of food or money to buy it, and Skif had finally hit on something that was.

It took him far out of his own neighborhood, and into places where his ragged, coatless state was very conspicuous. That was the drawback; before he reached his goal, he might be turned back a dozen times by suspicious folk who didn’t like the look of him in their clean and prosperous streets.

Eventually he left the tenements and crooked, foul streets and penetrated into places where the streets were clean and kept clean by people whose only job was to sweep them. The transition was amazing to him, and even more amazing was that there were single families that lived in buildings that would serve to house a dozen or more families in this area. He didn’t even try to venture onto those streets; there were all sorts of people there whose only job was to keep people like him out.

Now he went to the alleys, slinking from bit of cover to bit of cover. There was plenty of cover here; permanent rubbish bins where ashes, broken crockery, bits of wood, scraps from food preparation too small or too spoiled for anyone from these houses to consider useful were left for the rubbish collectors. This was where the wood—and possibly some of the foodstuffs—bought by Uncle Londer came from. Skif knew better than to rummage in those bins; they “belonged” to the rubbish collectors who guarded their territories jealously, with curses, kicks, and blows. But the rubbish collectors didn’t care who they saw in their alleys so long as he left the bins alone, and they ignored Skif as if he was invisible. Sometimes there were other things left back here as well, usually weeds, bags of dead plants and leaves, sticks and trimmings from gardens. It all made places for a small boy like Skif to hide. These alleys were faced by blank walls that rose well above Skif’s head, but not all of those walls were as impervious as they seemed.