Skif hopped out and shut the cubby doors behind him. Raf was bent over the fire under the wash cauldron, coaxing a flame from the banked coals. “Take yon tallow dip, take a light from here, an’ light them lamps,” he ordered, jerking his head at a tallow dip on the otherwise clean table behind him, barely visible in the dim and flickering light from the hand-sized fire. Skif picked it up, lit it at Raf’s little fire, and went around the walls to relight the lamps he vaguely recalled hanging there. There were a lot of oil lamps—four!—and all of them were cobbler’s lamps with globes of water-filled glass around the flame to magnify the light, the most expensive kind of oil lamp there was. Skif was impressed; he hadn’t paid any attention before, other than to note absently that although this room didn’t have any windows there was plenty of illumination. It was interesting; Bazie didn’t spend money on luxuries, but in places where it counted—the good soap for the laundry, for instance, and the lighting, and decent fuel for the fireplace under the wash boiler—Bazie got the best.

When he was done, he blew out the tallow dip and put it with the others in a broken cup above the firebox. By this time the shutters of another cubby, one just above Skif’s, had been pushed open by a foot, and Deek’s tousled head poked out.

“Eh, Bazie?” he called, yawning. “Yon ge’op? Me’n Raf’r op. Young’un Skif, too.”

“Aye,” came a muffled reply, and the shutter to a third eased open. This one was larger—taller, rather—and Bazie was sitting up inside, peering out at them, the stumps of his legs hidden under his blanket. Satisfied that the fire was well started, Raf got up, and Deek swung himself out and down onto the floor. The two of them went to Bazie’s cubby and linked hands. Bazie put an arm around each of their shoulders and swung himself onto the “chair” made by their hands.

They carried him to a door beside the one that led outside—one that Skif hadn’t noticed before. Bazie let go of Raf’s shoulder, which freed one of his hands, and opened it, and they carried him inside. There was evidently another room there that Skif had no notion existed.