There were fifteen kiddies here at the mine now, and the three crippled adults. Ten of the oldest got mining duty, him and Davey and Burd and Tansy and Ket in the morning, five others in the afternoon. Of the five left over, one was the donkey-boy, and the other four were on the sluices all day. Those four looked particularly miserable this morning; they knew what to expect. They’d be getting chilblains before long, painful red-and-purple bumps on their hands caused by the cold water that could crack and even ulcerate. Of course, if they could get their hands warm, the chilblains would go away, but even taking their hands out of the water for a few moments to warm them in their armpits would mean they weren’t panning the gravel, and if they weren’t panning for sparklies and got caught, they’d get beaten.

Mags had never gotten chilblains, but he considered it luck more than anything. And even without chilblains, when he was working the sluice in winter, his hands hurt with the cold more than enough. The only time they didn’t have to work the sluices was when it was so cold the troughs froze right up, or when there was a blizzard so thick you couldn’t get to the sluices. And when that happened, it was so cold that there was no good place at all to be but the mine. That had only happened twice, and they had all bundled down there, and not even Master Cole had complained about it. Then again, Mags reckoned he didn’t much care for his workers freezing to death either.

The mine was definitely the better place to be, come winter. He felt the temperature difference as soon as he was ten feet down the main shaft and the lower he got, following the old cave that the mine had started as, the better he felt. By the time he reached his seam he was almost comfortable. He found the toolbag where it was supposed to be, at the end of the tunnel, which meant someone had been working his seam last night. Which meant that it might need a support . . .

He fetched a timber, but that left him able to only carry his chisel and hammer, He crawled in, found as he had expected that the roof needed shoring, and hammered his timber in place. Then he went to work.

The seam he was following continued to yield good sparklies today. Smaller ones, but more of them. Once he had uncovered them, he went back to his bag for a tool made out of a big nail in a handle, something he used to pry small sparklies with good color out of rock rather than chipping at them.

That was when he overheard Jarrik and one of his brothers talking about something in low, urgent voices.