Mags carefully positioned his chisel and tapped at a likely spot in the seam with his hammer. It was a good broad seam, this one, as wide as the tunnel was tall, which meant there was no problem with spending most of his time hammering out waste rock and getting shouted at for not bringing up any sparklies today. In fact, he had three good ones so far, the yellow ones. They were all in the pouch around his neck that he’d bring out at the end of his shift. Master Cole liked the yellow ones. He liked the green ones even better, but his sons usually worked seams that had the green ones in them. He didn’t trust the orphans on those seams, though what he thought the orphans would do with a big green sparkly, Mags couldn’t imagine. Where would they go with it? Who’d buy a gemstone from a scrawny, raggedy brat? And that assumed they could somehow get off the property in the first place.

This mine produced a lot of different sparklies. Yellow, a pale green that wasn’t as good as the dark green ones, dark red, purple ones of all sorts of shades, a paler yellow than the ones Mags had in this seam, a pale blue, and a clear with silver threads running through it. More of that last than anything else, and it was what the youngest mined. When you had more experience, you moved up to the pale yellow and dark red. Then the pale green and the purple. Then the dark yellow and the pale blue. Those took a good eye and a good hand.

Mags’ tapping released a chunk of rock. There was nothing in it that he could see, but it wasn’t waste—it would go up to the hammer-mill and the sluices. He shoved it behind him for the collector, the youngest kid of all, who would pull out all the rocks from the tunnels and throw them in the donkey cart.

He set his chisel into a good spot and began tapping again. One more sparkly and he’d get a second slice of barley bread with his broth. Oh, that would be good.

There were two sounds in the mine where he was, the tapping and the steady drip of water. Closer to the mouth, you could hear the bellows that drove fresh air down here, and the creaking of the pumps that pulled water out. Not that they’d drown if the pumps failed, but Master Cole had learned that working in water rusted the tools and meant sparklies were lost. So no working in water.

The rock fractured suddenly and dropped off the face, and there, catching the light was another yellow sparkly as big as Mags’ thumb. Extra bread for sure!

But first he had to get it out without breaking it.