When it came to how the workers were treated, well, there just didn’t seem any reason why Master Cole couldn’t do exactly as he pleased with the workers in his mine. But from the moment Mags began talking, it was obvious that both Jakyr and this stranger were caught off guard by what he was telling them. Not only that, but they both were angry—though not at him. He caught sight of a vein throbbing in the strange man’s temple almost at once, and sensed thoughts full of outrage as Mags carefully detailed what life was like at Cole Pieters’ mine. That astonished Mags, astonished him so much that he actually forgot his own apprehension. That this stranger would actually care that the kiddies went cold, starved, and bare was the most amazing thing he had ever encountered in his entire life. It came near to making no sense at all. Because all he could think of was—why? Why should he care? What difference did it make to him? And wasn’t that how things were everywhere for the kiddies nobody wanted? If all those priests hadn’t been outraged, then why was this stranger?

When he had finished with telling about a typical day, with Jakyr questioning him minutely about the meals, and how one earned or lost those precious slices of bread, Jakyr took him back over a day again, this time in the dead of winter. He asked how they protected their feet from the snow, and how long they had to work at the icy water in the sluices, then what kind of bedding they had once the winter set in. As he questioned Mags ever more closely, Mags described how many of the kiddies would get chilblains and how they had to be careful not to lose fingers or toes to the cold, and he thought the stranger was going to burst. Except that anger was all on the inside. On the outside, he looked just as calm as calm, and never once faltered in his writing down of things. He could have been writing down what everyone here had for breakfast, for all that he showed. It was strange, listening to the silence in the room broken only by his voice and the steady scratching of a pen. Very strange, as it occurred to him that he probably had not spoken so much in an entire year.

Then Jakyr asked about the injuries to the mine workers. And the dangerous question, “How did people die?”