Skif had no intention of missing out on his share. His stomach growled as he ran, and he licked his lips in anticipation.

Unless luck went his way, this might be the only really edible food he’d get for the rest of the day—and there was no doubt in his mind that the rest of the children in his group were in the same straits.

The narrow, twisting streets he followed were scarcely wide enough for a donkey cart. The tenement houses, three stories tall including the attics, leaned toward the street as if about to fall into it. There was not enough traffic to have worn away the packed, dirty snow heaped up against the walls of the houses on either side, and no incentive for the inhabitants to scrape it away, so there it would remain, accumulating over the course of the winter until it finally thawed and soaked into the dirt of the street, turning it to mud.

But that would not be for several moons yet. There was all of the winter to get through first. At least the cold kept down the smell—from backyard privies, chicken coops, pigeon houses, pig sties. The poor tried to eke out their meager foodstuffs any way they could. Pigeons were by far the most popular, since they could fly away by day to more prosperous parts of town and feed themselves at someone else’s expense. There were clouds of them on every available perch, sitting as close together as possible for warmth, and whitening the broken slates and shingles of the rooftops with their droppings. Of course, with all the snow up there, the droppings were invisible in winter.

Skif was finally warm now, his breath puffing out whitely as he ran. He had no coat, of course, but no child in his neighborhood had a coat. There were three ways to get warm in the winter—work until you were warm, do something that kept you near enough to the fire that you weren’t freezing, or—be as creative about finding warmth as Skif was.

After six turnings, he was in a slightly more respectable neighborhood. The streets were marginally wider, a halfhearted attempt to remove the snow had been made, and there were a few dark little shops on the first floors of the tenement houses. More chimneys sported thin streams of smoke, and at the end of this final street, just before it joined one of the main thoroughfares, was the Temple of Belden. It wasn’t a large temple as such things went; it had only four priests and a half-dozen novices. But the Order of Belden was a charitable Order, which was just as well, since there wasn’t much scope for anything but charity down here.

As such, one of the charitable acts performed here was to educate the poor children of the area. But Skif wasn’t here because he had chosen the place, or even because Uncle Londer had picked it from a number of options. He was here because his second cousin, the middle son of his uncle’s brood of three, was a novice here.