“All—” he began, and the children literally leaped from their seats and stampeded for the door before he could finish. “—right—” Skif heard faintly behind him as he scooped up Dolly and shoved his way with the rest through the open door with her held protectively in front of him.

Once outside, he broke away from the mob of children, bringing Dolly with him. The rest streamed in every direction, and Skif hadn’t a clue what made them all so anxious to get where they were heading to do so at a run. Maybe it was the prospect of finding a little warmth somewhere. Without a word, he wrapped his arm around Dolly’s thin shoulders and turned her in the direction of her home. Since a few days after her first appearance in the schoolroom, when he’d caught some of the older children teasing and tormenting her, he’d played her guardian. Her father brought her in the morning on the way to his work at the docks, but Skif was her escort home, where she would join the rest of the children in her family and her mother at their laundry. In winter, despite having to struggle with soaking, heavy fabric and harsh soap that irritated and chapped the skin, a laundry wasn’t a bad place to work, since you could always warm up in the room where the washing coppers were kept hot over their fires. Dolly never lingered once they arrived; she only cast Skif a shy smile of thanks and scampered inside the building, where a cloud of steam poured out into the street from the momentarily open door.

His self-appointed duty complete, Skif was now free for as long as he could keep out of the way of his relatives.

Kalchan would work him until he dropped, not serving customers, since that was Maisie’s job, but doing everything else but cooking—and “everything else” included some things that made Skif feel sick just to think about. On the other hand, out of sight was definitely out of mind with Kalchan, and so long as Skif didn’t claim meals, his eldest cousin probably thought he was in lessons during the daylight hours. Fortunately Beel had suffered enough under his older brother’s fist as a child that he didn’t go out of his way to enlighten Kalchan as to Skif’s whereabouts out of school.

That did leave him some options. Sometimes he could find someone with errands to run; sometimes he could shovel snow or sweep crossings for a pennybit. There was refuse to haul off for the rag-and-bone men if they came up short a man. But none of that was to be counted on as a source of food or money to buy it, and Skif had finally hit on something that was.

It took him far out of his own neighborhood, and into places where his ragged, coatless state was very conspicuous. That was the drawback; before he reached his goal, he might be turned back a dozen times by suspicious folk who didn’t like the look of him in their clean and prosperous streets.