“In Valbeck you helped me make money. Now… I want you to help me give it away.”

They had reached the back of the queue. Dozens of lumpen figures crowded along one side of the street, bound up into shapeless bundles of torn clothes, blankets, rags. They stamped at the snow to keep warm, hugged themselves, hugged each other. Further on, someone sawed at a violin while a woman danced. Danced well. Children pelted each other with snowballs. Caught bystanders. There was laughter. Clapping. A cheerful feeling all too rare in the city now.

“What are they queueing for?”

Savine sighed. She still was faintly embarrassed to utter the words. “My charity, Citizen Vallimir.” She gestured towards a tin chimney peering over the roofline, dark smoke billowing up as the pale specks swirled down. “I own six bakeries now in the borough and have agents scouring Midderland for flour. Soup is made from whatever we can find. Thread is brought from Valbeck and the blankets woven just up the street. Coal comes in from my mines in Angland through an agreement with Lady Governor Finree. I was using the canal I own with Dietam Kort to move goods, until it froze.”

Everything in the city had frozen. The water in the fountains. The river around the boats. Festoons of ice hung from broken gutters. In some of the cheaper taverns, she understood, the wine was known to freeze in the cups.

“When I first tried to give bread away it turned into a riot. One of the wagons was upended. People wrestled in the mud for crumbs. People who got away with what I had given them were robbed in the next street. I observed the whole sorry business pressed into a doorway while my companion’s brothers shielded me with their bodies.”

“It is not like you to show too much faith in people’s good nature.”

Who knew generosity could be more dangerous than greed? “A mistake I will not make again. Ever since then I have been applying the same rigour to giving my money away as I did to making it.” They crunched through the boot-mashed snow to the front of the queue, where it passed through the iron gates into the warehouse. “Real estate in these parts has plummeted. I bought this place for a price you would not believe.” She had bought half the decaying buildings in the neighbourhood, in fact, and slashed the rents. “I saw the roof mended and invested in guards and gates. I hired locals to drive wagons, handle goods, stoke ovens, knead dough. I distributed some carefully judged bribes among the local Burners, secured some help from an old contact in the criminal fraternity and made sure she kept order on the streets.”

She waved towards one of the braziers, a matching pair of Majir’s frowning thugs in attendance. “The people queue, hopefully without freezing. They receive a bag of coal, two loaves of bread, a blanket. There might be meat or milk for children, on a good day. Names and addresses are taken, marks and signatures given to discourage fraud. But sometimes examples have to be made even so.”