Kate Elliott - Cold Magic

hopes and gossip. By the worn and exhausted faces flooding past us, I could see that no one had the strength to speak.

Just before the first wave reached us, I looked at Bee, and Bee looked at me. We needed no words to share what must have been obvious to both of us. It simply had not occurred to either of us that the mills would shut down for the night, because they relied on daylight for their workers to see. Then the wash hit us, men and women and children in faded and mended clothing, the women with their hair covered by scarves and faces pallid or ashen, depending on their complexion. So thin they were, faces pinched, hands trembling; one young woman was rubbing her right ear, and a man with stooped shoulders leaned heavily on a comrade, as though he were about to faint. A boy no older than Hanan passed, his gait made awkward by the evident pain caused him in his right leg, for he grimaced each time that limb pressed into the ground. A very small girl passed holding a bloody rag to the back of her head and crying, although not one soul paid the least attention to her.

Bee pushed forward against the tide, and with an elbow here and a shoulder there, we pressed through the crush toward the mill's doors, where a pair of foremen watched as the workers departed. In such a commotion, it was easy enough to be what I was not. I was not walking into the mill but rather was part of the outward flow; Bee was twisting her bracelet, as if anxious about a missed tryst, no one important. Hidden within the glamor of misdirection, we got inside the stairwell; very dim it was, with no windows and only one lamp burning midway between each floor. The clomping of many feet echoed in the stairwell as folk pushed down.

Shoved against the brick wall, we swam like birds against the current upward, for laborers from the upper floors were only now coming down. At the first landing, we slipped into a vast,

low room with big windows where the encroaching dusk gave us little enough light to see by. Brushes were hung from a rack on the wall. Spinning mules stood in their ranks, fiber pulled in long threads but now still. Bee knocked her knee against a wheel, and I jammed my toe when I kicked a runner lying so low along the floor I had not expected it. White flickers of lint drifted and warmth lingered. Dust tickled in our nostrils. A bloody knot of human hair lay on the floor.

"Did you see how young those children were?" whispered Bee.

Footsteps clumped behind us. We turned.

A night watchman with a lantern and a knotted whip walked in. "Here, now, off you go, girls! I've no time for your malingering! We're closing up!"

We hurried away down the long room to the opposite door, by now drowned in gloom, down the cold, silent stone steps, and again outdoors. Out back, connected to a one-storied annex, rose the engine house, where the engine still hissed and wheezed. A pair of watchmen stood by the door, talking and laughing. Bee grabbed my arm and tugged me with her as she marched to the door. As they looked up to see her, she bobbed her head and rubbed her hands as if nervous.

"Begging your pardon," she said in a soft, un-Bee-like voice, "but we're come up from the country for we were told we could get jobs here."

"What kind of job were you thinking?" asked the younger man.

The elder gave a frown. Bee burst into tears.

I said, "Oh, please, we're good girls. We were sent up to live with our cousin on Wellspring Terrace and take a job here, for there's no husbands for us at home. But she died, and her husband said a terrible thing to my sister, like he meant to…to mistreat her. We've just enough coin to make the trip home, but

nothing for a roof tonight, and it's so cold, and we're so frightened."

Bee bleated out another anguished sob.

"All we ask is one night. In a safe, warm place, like you'd hope for your own sisters and daughters."

"Probably that bastard Tom Carter," said the elder. "For his wife died three months back. Some say he shoved her down the stairs, and her pregnant! The baby died, too."

Bee wept noisily.

"All right, then," continued the elder with a sigh, "and don't you go being disrespectful," he added, with a stern nod at the younger man. To us, he said, "I'll tell them to let you lie on the floor just inside the door. But how much sleep you'll get I could not say, for it's a cursed din."

"Do they keep the furnace lit all night?" I asked, hoping he would say yes.

"Yes. It's easier that way than drawing it up each morning." He opened the door.

And, indeed, inside the stone walls of the engine house it was smoky and noisy and hot, but it was combustion, and if anything would hide us from the mansa, it was combustion.

We curled up against a wall, out of the way, in our coats. The workers in charge of the furnace ignored us. It was smoky, and noisy, and hot, but we slept.

A horn blast woke us before dawn. The hard planks had bruised my right shoulder, and my neck ached from lying crooked all night. My stomach felt hollow, and worst of all, the smoke and heat had parched my lips until they were flaking. The older watchman appeared as, from far off, a roll like thunder rose.

"Best you get moving, then," he said in a loud voice above the steadily increasing rumble. "May the gods watch over your travels."

Bee got quickly to her feet. "My thanks to you," she said with real gratitude, and she kissed him smartly on the lips, which made him flush and then smile. We hurried out into icy dawn, where the silence was shattered by the clatter of hundreds of workers surging along the streets, entering the factory doors, and clomping up the stairs in their wooden shoes.

We joined the stream, going up one floor to the long room with the spinning mules. I grabbed a pair of brushes from the bar, and Bee and I set to work brushing beneath the thread as more workers streamed into the spinning hall. They looked as weary in the gray pallor of morning as they had under dusk's gentle glow.

"Here! You two!" A man with a weathered face and a scar across his nose called us out. "Who are you?"

"Maester told us to start by brushing," said Bee. "Was it wrongly done, maester?"

"Out with you," he said. "You don't belong on my floor."

"But the maester told us-"

He raised a hand in which he carried a knotted whip. "Before I have cause to use this on you!"

We scuttled toward the door. Fortunately, he turned away as, with a hiss of steam, the gurgle of water, and a clunk, the workings began turning over. A low roaring bass and a high, bell-like ringing combined to create a humming clamor. Scarcely had we reached the door than we heard the pop of the lash and a child's shriek, but we dared not turn around. We paused on the landing, shivering, for it was cruelly cold, and we were stiff and hungry and our voices more like croaks from being so dry.

"Now what?" Bee asked. Even with a brick wall between us and the spinning hall, I could barely hear her.

"Let's go up! We must pray that the mills' voice and the combustion that powers the machines will conceal us from the mansa."

We climbed to the next floor and peeked in to another wide room of spinning mules. The clamor and constant movement; the men and women tending the machines; the children on a constant plodding track between threads needing to be pieced while others crept beneath the wheels, sweeping up lint and dripping grease with their hand brushes; the simple exhaustion of every soul there: all this protected us from scrutiny. No one had time to look our way, not until a foreman strolled down the center aisle with a whip in hand, his restless gaze raking the ragged children in case one might sag to grasp a breath of rest. The heat was beginning to rise, and a mist of pale fiber dust floated with it so with each breath I began to feel the urge to cough.