The corner behind the pyramid of empty flour barrels was dark, cold, and smelled of sour yeast and mice.
Heth Ash sat on an overturned keg of three-inch wire nails. Her knees pulled was tight against her ribs, her hands clasped around her shins to hold herself together. Her boots, thin-soled and cracked across the instep from two winters of walking the melted rock waste paths of the Salt Ward, barely touched the rough floorboards. Every breath she drew dragged through her throat like a mouthful of dry crushed slate. Her lungs, scarred by four winters of skin-burning bitter salt dust and sulfur fumes from the salt-glass lehrs, seized with a dry, wooden burst that doubled her forward, her forehead bumping hard against the rough stave of a cedar barrel.
She bit down into the thick wool of her scarf. She clamped the weave between her back teeth so the sound of her coughing wouldn’t carry across the partition into the main warehouse. She couldn’t afford to cough aloud. In the freight shed, sixty refugees from Platform One were huddled on piles of damp rough rope sacks and straw dunnage. It listened with scared intensity to every noise that echoed through the building. If they heard the court guard’s daughter choking on her own blood, the fragile discipline that kept them quiet in the dark would shatter into panic.
