Gaunt had been on shift past eight bells for three nights running, because the bell’s iron and the Charter’s sum had to be ready before Tamsin filled in her blank, and because nobody else in the Hold would work the bellows with lungs like his.
Pell knew it. She knew it the way she knew the state of the flour in the bin, by the feel of it under her hand. She had seen the smith come up from the Forge at the end of each long shift with his face grey and his hands black and his eyes gone small and bright, as a man’s eyes went when he had been awake too long to be proud of it. She had put bread into his hands, and he had taken it without a word, and she had said, eat that, you great ox, before the Forge eats you, and he had said, I object, through a mouthful of crust, and she had felt a tired warmth go through her, because at least he was still himself enough to object.
On the third night she went down the Kitchen stair with a basket of bread for the furnace-men.
It was late. The Kitchen was dark behind her, the ovens banked and ticking, the flour-bin shut. The stair ran from the Kitchen door down to the yard, twenty-two steps, with a rail on the left worn smooth by a century of hands, and the cold came up off the flags as…
