The rain had turned into a cold, clinging sleet by midnight. Along the narrow alley between Widow Mira Os’s tenement row and the blank limestone flank of the Ferry Museum, the cobbles were slick with grease and wet coal slurry.
Pella Rook stood at the corner of the coal yard with her wool muffler pulled tight across her mouth. Her breath rose in white, ragged puffs against the yellow animal fat glow of a horn lantern held by Mira Os herself. The widow wore a man’s heavy frieze coat pinned at her throat with a brass wire skewer, her feet wedged into wooden pattens that lifted her skirts four inches above the icy mud.
“The chute hasn’t been unbolted since the year of the frost,” Mira whispered, her voice like dry husks rubbing in a grain sack. She fitted a heavy wrought-iron crank into the bronze lock-metal tube beside the basement curb. “My brother stored three chaldrons of sea-coal down there before the water came up. If you break my iron latch, Eren Tal, you replace it with forged charcoal iron, not academy scrap.”
“You have my word on the iron, Mira,” Eren replied from the shadow of his heavy cart.
