Sella kept her left arm threaded through the shield straps, letting the iron-rimmed timber hang close against her hip as they walked past the rusted boiler of the old pumping shed.
The ground here smelled of coal slack, soaked pine needles, and stale bilge water. For ten years Sella had surveyed border holdings for the Crown, and she knew the look of a closed mine. When the Crown shut a shaft for good, the iron cage was dropped to the bottom, the cables were greased and coiled under oilcloth, and the headframe timbers were left to weather to that pale, dry silver that warned trespassers of rotted sills.
This headframe was not silver.
The massive larch uprights were slick with fresh black pitch. In the brazier pan set beside the hoist lever, red embers glowed under a layer of grey wood ash, venting a thin, sweet curl of birch smoke that drift-drifted across the road. The heavy padlock on the shaft gate was not the rusted Crown iron of the Hill War; it was a square brass tumbler lock, bright as a newly minted four-penny bit, with oil still glistening around the keyhole.
Beside her, Garr and Pell walked with their heads down, their shoulders hunched under threadbare canvas coats. Garr was fifty, with the crooked, thickened fingers of a man who had handled stone chocks for thirty winters. Pell was younger, thirty-five perhaps, his face permanently marked by the blue coal tattoos where flying rock had peppered his cheeks…
