The pine trestle table in the center of the Grand Hall was crowded with an unholy mixture of archival slates, dry bread crusts, an uncoiled spool of tallow-soaked fuse, and three lumpish sticks of willow charcoal.
Beside the central candle, Renn leaned his weight heavily against the bench, his ash crutch propped between his knees like an extra spar of timber. With his left trouser cuff rolled up to the knee, the pale, milky crystal of his injured lower leg caught the flickering yellow light, translucent and cold as pond ice beneath the skin. Every time the wind rattled the entry curtain, the miner’s jaw set hard, his gaze darting toward the floor as though he expected the flagstones to drop away into the three-hundred-foot dark of the lower mine drift.
“I swore when Fen pulled me out of the rubble five months ago that I’d never smell the damp in that pit again,” Renn said. His voice was thick with the grit of old coal-dust, rasping in the back of his throat. “I have bad dreams every Thursday night about the lift cables screaming over the pulleys. I wake up with my fingers clawing the bolster because I think the air has gone black.”
