Before first light, the Low Brace came out onto its roofs.
Mara had not expected it. She had expected the guild hall to be full, perhaps, of people who had read Pell’s notice; she had not expected the district. But when she came out of her room above the office in the cold dark, an hour before the shrine’s table said Hearth would rise, the yard was already full of people, though none of them stood in it. They were above it, on the roofs.
On the office roof, and the kitchen roof, and the bunk room’s roof. On the roofs of the houses along the lane, and the shed roofs, and the flat tarred roofs of the dye works across the way. People sat on crates and folded blankets and upturned buckets, in coats and hats and scarves, in the dark, facing east toward the cooling towers. Some had brought tea in tins, wrapped in rags to keep it warm, and were passing it along the rooflines. A grandmother on the dye works’ roof had a small brazier going, against all the rules, and people were holding their hands out to it. Children were everywhere: on the roofs, on the stairs between them, on the iron ladder up the old water tower behind the yard, until someone’s mother shouted at them and they came down, slowly, protesting.
