The children came up onto the roofs before Hearth rose.
They came because of the noise. The yard crew had been working since the meeting ended, through the small hours, by work lamps: the scrape of shovels, the rumble of a handcart over the frozen ground, Gell’s voice calling measurements, the clang of a sledgehammer driving stakes. The noise carried across the Low Brace’s flat roofs, and one by one, in the blocks around the yard, windows opened and faces looked out, and then the children came up through the roof hatches in their coats and blankets and crowded along the roof edges to see.
Mara saw them when she looked up from the stakes. A dozen on the dormitory block. More on the tenement across the lane. A cluster on the bakery’s roof, sitting with their legs over the gutter.
One boy on the dormitory block was leaning out over the edge, too far, his hands on the parapet and his whole upper body out in the air, trying to see down into the yard.
Then a hand closed on his collar from behind and pulled him back.
Pell. He had gone up to the dormitory roof a few minutes before, with a slate under his arm. He held the boy’s collar firmly until the boy was sitting on the roof with his back against the parapet, and said something to him that Mara could not hear. The boy nodded quickly.
