Every child in this neighborhood was running eagerly to their various teachers for the same reason that Skif did; free and edible breakfast. This was an innovation of Queen Selenay's, who had decided, based on her own observation, that a hungry child doesn't learn as well as one with food in his belly. So every child in Haven taking lessons who arrived on time was supplied with a bacon roll and a mug of tea in winter, or a buttered roll and a piece of fruit in summer. Both came from royal distribution wagons that delivered the supplies every morning, so there was no use in trying to cheat the children by scrimping. But if a child was late, he was quite likely to discover that his attendance had been given up for the day and someone else had eaten his breakfast, so there was ample incentive to show up on time, if not early, for those lessons, however difficult or boring a child might find them.
Skif had no intention of missing out on his share. His stomach growled as he ran, and he licked his lips in anticipation.
Unless luck went his way, this might be the only really edible food he'd get for the rest of the day — and there was no doubt in his mind that the rest of the children in his group were in the same straits.
The narrow, twisting streets he followed were scarcely wide enough for a donkey cart. The tenement houses, three stories tall including the attics, leaned toward the street as if about to fall into it. There was not enough traffic to have worn away the packed, dirty snow heaped up against the walls of the houses on either side, and no incentive for the inhabitants to scrape it away, so there it would remain, accumulating over the course of the winter until it finally thawed and soaked into the dirt of the street, turning it to mud.
But that would not be for several moons yet. There was all of the winter to get through first. At least the cold kept down the smell — from backyard privies, chicken coops, pigeon houses, pig sties. The poor tried to eke out their meager foodstuffs any way they could. Pigeons were by far the most popular, since they could fly away by day to more prosperous parts of town and feed themselves at someone else's expense. There were clouds of them on every available perch, sitting as close together as possible for warmth, and whitening the broken slates and shingles of the rooftops with their droppings. Of course, with all the snow up there, the droppings were invisible in winter.
Skif was finally warm now, his breath puffing out whitely as he ran. He had no coat, of course, but no child in his neighborhood had a coat. There were three ways to get warm in the winter — work until you were warm, do something that kept you near enough to the fire that you weren't freezing, or — be as creative about finding warmth as Skif was.
After six turnings, he was in a slightly more respectable neighborhood. The streets were marginally wider, a halfhearted attempt to remove the snow had been made, and there were a few dark little shops on the first floors of the tenement houses. More chimneys sported thin streams of smoke, and at the end of this final street, just before it joined one of the main thoroughfares, was the Temple of Belden. It wasn't a large Temple as such things went; it had only four priests and a half-dozen novices. But the Order of Belden was a charitable order, which was just as well, since there wasn't much scope for anything but charity down here.
As such, one of the charitable acts performed here was to educate the poor children of the area. But Skif wasn't here because he had chosen the place, or even because Uncle Londer had picked it from a number of options. He was here because his second cousin, the middle son of his uncle's brood of three, was a novice here.
Cousin Beel had as little choice about his vocation as Skif did; Uncle Londer wished to impress his social superiors with his sense of charity, and so Beel became a novice. Beel seemed to like the life, though — or, he liked it as much as this curiously colorless young man could like anything. Beel was as forgettable as Kalchan was remarkable.
Skif pushed open a little side door in the chapter house next to the Temple. The door opened directly into a public room with several tables and benches in it; there were thirty or forty other children that took lessons there, and about half of them were already sitting on the benches, waiting for their meal. Skif slid in beside one of the smaller girls, a tiny big-eyed thing called Dolly. She smiled up at him in welcome; he was her protector and kept her from being harassed by any of the more aggressive children who would try to bully her outside of classes for anything that they thought they could get from her.
He took her cold little hands in his and held them until they warmed while they waited for the last of the children to straggle in. Skif heard her stomach growl while they waited; his answered hers, and she gave a little giggle.
Finally a small bell rang somewhere in the Temple marking the end of the First Service, and a door at the back of the room opened. Beel and one other novice entered, carrying baskets. The delicious aroma of bacon wafted gently to where Skif sat, trying not to fidget; every eye in the room was riveted on those baskets as Beel and the other novice left and returned with steaming pots of tea and thick clay mugs.
It seemed an eternity before the last of the paraphernalia of breakfast finally was brought in and arranged to Beel's liking. Only then were the children permitted to come up to him, one at a time, and receive their rolls and mugs. By then, of course, the rolls were stone cold and the tea at best lukewarm.
It didn't matter. So long as the rolls weren't frozen hard as stones, so long as the tea wasn't a block of ice, there wasn't a child here that wouldn't devour every crumb and drink down every drop. Some of them began eating and drinking while they walked back to their places, but not Skif, and not Dolly either, for she followed his example. It wasn't for the sake of manners; Skif didn't have any, no more than any of the others. It was because he had figured out that if he ate over the table, he could catch every crumb, and he did. When they were done, he and Dolly licked their fingers and picked up the tiniest fragments from the wood.
Lukewarm as the tea was, it was still warmer than the room. The mug served double duty as a hand warmer until the tea was gone. They weren't allowed to linger over it, though, not with two novices standing over
