My heart pounded as I looked behind me. I hardly knew what to think—it was extremely rare that I encountered anyone, and rarer still when I saw anyone while I was on my more secret adventures. The cabin my family and I lived in was far enough away from the village that we rarely had any visitors. Not that the distance was the only thing that kept people away.

I heard the footsteps again, this time with the murmur of voices, and I darted quickly into a copse of bare trees and crouched, hiding behind some of the scrubby bushes. As the footsteps drew near, my imagination went wild, imagining a band of roving bandits might be coming up the path. Maybe it was a handsome prince. Or maybe even a wolf.

Dangerous, yes, but that made the thought twice as exciting.

The footsteps got louder, and a moment later, the voices came more clearly. I crouched even lower. Not for the first time, I wished I could be as stealthy as Tamsen. He had this way of virtually disappearing into the landscape. He was so good at it, he was once able to reach out a touch one of the rangy deer that roamed our mountain in the springtime.

I didn’t know how he did it, though I’d certainly tried to master the trick myself. But I’d never quite been able to pull it off.

I held my breath as the group approached. As they got closer, I saw that they weren’t actually a roving band of bandits—or wolves. It was a knot of five village children, walking along the river path.

I was surprised to see them and—not knowing what else to do—I leaned in, trying to listen to their conversation as they passed. We had so little contact with the people of the village, so I was always interested in what their lives were like.

But what were they even doing here? I rarely came down this pathway because it was secluded and dangerous, but at least it was relatively close to my cabin and the pathways I walked to forage for the occasional nut or berry. But the village of Carin was several hard miles away, and it was extremely rare for any of the villagers to venture so far.

Unless they’d been working in the mines. The villagers had mined the mountain for ore for generations. Production was more limited now, but there were still workers in the old caves.

But this was a group of children. It wasn’t possible that they had been at work—was it?

As the group passed in front of me, I was as close to them as I had ever been, and I could see their tanned faces, dusty and strangely weathered for children. They couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, but they looked older. Maybe it was the stooped way they carried themselves. Their clothes were tattered and worn, just as dirty as their cave dusted faces. Everything about the children seemed a brownish color, and that’s when I knew they had been in the mines. The reddish-brown dirt was everywhere on the mountain and was especially difficult to escape in the old mining caves.

If I had any further doubt, one of the small children—a boy with hair that might be yellow but was now covered in the brownish dust—hefted a shovel and threw it over his shoulder.

I was shocked to see the shovel was almost as big as he was. That didn’t seem right. Why were children so young pressed into work? Surely there had to be some older children or men who could work in the mines.

But I remembered my father once said they preferred younger children to work in the ore mines. The passageways could be small, and it was easier for children, who didn’t need as much room. I also remembered that most of the men of Carin farmed the land, trying to eke out a living of any hearty vegetables they could grow in Carin’s poor soil.

Looking at the small children, I sighed, but when I shifted, my foot broke a brittle branch. The cracking sound was deafeningly loud to my ears.

The village children must have heard it too because they stopped suddenly and glanced around, looking to see who was there.

Heart fluttering, I sank even further back into the bushes, wishing harder than ever I could disappear from view. I held my breath, hoping that would help.

One of the children stepped forward. He was the shortest of the bunch, and he had dark hair and black eyes. He narrowed them as he looked around. “Who’s there?”