Kirah awoke at first light with an inexplicable sense of well- being she had not felt in a long time. She bounded from her feather tick, feet dancing over the cold floor, seeking her worn boots. Jamming her feet into the things, more mud than good leather now, she stoked the fire with just one small piece of wood to keep the cinders burning while she toiled in the bakery below.
Kirah had secretly done work for the baker's wife for some time. Glammis hadn't been thrilled with the idea of Cormac DiThon's crazy sister working for him, let alone living in the room above his bakery. But his wife, Deeander, had taken pity on Kirah and offered her room and board in exchange for sweeping floors, changing the rushes occasionally, and the odd bit of sewing and mending.
Kirah wasn't happy Glammis had died from the plague, for the baker had been a kindly man, despite his prejudices- still, she was happy that his passing had given her the opportunity for work that was more to her liking than the tedium of ordinary household chores. Today she would bake bread, until the flour ran out, that is.
Kirah shrugged on her dirt-stiffened clothing-old hose and the thin shift Deeander had given her-then gnawed off a small piece of hardtack and gulped some soured milk before skipping down the stairs to the bakery.
She bypassed the open front door and took the alleyway to avoid the patrons. Two meager, half-filled sacks of ground spelt flour were propped against the back door, left by Wilton Sivesten, the miller's son. Normally, the bakery would receive five times that amount each day, but the mill had slowed its production considerably since the death of the miller. Frankly, there were far fewer people in the village to buy the bakery's products, anyway.
Kirah asked herself why she should be feeling so light of heart when things in Thonvil seemed their grimmest. She didn't have to look far for the answer. Lyim. He had miraculously arrived in her life for the second time, bringing hope.
Once Kirah had had an endless amount of hope. Hope and two loyal brothers. But first Quinn left, then Guerrand, taking with him the last of her hope. All she'd had left was belief in herself. Even that had proved insufficient in Gwynned.
As usual, Kirah turned her mind away from that unspeakable time. There was something pleasant to ponder now. Lyim cared enough about her to travel far with the cure. She still had difficulty believing Guerrand had caused this plague, but where was he, if he was so innocent?
Kirah stepped into the stone-block baking room and looped a broad, white apron nearly twice about her narrow waist. She didn't wait for Deeander to tell her the day's tasks-they seldom varied. Besides, the baker's widow was undoubtedly busy in the front room, selling the last of yesterday's yield.
First, Kirah stoked the two brick ovens, raking out the ashes to prepare the hot floor for the loaves she would prepare next. When she was satisfied with the level of heat, Kirah went to the long marble baking table and carefully lowered the cloth-covered bowl of fermented bread starter from a high shelf. She tossed a wooden scoopful of the goopy, sour-smelling stuff into an enormous mixing bowl. To that she added coarse, brown spelt from one of the new sacks (there was no one who could afford fine white loaves, even if they could get the flour), a pinch of sea salt, and a large ladleful of warm well water from the cauldron that always hung above the fire pit. Kirah mixed it around with her bare hands, squeezing the concoction between her fingers.
Next came her favorite part. Sprinkling the marble table with a frugal amount of flour, she flung the stringy mixture onto it, pushed her sleeves past her elbows, then began to furiously knead the dough. It was the color of coarse, undyed cotton, with dark flecks of brown. Kirah counted to three hundred while she pushed and prodded the stuff around the table. When she was at last satisfied with the soft feel of it, Kirah chopped the dough into thirds with a sharp knife. Fashioning each into a perfectly round ball, she placed them one, two, three on the flat shovel end of a long, wooden peel and gently lowered them upon the hot oven floor. With a quick tug, she yanked the peel from under the bread and withdrew it from the heat before the wood could char.
Brushing the leftover flour from her hands, Kirah surveyed her work with satisfaction. Three loaves in the oven in no time at all. A wisp of hair fell across her face, and she looked at it cross-eyed before trying to blow it back. The strands stuck upon her sweaty forehead. Funny, she thought, scraping them away with the back of her hand, I don't feel hot enough to sweat. If anything, she felt a little chilly, despite her strenuous efforts at the kneading table. Must be the heat of the ovens, she decided.
Kirah was preparing to mix a batch of pie crust when Deeander pushed back the curtain to the front room.
The stout woman's face was pale with strain as she looked upon the loaves in the brick oven. "I would have stopped you had I heard you come in." She shook her head sadly. "Every day there are fewer and fewer to come and buy bread. I have yet to sell yesterday's loaves."
"People still have to eat," Kirah said.
"What people?" barked the baker's wife, her patience suddenly snapping like a lute string. "Have you looked outside today? Have you seen the bodies of stone stacked head to toe upon the green because they can't dig graves fast enough to bury the dead anymore?" Bright spots of angry red mottled her fleshy face. "Why do we make bread to sustain people who will only die horrible deaths within the week?"
"With that line of reasoning," said Kirah, "you could ask why ever feed someone? They will only die in forty or fifty years anyway." Her expression turned serious. "Because to not feed people is to ensure their deaths, that's why."
The baker woman's bosom heaved, and she wearily lowered herself into a flour-flecked chair. "It's just that I've given up hope. I see no reason nor end for this disease. Sometimes I wish it would just take me and end
Cb" CDedusA plague the waiting!"
"Don't ever say that!" Kirah gasped, looking over her shoulder to see if the woman's young son had heard her, but there was no sign of him. "You have Dilb to think about."
"It's about him that I worry endlessly," the woman confessed. "How can I keep the plague from him, when I don't know how to keep it from myself?"
Kirah massaged the woman's thick shoulder, hoping to impart strength. She wished that she could give the woman the hope she herself felt, but the town had never been trusting of mages. She would just have to wait until Lyim returned with enough antidote for everyone, then hope the townspeople would follow her example and take the cure.
"Make no more bread, and take the rest of the day off," Deeander instructed her, pushing herself up to return to the front room in hopes that someone would come to buy bread. "I'll watch the loaves you've made."
Kirah cleared the marble pastry table. Removing her apron, she hung it on a hook and wondered what she would do to fill her day. She wished Lyim would return soon, for reasons that had nothing to do with cures. He'd left two days ago to get enough antidote for the rest of the village. She missed him more than she was comfortable admitting, torn between an expectation too strong and fear of disappointment. Suddenly she could not sit still-not for a moment-leaving her in an itching agony.
She would stop by the inn. Surely Lyim would stay there when he returned with the cure. Kirah polished the bottom of a pie pan with a coarse sleeve and checked her reflection. Her face was sweaty and her hair lank. With clumsy, untrained hands, she braided the pale blond strands into one long plait that rested on her
right shoulder.
Pulling on a loose, scratchy woolen cape, Kirah stepped out into the narrow, filthy alley and shivered. She hadn't remembered the air feeling so cold. Thankfully, the Red Goose Inn was only two thatched buildings and a vegetable patch down the street, across from the green. She would warm herself by the fire there before checking with the innkeeper. Kirah rounded the corner and emerged into the sunlight.
She had kept to her room and the bakery since Lyim left and was amazed at the change a few days made in the village. Never prosperous, it looked nearly deserted now. The taint of decay was everywhere, including the shabby, boarded-up shop fronts. The breeze carried the scent of burning flesh; she'd heard people were now cremating the husks of skin that victims shed on the second day of the disease, in hopes of stopping its spread. The greatest shock came from the sight of bodies piled upon the green, as Deeander had said, waiting for burial.
Without realizing it, Kirah had slowed her pace until she was barely moving. The horror of the stacked bodies was riveting. Human torsos and faces frozen in terror and pain intermixed with a mass of snakes that still seemed to writhe, in spite of being stone. She did not iook closely enough at the faces to recognize anyone, but it was clear that many of the dead were children ar.d infants. Snake bodies lay on the grass, broken off from limbs by careless or hurried handling. It was a scene from a nightmare, a chamel pit of snakes squirm- ire over and between the corpses of the tormented dead.
Kirah yanked her gaze away from the horrid stack ar.d covered her eyes. She had become suddenly lightheaded and waited several seconds for the dizziness to pass Her gaze went wide to the right, over a fallow tbe
vegetable patch arid to the fields that surrounded Thonvil. Unharvested corn stood exposed in sodden patches, where the previous winter's steady north wind had bent the old stalks until they trailed the ground like willow branches. Kirah spied a shape trudging through the distant fields, bent almost double beneath a load. She couldn't see whether it was man, woman, or child, but she didn't hail the person, for it was enough to know there was at least one other person in the world who had not yet stopped his life for the plague.
Kirah hastened up the steps to the inn. The smell of decay seemed to vanish here, replaced by the scent of damp ashes. The hearth had just been cleaned. So much for warming myself before the fire, Kirah sighed inwardly.
No one was inside the large taproom. Kirah waited for the innkeeper at the tall counter, where the dark, pitted wood of the bar met the back wall. Feeling a little queasy of a sudden, she lowered herself upon a stool. The muscles of her shoulders, neck, and lower back had begun to ache. It was probably a good thing that Deeander had given her the day off, she decided. She'd obviously been overdoing it at the bakery.
Growing impatient, Kirah rapped her knuckles upon the hard wooden bar. Cold, despite the perspiration between her shoulder blades, Kirah shivered her thin cape closer, as if a bird rearranging its feathers.
"Hallooo?" she called toward the kitchen door when her knuckles were sore from banging.
At length a thin, shiny-pated man in his middle years pushed through the swinging door, wiping his hands on a filthy apron, a look of suspicious surprise on his face. His inn had not seen the likes of Kirah DiThon before, either as lord's daughter or crazy woman. Llewen knew her only by reputation.
"If you're here to break fast or for noon lunch, I'm afraid all we have is a few of yesterday's greasy turnips," Llewen confessed. "There's no meat to be found in the town."
"I'm not here to eat," said Kirah. "I'm looking for someone who probably stayed here recently and is expected to return any day. He's tall, with long, dark, wavy hair. He was wearing a dark brown robe."
The innkeeper raised his eyebrows at the word "he." Everyone in town believed the story of crazy Kirah waiting for the return of a lover who didn't exist. "What's his name?" Llewen asked.
Kirah saw the disapproving curiosity in the man's watery eyes. "Either you've seen the man I've described or you haven't. Which is it?"
"Haven't," he said, shaking his head. "Nobody's come to Thonvil or stayed at the inn since word of the sickness spread."
"But that's not possi-" Kirah began, then stopped. Lyim was a mage; perhaps he had magiced himself up a place to stay. "Thank you," she said weakly, turning to leave. She felt hot and limp. "Have you a cup of water, please? I'm not feeling quite right."
The man looked at her in alarm and stepped back from the bar warily.
She saw his fear through bleary eyes. "Don't worry, it's not the plague," she muttered, though the world began to spin crazily. "I can't be getting the plague, you see…" Kirah didn't finish the sentence, because she had slouched, unconscious, to the floor.