The Witch of Tallow Row

The Ashwardens saved Maud's life. Teo would remember that later, with a strange, sour feeling in his stomach.

They arrived at a run, six of them, with Captain Dane at their head, and they waded into the crowd with the flats of their swords and the weight of their grey coats and the dreadful, faceless iron of their masks. The crowd broke the way crowds always broke. In a few moments, the old woman was lying in the snow in a circle of Ashwardens, and the people of the Sump were standing back, panting, their faces sullen.

"She's a witch!" someone shouted. "She cursed us! She made the fire!"

Captain Dane looked down at the old woman for a long moment. His face, under the mask pushed up onto his forehead, was unreadable.

"Then the Chantry will judge her," he said flatly. "Not you."

His men lifted Maud by the arms and carried her away up Tallow Row, toward the switchback road and the Shelf. She had stopped screaming. Her head hung down. Her bare feet left two long, faint tracks in the snow.

The crowd did not disperse. It followed them, at a distance, muttering.

Teo stood by his cart and watched them go.

'Of course,' he thought. 'Of course it's the old woman with the cats.'

The Chantry's tribunal sat the next morning, in the Hall of Judgement on the Shelf. It took less than an hour. Mira was there... she was a daughter of the Shelf, and an acolyte, and no one thought twice about letting her into the gallery... and she came down to the cellar that night white-faced and shaking, and told them all of it.

There had been twelve witnesses. The burned woman from the Mercy House, who said the witch had touched her arm in the market. The dancer who had seen her face in the snow. The family who had bought her poultice. A man who swore he had seen her talking to a black cat on the night of the first snow, and that the cat had talked back. A woman whose milk had dried up after Maud looked at her. A dozen more, each worse than the last.

Maud had not denied any of it. She had sat in the dock, shaking, and stared at the floor, and when they asked her questions, she had only whispered that she was sorry, she was sorry, she only sold herbs, she was sorry.

The tribunal had found her guilty of witchcraft and of bringing Saint Ardo's Fire upon the Sump. She was to be burned in the Burning Square on the Shelf, before the whole city, at noon on Firstday.

Six days.

Mira sat on a crate, her hands clenched together in her lap so tightly that the knuckles had gone white.

"She didn't do it," she said. Her voice was very quiet. "I know she didn't. You can't make a person's fingers turn black by touching her arm in the market. You can't curse a city by talking to a cat. It's... it's stupid. It's stupid and wicked and they're going to burn her for it, and the whole Shelf is going to come and watch."

Hesk said nothing. He sat in his chair with his hands folded.

Teo was standing in front of the two maps on the wall, the old one and the new one, staring at them.

"Then we prove it," he said.

Mira looked up at him.

"How?"

Teo was silent for a while.

He did not know. That was the truth. He did not know what Saint Ardo's Fire was, or where it came from, or why it struck whole households and passed over the house next door. He had six days to find out something he had failed to find out in three weeks.

But he knew the Three Questions. And he knew, at least, how to start.

"What would be true if she were a witch?" he said slowly. "If Maud really made the fire. If she cursed people. What would be true?"

Mira frowned.

"...The people who got sick would be people she'd cursed. People she'd touched, or looked at, or sold things to."

"Right. So." Teo turned to the second map. "How many of the sick ever met her?"

They worked through the night. Mira knew most of the Mercy House cases by name now. Teo knew the streets. Nell, who had been sent to bed and had not gone, sat on the stairs with her chin on her knees and remembered things that both of them had forgotten... who bought herbs from Maud and who would not go near her, whose children threw stones at her cats, whose mother had crossed the street to avoid her.

By dawn, they had a number.

Of the two hundred and sixty-three people who had caught Saint Ardo's Fire in the Sump, twenty-two had ever bought anything from Maud, or been touched by her, or been looked at by her in a way that anyone could remember.

Twenty-two.

The other two hundred and forty-one had never been near her.

"And the ones on the Shelf," Mira said hoarsely. "The clerks, and the servants. There've been thirty of them. Maud's never set foot on the Shelf in her life. She can't climb the stairs."

Teo stood back from the wall and rubbed his burning eyes.

"So it isn't her," he said. "That's one question. It isn't her. It isn't the water. It isn't the air, or it would be spreading street by street. It's something that happens inside a house. Something everyone in a house shares... but not the house next door."

He frowned.

"Something they eat?"

The word hung in the air.

Hesk, in his chair, suddenly sat up very straight.

"Saint Anthony," he said.

Teo and Mira both turned to look at him.

The old man's face had gone very still. His blind eyes were turned toward the ceiling, and his lips were moving.

"Saint Anthony's fire," he murmured. "That was it. That was the name — not Saint Ardo... Saint Anthony. A saint of the Makers, I think, or of some people long before the Makers. The Leaf was in the vault... a page about the sicknesses of the old world. There was a picture of a man with black hands. And there was a word... a strange word, I didn't understand it, I thought it was a name..." He clenched his fists. "Ergot. That was it. Ergot. And another word, right beside it. A word I did understand. I remember being surprised by it, because it was so ordinary."

"What word?" Teo said.

Hesk turned his face toward him.

"Rye," he said.

For a long moment, nobody moved.

Then Teo turned his head, slowly, and looked at the table in the middle of the cellar.

At the half-eaten loaf of black rye bread that Mira had brought down the night before, from her mother's own kitchen on the Shelf.

At Nell, who had come down from the stairs at some point in the night without anyone noticing, and was sitting on a crate beside it, chewing on a thick slice with enormous concentration, the way she always did.

Teo crossed the cellar in two strides — and slapped the bread out of her hand.