The Purple Spur

Nell did not cry. She looked at the bread on the floor, and then at Teo, and her face went through surprise and outrage and something very close to murder in the space of a single heartbeat.

"What was that for?"

"Don't eat it," Teo said hoarsely. "Don't eat any more of it. Not until I know."

"Know what?"

He did not answer. He was looking at Hesk.

The old man had gone very still in his chair. His blind face was turned toward the place where the loaf had fallen, as if he could see it lying there in the lamplight, dark and heavy and sour.

"It's only a word, boy," he said quietly. "Rye. I don't remember the rest. I don't know if the page said rye causes the fire, or cures it, or has nothing to do with it at all."

"I know."

"So you can't be sure."

"No." Teo crouched down and picked the bread up off the floor. He broke it open, very carefully, and stared at the dense black crumb inside. "But I can look."

He looked at it under the lens for an hour, that night, and saw nothing he understood. Crumbs. Flour. Little threads and specks that could have been anything. Bread was bread. Once a grain had been ground and mixed and baked, whatever had been in it was smeared through the whole loaf like ink through water.

"Then we need the grain," Mira said. "Before it's ground."

She had been very quiet ever since he had knocked the bread from Nell's hand. Now she was sitting on the edge of a crate with her hands pressed together between her knees, and Teo realised, with a strange jolt, that she was frightened. Not of the Ashwardens, or the Chantry, or the dark — of the bread.

"My mother switched the whole household to rye," she said. "In the autumn. I told you. And last week... last week, she wrote to me that our cook has been dropping things. That her hands shake. She thought it was the cold."

Nobody said anything.

"Merchant Fell has three granaries on the Shelf," Mira went on, her voice very steady. "They're on Tanner's Terrace, behind the Guildhall. He's been buying rye from every farmer in the valley since the summer. Every baker in the city buys from him now... there's nobody else with enough to sell." She looked up. "The night watchman on the middle granary is a man called Orrin. He has a daughter in the Mercy House with a broken leg. I set it for her."

Teo looked at her for a long moment.

"...You want to break into a merchant's granary," he said slowly. "On the Shelf. With an Ashwarden standing at the end of my street."

"I want to visit a granary," Mira said. "On an errand of mercy, from the Mercy House, to bless the grain against the winter rot. Which is a thing acolytes do, every winter. You will be carrying the holy water."

'...Ah,' Teo thought. 'She's done this before.'

He was wrong, as it turned out. She had never done anything like it in her life. But she lied to Orrin the night watchman so smoothly, two nights later, with such calm and sweetness and such careful questions about his daughter's leg, that Teo stood behind her in the snow with a brass bucket of well water and began to feel slightly afraid of her.

Orrin let them in. He even lit them a lantern.

"Don't be long, Sister," he said, glancing nervously up the dark terrace. "Master Fell doesn't like visitors. Not even holy ones — especially not holy ones."

The door closed behind them.

The inside of the granary was vast.

Teo had never been inside a building like it. It was one of the old Maker structures that the Shelf had been built around, a hall of grey poured stone so tall that the light of the lantern did not reach its roof, so long that its far end was lost in darkness. Wooden walls had been built inside it, dividing it into great bins, each one as large as a house. And every bin was full. Mountains of grain rose up into the shadows on either side of them, dark and heaped and silent, smelling of damp earth and dust and something else, something faintly sweet and rotten.

There was more food in this one room, Teo realised, than the whole Sump ate in a year.

'And he's charging four coppers a loaf.'

He set down the bucket and climbed up the side of the nearest bin. The rye shifted under his knees like sand. He plunged his hand into it up to the elbow, brought out a fistful, and held it up to the lantern.

Rye grains. Long and thin and grey-brown, a little shrivelled from the wet summer.

And among them...

Teo frowned. There was something else in his hand. Several somethings. They were much larger than the grains, three or four times as long, and curved, like little claws or the spurs on a cockerel's foot. They were a deep, dark purple, almost black, with a dull, faintly crusted surface.

He had seen them before. Everyone in the valley had. Every year, a few of these dark spurs turned up in the rye harvest, sticking out of the ears where a grain should have been. Farmers called them all sorts of things. Cock's spurs. Wolf's teeth. Black grain. Nobody paid them any attention. They were just bad grains... a little blight, like a mouldy apple in a barrel.

But there had never been this many.

Teo dug his hand in again, and again, in a different place each time. Every fistful had them. Five. Ten. Twelve. In one handful from near the bottom of the bin, where the damp had collected, he counted twenty-one.

He climbed down without a word, took the brass button from inside his shirt, and crouched by the lantern. Mira knelt beside him. He cut one of the purple spurs open with his knife. Inside, it was pale... a dense, whitish flesh, nothing like the floury heart of a grain. He shaved off a sliver so thin he could almost see through it, laid it on his sliver of glass, and held the lens to his eye.

It took him a long time to understand what he was seeing.

The inside of the spur was not made of grain at all. It was made of threads. Countless thin, pale threads, tangled and woven together into a tight mass, like felt, or like the white fur that grew on bread left too long in a damp cupboard.

Mould. It was a kind of mould.

He lowered the lens slowly.

He did not need the rest of Hesk's Leaf. He did not need the name. He could see the shape of the thing now, the way he had seen the shape of the flux on the map. A wet, cold summer. The rye standing in the rain in the fields, flowering in the damp, the mould creeping into the flowers and growing where the grain should have been, until each infected flower became one of these dark, hard spurs. Then the harvest, and the threshing, and the spurs going into the sacks with all the rest. Then the mill. And a millstone did not care what it ground. Spur and grain together, crushed into the same flour, baked into the same dark bread, where the colour hid everything...

And then the bread went into people.

Whatever was in that mould... whatever poison it carried... it did not stay in the stomach the way the small lives of the flux did. It went somewhere else. Into the blood, perhaps. Into the hands and the feet, which burned and blackened as if the blood could no longer reach them. Into the head, which danced and saw flames that were not there.

And it struck households, not streets... because a household shared a loaf.

Mira was staring at the spur in his palm. Her face was white.

"Wolf's teeth," she whispered. "My grandmother used to call them that. She said a good cook always picks them out." Her voice cracked. "Nobody picks them out anymore. There are too many. And the bakers grind everything, because they're paying Fell for every sack..."

"How many sacks are in here?"

"I don't know. Thousands."

"And he's selling it to every baker in the city."

"Yes."

Teo closed his fist around the spur.

There were footsteps outside. Heavy ones, crunching through the snow. Orrin's voice, rising in alarm, and another voice answering it, cold and sharp.

"...At this hour? What blessing? Open the door, you fool, before I have you flogged."

Mira was on her feet in an instant. She grabbed the brass bucket, dipped her fingers in it, and began flicking water over the nearest bin of rye with great ceremony, murmuring the words of the winter blessing in a clear, carrying voice. Teo stuffed the button and the knife back inside his shirt, filled both his pockets with rye from the bin as fast as his hands could move, and then bowed his head and clasped his hands like a good acolyte's servant.

The door opened. Lantern light flooded in.

A young man stood in the doorway. He was perhaps thirty, sleek and well-fed, wrapped in a heavy fur-lined coat, with a gold chain around his neck and the bored, faintly irritated face of someone who had never once in his life been hungry. Behind him stood Orrin the watchman, wringing his hands, and two big men with cudgels.

Osric Fell the Younger looked at Mira, and then at Teo, and then at the wet grain.

"Sister," he said, with a small, cold smile. "How very devout of you."

Mira finished the blessing. She did not hurry. Then she turned to him, and bowed, as an acolyte of the Flame would bow to a man of the Shelf, not one inch lower.

"The Mercy House blesses all the granaries of Calder Reach against the winter rot, Master Fell," she said serenely. "Yours most of all. You feed the whole city, after all." She paused. "May the Flame keep your grain clean."

Osric Fell looked at her for a long moment. Then he stepped aside, and let them go.

Teo walked down Tanner's Terrace behind her in the falling snow with his heart pounding and his pockets full of poison.

He did not speak until they had reached the top of the switchback road, where the Shelf ended and the long, dark descent to the Sump began. Then he stopped.

"Five days," he said. "Maud burns in five days."

Mira nodded slowly. She did not look at him. She was looking up, past the lamplit terraces of the Shelf, toward the Crown, where the Flame burned blue and gold against the black sky.

"Then we have five days," she said, "to prove that bread can do what a witch cannot."