Who Ate What

"It isn't enough," Hesk said.

He said it gently, but he said it at once, before Teo had even finished emptying his pockets onto the cellar table. The purple spurs lay among the grey rye grains in the lamplight like little drops of dried blood.

"I know," Teo said.

"Do you? Tell me why."

Teo sat down heavily on a crate. He had been thinking about it all the way down the switchback road, in the snow, and he had arrived at the answer long before he reached the bottom.

"Because I saw mould in a grain," he said. "That's all. I didn't see it make anybody sick. Every year there are a few spurs in the rye, and every year people eat them, and nobody dances. If I stand in front of the tribunal and say the bread is poisoned, they'll say: then why isn't the whole city dancing? Half the Shelf eats rye now. The Chantry sisters at the orphanage eat rye. Why them and not the others?" He rubbed his face. "And I won't have an answer."

"Then what do you need?"

"The same thing I needed for the pump." Teo looked up at the second map on the wall... the one with no shape, the one with marks scattered everywhere. "Not where they live. What they ate."

They had five days.

Teo would remember those days later as a long grey blur of snow and stairs and doors. He had done this once before, with the flux, but then he had been looking for something simple... a street, a house, a well. This time, he needed to know where every sick household in the Sump bought its bread. And not only the sick ones. The healthy ones, too. Because the Three Questions demanded it. If it was the bread from Fell's granaries, then the people who ate it should be falling ill... and the people who did not eat it should not.

So he needed both.

He could not do it alone. In the end, it took all of them.

Mira went through the Mercy House cots, one by one, and asked every family she could find the same three questions. Where do you buy your bread? Is it rye, or wheat, or barley? How much do you eat, each day? Nell, who knew more children in the Sump than anyone alive, went from door to door on the pretext of begging and came back each evening with a dozen households in her head, every detail perfectly remembered. Teo pushed his cart through every ward and asked the bakers. That was the hardest part. Bakers did not like cart-men asking where their flour came from.

And on the second day, at the ferry docks below the Old Bridge, he found Bram Tull.

He found him by accident. Teo had gone down to the docks because the ferry ward was one of the few places in the Sump with no cases of the fire at all, not a single one, and he wanted to know why. And the answer, it turned out, was standing waist-deep in the freezing river, hauling a flat-bottomed barge up onto the stones with a rope over one shoulder, as easily as another man might pull a handcart.

He was the biggest man Teo had ever seen. Not fat — big, the way a door is big, broad and tall and heavy, with a close-cropped black beard and forearms like the trunks of young trees. When Teo called out to him, he turned his head slowly, the way an ox turns, and looked at the cart-man on the bank for a long time before he answered.

"Bread?" he said, when Teo asked. His voice was very deep and very slow. "We don't buy from the Shelf. Never have. I bring our rye down from the Fens myself. Down the river, three days, and back up against the current. My mother's people grow it."

"And... do you ever see the black spurs in it? Wolf's teeth?"

The big man looked at him with faint surprise.

"Course. Every year. More this year. Wet summer." He shrugged his massive shoulders. "My mother sorts them out. Spreads the grain on a cloth and picks every one. Then she puts it through a sieve. Takes all day." He paused. "Her mother told her. Black grain makes the fire. Everyone in the Fens knows that."

Teo stared at him.

'Everyone in the Fens knows that,' he thought, slightly dizzy. 'Everyone. Of course they do.'

All of Hesk's Leaves, all his careful questions, all those nights with the lens... and three days up the river, old women had known the answer all along. Not why. Not how. But what. They had known it the way people know that fire burns, because their grandmothers had watched it happen, and their grandmothers before them. It had simply never climbed nine hundred stairs to the Crown, because nobody on the Crown had ever thought to ask a farmer.

"What's your name?" Teo asked.

"Bram."

"Bram... I'm Teo. I need you to tell that to some people."

The big man considered him for a while. Then he looked past Teo, up the bank, toward the narrow streets of the Sump, where the smoke of the Mercy House pyres was rising into the grey sky.

"The fire," he said slowly. "Up there. That's the black grain?"

"I think so."

Bram was silent for a moment longer.

"...All right," he said.

On the fourth night, they put it all together.

Teo covered the bare wall of the cellar with a great chalk grid, the way Hesk told him to. Down the side, the bakers... seven in the Sump who bought their flour from Fell's mills, two who bought from a small mill on the river that ground grain from the Fens and the valley farms, and a handful of households who baked their own from grain they brought in themselves, like Bram's. Across the top, two columns. Sick, and well.

Then Nell read out the households, one by one, and Teo made his marks.

It took most of the night. When it was done, he stood back from the wall and was silent for a long time.

Of the households who bought their bread from bakers supplied by Fell, one in every four had Saint Ardo's Fire.

Of the households who bought from the small river mill, which ground mostly Fen rye and barley, one in every forty-one.

Of the households who baked their own bread from sorted grain, like Bram's family and the ferry ward around him... none.

And of the few households in the Sump who still ate wheat bread, the old shopkeepers and the brewery foreman Tobin and the Proctor of the Lower Wards, who would not eat rye if it was the last food on earth... none at all.

"And the Crown," Mira said quietly, from behind him. "The Chantry eats wheat. Only wheat. It's in the Canon, the bread of the Flame. Not one deacon in the Cathedral has burned — not one. Not one." She paused. "And the orphanage... the orphanage gets its rye from the Chantry's own farms, out in the valley. The sisters sort it. They make the orphans do it, as a penance." She laughed shakily. "I always thought that was cruel."

Teo did not answer. He was looking at the numbers.

It was not perfect. It would never be perfect. There were households that ate Fell's bread and stayed well... three out of every four, in fact. Some ate less. Some were lucky in which loaves they bought, because some sacks were much worse than others. Some, perhaps, were simply stronger. And the children were always worse than the adults, which made sense, if it was a poison... a small body could hold less of it. There was the one case in forty-one from the river mill, which might have been bad luck, or a few spurs that had slipped through, or someone who had bought a loaf from Fell's baker on the wrong day.

It was not certainty. Hesk had taught him better than to call it that.

But a person who ate Fell's bread was about ten times more likely to burn than a person who ate the river mill's, and the people who ate sorted grain or wheat did not burn at all. That was not a curse. That was not a witch. Curses did not care what kind of flour you bought.

"It's enough," Hesk said softly, from his chair. "Not to be certain. But to know where the truth is standing. It's enough, boy."

Teo nodded slowly. He knew it was.

The problem was that knowing was only half of it. The other half was making someone listen.

"So who do we tell?" Nell asked. She was sitting on the stairs with her chin on her knees, as she always did. "The tribunal? They already decided. They're not going to change their minds because a cart-man drew some lines on a wall."

Nobody answered her.

Then Mira stood up.

She did it slowly, smoothing down her white robes. Her face was very calm. Teo had seen that calm before, in the Mercy House, when she had told Cobb to bring the water.

"Not the tribunal," she said. "Everyone. At the burning."

Teo turned around.

"Mira..."

"An acolyte of the Flame has the right to speak before a burning. It's in the Canon. The Mercy of the Last Word. Any acolyte may plead for the soul of the condemned before the fire is lit." She drew a deep breath. "Nobody has used it in eighty years. But it's still there."

Teo stared at her. He found that his mouth had gone dry.

"They'll burn you too," he said hoarsely. "Mira. You stand up in the Burning Square, in front of the Shelf and the Crown and the Archdeacon himself, and you tell them the Flame's tribunal is wrong... they'll tie you to the stake next to her."

Mira looked at him for a long moment. Then, unexpectedly, she smiled.

"Perhaps," she said. "But I won't tell them the tribunal is wrong. I'll tell them the Flame has shown me the truth."

She picked up a single purple spur from the table, and turned it over in her fingers.

"...And for once," she said quietly, "I think that might even be true."