Smoke in the Square

The Burning Square was the oldest place on the Shelf.

It was an open plaza of grey Maker stone, perfectly flat and perfectly square, cut into the face of the Spillway halfway between the Sump and the Crown. On three sides, the merchant houses of the Shelf rose up in tiers of red tile and carved balconies, their windows hung with banners for the occasion. On the fourth side, there was nothing at all. The square simply ended in a low stone parapet, and beyond it, the whole valley spread out beneath the winter sky... the snow-covered fields, the frozen river, the dark smudge of the Sump far below, and beyond everything, the endless grey emptiness of the Ashlands.

In the middle of the square stood a post.

It was made of black iron, as thick as a man's waist, and it had stood there for three hundred years. Around its base, the stone was stained a deep, permanent brown, and around that, today, someone had stacked a great ring of bundled wood and pitch-soaked straw, as high as a man's chest.

The whole city had come to watch.

Teo had never seen so many people in one place. They filled the square from wall to wall and spilled out into every street that led into it, packed shoulder to shoulder in the cold. The Shelf in their furs and fine wool, crowding the balconies. The Sump at the back, in their rags, craning their necks. Children sitting on their fathers' shoulders. Old women with baskets of hot chestnuts, selling them to the crowd. A burning was a holiday, of a kind. There had not been one in Calder Reach for six years.

And at the head of the square, on a raised platform of white stone draped in red cloth, the Chantry.

The tribunal sat in a row of tall chairs, three deacons in red and gold. Behind them, a dozen Ashwardens stood at attention, masks down, swords drawn and resting point-down on the stone. And in the centre of the platform, a little apart from the rest, in a plain black robe with a small blue flame at his throat, sat Valdris Kahl.

Teo had not known the Archdeacon would come. Judging by the whispers rippling through the crowd, nobody had.

He stood at the back of the square with Bram and Nell, pressed against the wall of a chandlery, with his hood pulled up over his face, and felt sick.

'He came. Of course he came. He wanted to see it.'

The bells of the Crown began to ring. Noon.

They brought Maud out from the door beneath the platform. Two Ashwardens held her by the arms. She was wearing a plain grey shift, and someone had cut off her hair, and her bare feet left small wet prints in the dusting of snow on the stone. She did not struggle. She did not seem to understand where she was. She looked around at the vast crowd with a kind of mild, confused surprise, as if she had woken up in a stranger's house.

The crowd fell silent as she passed.

They led her through the ring of wood, and tied her to the iron post with a chain around her waist, and stepped back. A deacon came forward with a torch. Another read the sentence from a scroll in a high, droning voice... witchcraft... the curse of fire upon the faithful... by the judgement of the Undying Flame... and the crowd, which had been silent, began slowly to murmur, and then to shout.

"Burn her!"

"Witch!"

"For my son! For my son's hands!"

The deacon with the torch looked up at the platform. One of the tribunal raised his hand.

And from the front of the crowd, a clear voice said:

"I claim the Mercy of the Last Word."

The square went silent again — not slowly, this time. All at once, as if someone had cut a rope.

Mira stepped out of the crowd.

She was wearing her white robes, clean and pressed, and her dark braid was pinned up neatly under her cap. In one hand, she held a small cloth bundle. In the other, a loaf of black rye bread. She walked across the open stone, past the Ashwardens, until she stood just outside the ring of wood, beside the iron post. And then she turned around and faced the city.

Teo stopped breathing.

On the platform, the three deacons of the tribunal had half risen from their chairs. One of them was saying something, sharply, gesturing at the Ashwardens. And then the Archdeacon lifted one hand... just slightly, a small, idle movement of two fingers... and all three of them sat back down.

"Speak, Sister," said Valdris Kahl. His quiet voice carried across the whole square. "The Canon allows it."

Mira bowed to him. Then she lifted her head.

Teo would never quite remember everything she said. He was too frightened to listen properly, and the wind snatched at her words, and the crowd was murmuring again. But he remembered how she said it. She did not shout. She did not plead. She spoke the way she spoke in the Mercy House, to the dying, clearly and calmly, as if she had all the time in the world.

She told them that she was an acolyte of the Mercy House, and that she had nursed the burned and the dancers of the Sump for two months, and washed them, and prayed with them, and watched them die. She told them that she had prayed for the Flame to show her the cause. And she told them that the Flame had answered.

Then she unwrapped the cloth bundle, and held up a handful of purple-black spurs in the cold winter light.

"This is the curse of Saint Ardo," she said. "It is not a witch. It is a sickness of the rye. It grows in the fields in a wet summer, in place of the grain. Your grandmothers called it wolf's teeth. Your grandmothers picked it out of the grain with their own hands, because they knew it brought the fire. And this year, the summer was the wettest in living memory, and no one picked it out. It went into the mills, and into the flour, and into the bread." She held up the loaf. "And into you."

The silence was absolute now.

"Ask yourselves," Mira said. "Who burns? Those who eat wheat? No. Ask the Shelf. Ask the Crown. Not one priest of the Cathedral has burned, because the bread of the Flame is wheat. Those who eat the rye of the Fens, sorted by hand, as the old women sort it? No. Ask the ferry ward. Not one of them has burned." She turned slowly, holding up the bread so that the whole square could see it. "Those who eat the rye from the granaries of the Shelf. Those are the ones who burn. One in every four households. Children most of all. Did this old woman touch every one of them? Did she curse a granary?"

There was a sound from the balconies. A sharp, angry sound. Teo looked up and saw a sleek young man in a fur-lined coat... Osric Fell... on his feet, his face white with fury, shouting something that the wind carried away.

Mira did not even glance at him.

"Burn her if you must," she said quietly. "But if you do, keep eating the bread. And next winter, when the fire comes back, ask yourselves who you will burn then."

She lowered the loaf.

For a long moment, nothing happened at all.

Then, on the platform, Valdris Kahl rose to his feet.

Teo's heart stopped. Every eye in the square turned to the Archdeacon. He walked slowly to the front of the platform, his black robe stirring in the wind, and stood there for a while, looking down at Mira in her white robes, and the old woman chained to the post behind her, and the handful of purple spurs.

When he spoke, his voice was warm and grave and full of sorrow.

"The Flame," he said, "is merciful."

A ripple went through the crowd.

"For two months," the Archdeacon went on, "the faithful of Calder Reach have suffered, and prayed for an answer. And today, the Flame has given us one... through the mouth of its humblest servant." He bowed his head slightly toward Mira. "I have long suspected that the rye of this cursed summer was unclean. I have prayed upon it. And now the Flame has confirmed it. This woman is no witch. She is a foolish old crone, and she will be released, and she will do penance for her foolishness, and she will be grateful for the Flame's mercy."

He raised his hands.

"And the cursed rye will be cleansed by fire. Every sack in every granary in Calder Reach. Today. By order of the Voice of the Flame."

The crowd roared.

It was not a cheer, exactly. It was too confused for that. But it was loud and long and full of something like relief, and it went on and on, rolling across the square and down the streets, until the whole Shelf seemed to be shouting. Two Ashwardens stepped through the ring of wood and unchained the old woman, and she fell to her knees on the stone, weeping. Mira knelt beside her and held her.

On the balcony, Osric Fell was no longer shouting. He was sitting very still, staring at the Archdeacon with an expression of pure, white horror.

Teo stood at the back of the square and could not move.

'...He did it again.'

He had known it would happen. Some part of him had known it from the moment the Archdeacon lifted his two fingers. Valdris Kahl had been told the truth in front of the whole city, by an acolyte of his own Chantry... and he had picked it up, and dusted it off, and handed it back to them as a miracle. I have long suspected. The Flame has confirmed it. And the city cheered, and the Chantry was right again, and nobody would ever know that a cart-man and a blind man and a ferryman's mother had found the answer.

And yet...

Maud was alive. The rye would burn. No more children would dance.

Teo did not know what to feel about that. He stood there for a long time, trying.

Across the square, on the white platform, Valdris Kahl turned his head, and his clear grey eyes found Teo's hooded face in the crowd. He held his gaze for a moment. Then he smiled, very faintly, and inclined his head... the small, courteous nod of one player to another across a board.

That night, the granaries of Tanner's Terrace burned.

The Ashwardens did it properly. They dragged out every sack of rye from every bin and piled them in the Burning Square around the iron post, and set them alight, and the fire burned all night, a great roaring column of orange and black that lit the whole face of the Spillway like a second Flame. The smoke rose and rose. People came out onto their balconies to watch it, and cheered.

Teo watched it from the roof of the chandlery, far below, with Nell beside him wrapped in a blanket.

He was counting again. He could not help it. Three granaries. Perhaps four thousand sacks. Perhaps half of all the grain left in the valley, after the wet summer and the thin wheat and the drowned barley.

And it was the middle of winter.

"Teo," Nell said in a small voice, after a while. "If they're burning all the bread..."

She did not finish. She did not have to.

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

'...What is the Sump going to eat?'