For the first two days, Mara called it a winter chill.
Ellyn was two, and two-year-olds caught whatever came off the road.
Mara bundled her in sheepskins by the chimney, spooned warm mint water between her lips, and snapped at Garran whenever his big boots blocked the light from the hearth.
On the third night, the heat in Ellyn’s skin dried the sweat right off her forehead.
She stopped kicking at the blankets.
Raymun sat on a low three-legged stool beside her cradle, his chin resting on the pine rim.
In his head sat a hundred words from another life: amoxicillin, intravenous saline, pediatric wards, fever reducers.
He could picture the blue plastic caps on the syringes and the crinkling white paper on the examination tables.
None of those words told him which weed in the ditch would clear her chest, or how to get water into a child who would no longer swallow.
“Ellyn.”
Her crusted lashes parted a fraction.
“Ray?”
“I’m right here.”
Her eyes slid shut again, her chest rising in fast, shallow jerks.
Raymun gripped the rough edge of the cradle until the wood bit into his palms.
All the maps and dead kings in his head meant nothing at all while a two-year-old girl burned up three feet from the kitchen table.
Garran saddled the bay mare before dawn and rode out into the sleet.
An old woman from the village came first, smelling of crushed garlic and mutton tallow.
She pricked three drops of dark blood from Ellyn’s heel, tied a pouch of dried mugwort around her wrist, and took four copper pennies from the dish.
By noon, Ellyn’s breathing sounded like dry leaves scraping across stone.
The next afternoon, Garran brought a barber-surgeon up from Duskendale on a hired mule.
The man wore silver buckles on his shoes and carried a brass-bound case of glass vials.
“The bad humors have settled in the lung,” the surgeon said, wiping his fingers on a clean linen towel Mara had warmed by the fire.
“Three drops of the black tincture in goat’s milk when the star rises.
If the phlegm breaks before dawn, she keeps her breath.”
Garran stood by the door with his wool cap crushed in both fists.
“And if it doesn’t break?”
The surgeon snapped the brass latch on his case.
“Then save the milk for the cat.
That will be twelve silver groats, master innkeeper, and two more for the mule’s hire.”
Mara walked to the chimney, pried the loose hearthstone up with the iron poker, and lifted out the cedar strongbox.
When she raised the lid, the bare wood of the bottom showed through the scattered coins.
The black tincture did not break the fever.
On the sixth night, long after the loft had gone still, Raymun crept to the top of the stairs in his shift and looked down through the banister rails.
A single tallow dip burned on the trestle.
Garran sat on the bench in his stiff, sleet-crusted cloak, a fresh earthenware jar sitting by the candlestick.
Mara picked up the jar, turned the wax seal toward the light, and looked at the hearthstone.
“There were four groats left in the box, Garran.
Who gave you the rest?”
Garran bent over and pulled at his frozen bootlaces.
“Myles down at the tannery had silver left from the autumn hides.”
“Myles doesn’t lend to his own cousins without taking a milk cow for surety.” Mara set the jar down hard on the pine.
“How much?”
“Enough to pay the apothecary by the sept and clear the town gate.”
“Look at me and say the number.”
Garran stopped tugging at the wet leather.
He kept his eyes on the mud melting off his heel onto the floorboards.
“Thirty silver stags.
And three pence on the stag every moon until the autumn shearing.”
Mara’s fingers curled against the edge of the table.
Raymun did not know the whole ledger yet, though he knew a good workhorse cost ten stags and a full barrel of beer brought in coppers.
He saw the way his mother’s shoulders pulled tight beneath her shawl.
“Warm the spoon, Mara,” Garran said, reaching for his other boot.
“We’ll count the hides when she’s sitting up.”
Two mornings later, a sharp noise from the common room jerked Raymun out of his blankets.
He scrambled out of his box bed and went down the cold ladder rungs so fast he skinned his heel on the bottom step.
Mara was on her knees on the hearthrug.
Garran stood behind her with a split log still resting in the crook of his arm, bark flaking onto the stones.
Ellyn was propped up against two folded quilts.
Her collarbones poked up like bird wings under her damp linen shift, and her hair was matted flat to her skull, yet her eyes were wide open and fixed on the iron kettle.
“Hungry,” Ellyn croaked.
Mara stayed frozen on her knees, both hands hovering an inch from the girl’s ribs.
Ellyn’s brow pinched together.
She smacked a weak palm against the sheepskin.
“Hungry.”
Mara pressed both hands over her mouth, her breath catching hard in her throat.
Garran dropped the split log into the woodbox with a loud crash and let out a ragged bark of a laugh, wiping the rough wool of his sleeve across his eyes.
Raymun skidded across the rushes and dropped onto his elbows beside the cradle.
“What do you want to eat?”
Ellyn turned her head slowly on the quilt.
Her cracked lips worked for a second.
“Honey.”
“The bees are asleep in the orchard,” Raymun said, grinning until his face hurt.
“We have barley mush.”
“Honey,” she repeated, louder this time, and Mara pulled the girl against her apron and wept into her tangled hair.
By the time the snow melted off the paddock fence, Ellyn had enough meat back on her ribs to steal bread crusts off Raymun’s trencher.
The house around her went lean.
When the March wind tore three boards off the stable gable, Garran nailed an old canvas sack over the gap instead of buying sawn pine from the mill.
The oil peddler came down the lane in April, and Mara sent him on his way without filling the crocks.
At night, after the drovers climbed up to the loft, the family sat in the dark and talked by the red glow of the turf embers to save the tallow dips.
One evening in late spring, Garran sat on the porch step with an iron awl and two needles, stitching a split horse collar by the last grey light in the west.
Raymun sat beside his boots on the floorboards, sorting bent horseshoe nails into an old clay pot so the smith could hammer them straight for half price.
“Did Myles take a lot?” Raymun asked, turning a rusted nail between his fingers.
Garran shoved the awl through the thick leather and pulled the waxed cord tight.
“That’s grown folk’s business, Ray.”
“Mother watered the small beer yesterday.
And you didn’t buy the bay pony from Hob.”
Garran paused with the black thread wrapped around his knuckles.
He looked down at the five-year-old boy beside his knee.
“It’ll take two harvests to clear his book.
Maybe three if the wool trade stays flat.”
Inside the open doorway, a wooden cup banged against the floorboards.
Ellyn was squatting by the hearthstones, using her carved wooden horse to batter the nose of the old hound, who lay with his chin in the rushes and let her do it.
When Raymun looked in, she held the block of pine up in both fists and roared at the dog like a bear.
Raymun tossed the bent nail into the clay pot.
“Cheap.”
Garran looked up from the harness leather.
“What’s that?”
Raymun pointed his thumb through the doorway at Ellyn, who was now trying to stuff the wooden horse’s tail into the hound’s ear.
“Three harvests.
It was cheap.”
Garran stared through the door.
The hound let out a long sigh, heaved himself onto his feet, and ambled under the trestle table with Ellyn scrambling after his tail on all fours.
Garran set his big, grease-stained hand on the crown of Raymun’s head and ruffled his hair once.
“Aye,” Garran said, picking up the iron awl again.
“Dirt cheap.”