By morning the smoke had put a brown edge on everything left outside.
Ysabet rubbed it from the rim of the water bucket with her thumb. There was not much, scarcely more than a dirty fingerprint, but when she looked toward the marsh she could no longer distinguish the far reed beds from the sky. A thin strip of red lay under the haze. It might have been sunrise reflected on water.
The sun was behind her.
Mara came through the passage carrying a rolled carpet.
“Help me with this.”
“Where?”
“Against the gate.”
Ysabet set down the bucket. Mara had already dragged one end of the carpet across the yard. Dust came out of it in little puffs. It was the old bathhouse runner, stiff with years of bare feet and spilled soap, and it would make a formidable obstruction if anyone wished to enter carrying furniture.
“Wet it first,” Ysabet said.
“Then I won’t be able to move it.”
“We’ll move it now. Against the wall.”
“Against the gate. I want the gap stopped.”
A small brown thing ran between Mara’s shoes.
Both women watched it disappear beneath the overturned wash tub. Another followed, then a third. Marsh voles, their fur slicked against their heads. None paused to investigate the spilled offal beside Tallow’s dish.
Mara tightened her hold on the carpet.
“That’s why.”
The passage behind her gave a good view of the street. A man was fastening a hurdle across his doorway. Two doors farther on, someone had taken the shutters down and was carrying them indoors. Most of the town was still deciding whether to protect its possessions from fire or from what came ahead of fire.
Ysabet crouched by the tub. The voles crouched too. Their sides worked rapidly. She put the bucket on the ground and lifted one edge of the tub with her left hand.
They bolted toward the far wall. One struck the brick, scrambled sideways, found the low gap under the drain and disappeared. The others followed it.
“They’ll get into the store,” Mara said.
“If we block the yard, they’ll try the passage. Or go through the house next door.”
“And if we leave it open?”
“Some will still get into the store.”
Mara gave her a hard look.
“I can offer worse answers if you prefer.”
From the laundry shelter came a dry scuff. Pip stood with its forefeet on the low board. The mouse’s whiskers were visible in the opening of its warm fold, then gone. Behind it, the fish crate had acquired another piece of clean clay. Ysabet had not put it there.
She took the creature’s water dish and carried it away from the shelter, down the yard toward the drain. Pip watched, eye following her left hand.
“We need water outside,” she said to Mara. “And a route that doesn’t finish in a wall.”
“The back gate opens onto the cart lane.”
“Then we’ll use it.”
“The hinge has gone.”
“The hinge has been going for three years.”
“And today it has arrived.”
They put the carpet against the bathhouse wall. Mara fetched the keys, and Ysabet went to the back gate with the smith’s clasp that had lain on the bench since Chaska delivered it. The clasp would not mend a hinge. It did serve as a wedge beneath the sagging bottom corner while Mara turned the key and lifted.
The gate opened half a hand’s breadth before the hinge tore loose.
Mara swore. Ysabet got her left shoulder beneath the lower rail. Together they lowered the whole thing onto the lane, where a man carrying roof tiles had to step around them.
“You can’t leave that there,” he said.
“Help us move it,” Mara answered.
He looked at his tiles. Then he set them down.
By the time the gate lay against the wall, the man had told them which reed stack was burning, whose cousin had seen it, and how the fire must have started. His account changed twice. What remained useful was that the lane led toward the stony ground behind the cooper’s shed, away from the wind, and that nobody had yet put an animal pen there.
Ysabet asked him not to.
“A pen keeps them together,” he said.
“It keeps them in the smoke.”
He rubbed his nose with the back of a hand. “My brother’s got three goats loose.”
“If they come here, I’ll turn them your way.”
“His way. I don’t want them.”
“Your dyer is coming tomorrow,” Ysabet said as they passed the copper piping.
“If she still wants to,” Mara said. “I’ll ask her to come the following morning. She can see the drains without a marsh in them.”
Mara took charge of the wet coverings. She knew which of the bathhouse cloths were worth saving and which she had been pretending were worth saving. Ysabet brought Kettle from beneath the bench and settled her in the stone-floored room beside the yard, where there was little to catch. The tortoise’s three legs scraped furiously at being carried. Her displeasure seemed excellent evidence of vigor.
Sedge followed in her box, with a loose cloth over the open top. There was room beneath it for her to turn. Tallow proved more difficult. He had discovered the water being thrown over the carpet and lay across it with all four feet spread, looking as if Ysabet had finally improved his accommodation.
She waited until his head turned toward a piece of offal, then guided him into the room. He accepted the food and refused to move farther.
“Good enough,” Mara said, stepping over his tail.
They left the inside door open for air and kept the street shutters mostly closed against sparks. Ysabet put the feed, medicines and unglazed clay under the stone bench. She moved the smallest things first. Her right hand had begun to ache from lifting the gate, and there was no merit in dropping the heavy things afterward.
Chaska arrived on foot, leading Lilt, with her delivery bag still fastened across her body.
“The north post has stopped taking marsh letters,” she said. “Someone finally thought to send word to the marsh.”
“Have you been over it?” Ysabet asked.
“No. Look at her.”
Lilt held her leading fins close. Even in the yard the gusts came unevenly, a lift followed by a hard sideways shove. Fine ash stuck to the moist skin around her breathing openings. Chaska wiped it away with a damp cloth before taking off the harness.
“I can carry a warning through the lanes,” she said. “The fire crew wants the back turns clear. Nobody believes a bell means their cart.”
“Tell them we’ve opened here.”
“For what?”
“Whatever keeps moving.”
Chaska looked at the fallen gate. “Mara agreed to that?”
“Mara,” the landlord said from behind the carpet, “has developed interests beyond being quoted.”
She threw a pail of water into the cloth. Chaska caught the bottom edge before it slid and held it while Mara tied the top to the wall hooks.
They dragged the less damaged of the two old washing troughs into the lane beyond the buildings. Wet sacking weighted over its split held some water, though a slow trickle escaped beneath it. The other trough stayed against the wall; moving Sedge had at least made its removal possible. A neighbor brought a second, smaller trough, then asked Ysabet to say clearly in front of Mara that it belonged to him. Ysabet did. He filled it anyway.
The first reed deer came just before noon.
It stumbled into the lane with its neck stretched forward and white foam at the corners of its mouth. Ysabet stepped back from the trough. The deer stopped, shaking, and stared at the space beyond her.
Behind it came a low chattering noise. Two more animals were pushing through the broken reeds at the end of the lane.
A boy ran toward them with a length of rope.
“Don’t,” Ysabet said.
“My father said—”
“Go tell him they’re going through the cooper’s ground.”
“He said catch one.”
The first deer struck the trough with its chest. Water surged over the edge. The boy stopped.
Ysabet took the rope from his hand, because she needed it to tie back a loose cloth and because giving him a different thing to do was more likely to work than telling him again.
“Hold this end.”
He did, resentfully. The deer drank in violent, jerking mouthfuls, then leaped past them toward the stony ground. Its companions followed. None looked back.
Pip had come out of the laundry shelter. It stayed near the bench, body held low, one narrow foot resting on the edge of a patch of sunlight. Its eye moved between the lane and Ysabet. The pouch at its chest shifted with the mouse’s weight.
She brought its shallow dish and clay to the yard side of the open passage, clear of the main path.
“Here,” she said, and set them down.
From beyond the roofs a bell began to ring in groups of three. Chaska tightened the strap of her bag and went out to find the fire crew. Mara sent the boy home with instructions to bring another bucket.
Ysabet remained by the empty back opening, holding a loose corner of wet cloth aside while the next animal hurried into the lane.