The Winter Cough had come out of the winter the way it always did, late and stubborn, and it had found the eel-wives’ lane, where the houses stood so close together that their chimneys shared a flue and their doors shared a draught.
Sella went door to door with her bag over one shoulder and her bone-ledger in its oilskin under the other arm. The oilskin had been stitched by a Lowgate saddler for the purpose, and it kept the damp off the pages, which was the only thing in the Hold that the damp had ever failed to get into. She had carried the book through every winter since the first, and she had learned to tell from how a door opened whether the house inside was counting its dead or its living.
This house was counting both.
Wren of the Reed-Houses was already there. She had come down from the lower lanes two days after the first child coughed, with a sack of dried marsh-herbs on her back and a pot she had carried all the way from the reed country, and she had set the pot on the hearth of the first house in the lane and had been boiling her black tea in it ever since. The house smelled of smoke and wet wool and something bitter underneath, like the bark of a tree that has been struck by lightning. Wren was kneeling by the box bed with a cup in her hand. She looked up…
