Pell woke with her hands in the dough and her face somewhere else.
It was the first thing she knew, before the cold of the Kitchen or the smell of the banked oven or the grey light that came through the shutter-slats. Her hands were fine. They were her own, square and red-knuckled, and they had found the dough the way they always found it, pressing and folding and turning the heel of the loaf back on itself without any help from her. But her face did not agree with her voice. She tried to say, Who left the shutter open, and her mouth made the words, and the words came out in her own rough Lowgate tone, and then something behind her cheekbones lagged a breath behind them, like a dog that has been told to sit and has decided to think about it.
She put her floury fingers to her cheeks. The skin was hers. The bones under it were not quite. They sat a little high and a little narrow, and when she pressed, the line of the jaw gave under her thumbs as though it had been shaped by somebody who had loved a different face.
“Bad bread,” said Pell aloud, to nobody, and went on kneading.
She had baked every morning since the spring, even on the days she was sure the flour would turn to sand. Today the oven door opened with a crack like a bone and stuck halfway. She put her shoulder to it. Beside her, the lad from the yard, who had been set to fetch the water, dropped his bucket and stood there with his mouth open, staring at her face as though she had grown a second nose on it.
“It’s nothing, boy,” said Pell. “I’ve had a face like this since my mother’s wedding.”
“Your face is wrong, Pell.”
“Then mind your own bucket.”
She did not look at the boy’s face while she said it. You did not stare too hard at a face that was about to tell you something you would have to answer.
---
The stiffening had come over the whole Hold in the night. Pell felt it under her boots as she crossed the yard, a grey dragging quiet, as though the weft had been pulled tight across the Hold like wet wool on a frame. Harrow stood by the Mason’s Yard gate with his count-cord looped over one wrist, and when he turned his head his eyes did not quite follow it. Gaunt was in the forge door with the bellows in one hand, and his jaw was locked halfway through a sentence he had begun in the Hall the evening before.
He saw Pell, and his eyes went hard, and he objected with his whole face. His mouth stayed shut and pinched at the corners as if somebody had sewn it. Pell could read every word of the objection in that look. It was about the bread.
“I know,” said Pell. “You’ll not be heard today, Gaunt. Make a note of it.”
Gaunt slammed the bellows down on the anvil and sat on the hearth-stone with his arms folded, glaring at the fire as if it had been the one to talk back.
In the goat-pens Tamsin was singing to the goats, a half-beat late, so that the song came out of her like wind through a door in the wrong room.
“They can’t hear me,” Tamsin said, very gently, when she noticed Pell at the gate. “It’s like singing with the lid on. The goat with the split horn is looking at me as if I’m a stranger.” She looked down at her own hands. “I think I am, a little.”
“You’re not a stranger, love.”
“Then tell the goat.”
In the Undercroft, at the foot of the nine steps, Korrin was standing very straight with his right arm hanging at his side. He had tried to lift it that morning, to reach a bundle of pikes on the high shelf, and it had stopped at the belt as though a rope had been tied to the elbow and pulled tight by a Lessary carter. He swore at it now, in a cheerful flood of marsh curses. It did not help. The arm stayed where it was, and he turned his head and looked at Pell with a flat, enormous patience.
“It won’t go up,” said Korrin. “I’ll not be asking you to help me, cook.”
“I’ll not be offering.”
“Good. I’ll carry the pikes with my left, then, and it’ll be a poor job of it, and I’ll remember who made me do it.”
Ysra was on the fourth stair. She had come down in the night to count it, the way she counted everything, and she had been there since. Her lips moved steadily, and she was counting the wrong stair: a stair twenty-two treads long, from the bottom up, with a weight on her shoulders that did not belong to her. The weight had a pole across it. Pell could see the marks on Ysra’s collarbones, pale and sore, where a carrier’s ash would have pressed through the shirt.
“Ysra,” said Pell softly.
Ysra opened her eyes. For a moment she did not know who was speaking. Then she did, and her face went white.
“I’ve been carrying,” she said, in a child’s flat accent, which was not hers. “Nine days. Nine days on the stair. I know how to carry, Pell. It’s the only thing I’m sure of.”
“It’s Pim’s,” said Pell. “The carrying. Pim’s been on the stair since before the Hold had a count. You’ve got his dreams, love. Put them back.”
“I can’t put them back. They’re in my shoulders.”
---
The Hall was worse. Pell brought the bread up at the sixth hour and found the Hands at the long table with their faces locked in a row, like the carved heads on the lease-lord’s old chair. Sella sat at the foot with her ledger shut in front of her, reading the injuries off their bones with her eyes.
“The body has spoken,” said Sella, in her dry, ordinary voice, which came out almost perfectly. “It spoke in the night, and it has not yet learned to stop. That is the diagnosis. The comfort is that the stiffening is a day, and not a winter, and that it costs no seal and no Hand.” She turned a page. “No one is hurt.”
“No one is hurt yet,” said Pell, setting down the bread-tray.
Sella lifted her head and looked at her for a moment, with the same eyes she used on a broken finger.
“Yet,” said Sella. “Yes. Thank you, cook. Write it down, Tallow.”
Tallow could not write it down, not properly. His hand moved on the page, but the letters came out in a slant that did not match his usual square script. He looked at the page, and then at Pell, with a face that was all bewilderment.
“It’s the wrong hand,” he said, very quietly. “My hand, and not mine. I don’t know whose it is.”
The prince had come in last. Idrin stood at the head of the table with his hand flat on the oak, the left one, the one with the scar. Pell could see his mouth work, trying to shape an order, and she could see the order not come. The stiffness had got into him too, somewhere in the jaw, the way the grey dust gets into the creases of a sack. He stood very straight and waited for it to pass, and when it would not pass he did a thing she had not expected. He took the slate from the table, and the chalk from Tallow’s pocket, and wrote on the slate in his tidy clerk’s hand, without a word.
Bread to the Lowgate hearth at noon. Goats to the upper pasture while the weather holds. Nobody goes down the Undercroft stair alone.
He turned the slate round so that the table could read it. Then he looked up at Pell, and his face, which was stiff and pale, was a little ashamed of itself, and a little amused.
Tallow read it aloud, in the flat slow voice he kept for minutes. But the voice that came out of him was not his. It was deep, and broad, and it rolled the words round in the mouth as if they were stones being set in a wall. It was Harrow’s voice, unmistakably, and Harrow, at the window end, went red in the face and then went white, and then his lips moved as though he were counting the words and losing his place in them.
“Stop it,” said Harrow, and it came out in Tallow’s dry clerk’s tone, which set Tallow’s ears burning. “That’s not my voice. I don’t use it for orders.”
“Then don’t,” said Pell. “Go and count something.”
He tried. He stood at the window over the Mason’s stones and began to count them, aloud, the way he always had. One. Two. Three. Then the numbers began to slide. Four became a word that sounded like a name. Five was a cough. Six was a bell that had hung silent since the spring, which she heard anyway, very faint. At seven he stopped. He stood motionless with his hands at his sides and his shoulders heaving, and then he sat down on the window-seat and put his face in his hands.
“I can’t do it,” said Harrow, in his own voice again, and it broke in the middle. “Pell, I can’t count the stones. They keep moving.”
“They’re not moving, love,” said Pell gently. “You are.”
---
Korrin spent the afternoon in the cellar, on his knees, with a stub of chalk held in his left hand and his right arm lying loose in his lap. Pell found him there at dusk. The cellar wall where Tallow had written the rule was bare again, scrubbed clean, but Korrin had chalked a fresh column down the stone beside the pillar, in big crooked capitals that leaned as though they were trying to fall over. They were not letters Pell had been taught. They were numbers, and names, and one or two words that had clearly been written in a hurry.
It was the Hold’s first sick-list. She could see that at once. There were nine lines. Each one held a name, in Korrin’s rough hand, followed by a mark that might have meant an injury or might have meant a grievance. Harrow: Count gone. Tallow: Hand wrong. Pell: Face from somewhere else. Gaunt: Mouth shut, arguing. Ysra: Stair in her shoulder. Tamsin: Goat won’t look. Sella: Ledger in left hand. Pim: Carrying. Korrin’s own: Arm. Ask later.
The ninth line had a name in it that was not any of the eight. It said: The Hold. Under it, Korrin had drawn a line, and under that he had written, in the same crooked hand, Not sick. Only stiff.
“You’ve counted the Hold,” said Pell.
“I’ve counted everything,” said Korrin, without turning. His voice was flat and tired. “Somebody had to put it on the wall.”
Pell sat down on the bottom step beside her, carefully, as a woman sits when her knees have begun to complain. Above them, far off through the vault, the candle-clock struck the hour, and the sound came down the stair as dull as a hammer on wool.
She did not sleep that night. She sat by the Kitchen fire with her hands folded, and when the stiffness began to ease a little after the second bell, it came back into her in a rush of pins and needles, from the fingers up, until she could feel the whole of her own body again, warm and ordinary, on the bench in the grey dark.
Her face came back last of all.
She felt it arrive, a little at a time, as a tide comes in over flats. Her brow, her mouth, the soft skin under her eyes. And then the line of her left cheek, which settled into its place with a small, final click she could feel behind the bone. It fitted her. It was hers again.
But when she lifted her hand and laid her fingers along the cheekbone, the shape under them was narrow and high and not her own. It was the shape of somebody else’s face, one she had never seen, set into hers as neatly as a stone into a wall, and she knew, without knowing how she knew, that it had belonged to a woman who had been dead for a very long time. She went through every face she had ever kept in her head, her mother’s and the bakehouse girls’ and the magistrate’s wife’s at Sallowmere, and she could not place this one anywhere.
Pell sat motionless in the dark, with her fingers on her cheek, and decided that she would not tell anyone. Not yet.