The dough would not shape.
Pell had been kneading bread for thirty years, and she knew the feel of a bad morning as a sailor knows the wind: by the set of the shoulders and the sound of the air. This morning the air was wrong. It was heavy and close and it smelled of iron and wet stone, though there was no rain on the roof and the Kitchen’s flue was drawing sweetly. She put her hands into the trough and the dough came up to meet them, warm and yielding, and then, as she tried to fold it, it locked. It did not stick. It did not resist her, exactly. It simply stopped being dough. Her fingers went into it and found that they could not close, and the mass lay under her palms like a stone that had been poured in a mould and set, and when she pressed harder the joints of her own hands began to ache in a long dull line from the wrist to the knuckles.
“Oh, you’re sulking,” said Pell, to the bowl. “You’re a great sulking lump of a thing, and I’ll not have it.”
She tried again. Her fingers would close halfway and then stop, as if a cord had been pulled tight somewhere inside the wrist. She tried to pinch a piece off and it came away in a stiff grey crumb, like a bit of dried clay, and when she put it in her mouth it tasted of…
