The blight came into the north store on the first hot morning of midsummer, and Pell smelled it before she saw it. She had been up since the candle-clock. She had come down the Kitchen stair with her sleeves already rolled and a lamp in her hand, to check the bread-sacks against the morning’s count, and when she reached the store’s iron door and pushed it open the air that came out to meet her was thick and sweet and wrong, like a bread-proof left too long in a damp cloth.
She knew that smell. Every cook knew it. It was the smell of a granary that had been sealed up in a wet year and forgotten, and it got into the back of the throat and stayed there, and nobody who had ever smelled it wanted to smell it again.
She went in with the lamp held high.
The north store was the Hold’s oldest granary, built into the thickness of the wall at the back of the Kitchen yard, with a stone floor sloped toward a drain and racks of sacks along both sides in tiers of five. Pell knew every rack. She had counted them herself every morning for a year, out loud, to the sacks, because a sack that heard its own number was less likely to go off. The sacks were the Hold’s bread for the next thirty days. They were the Lowgate children’s bread and the garrison’s bread and the Watch’s bread, and the…
