The flour loft was the one room in the Kitchen that had never been warm, even in summer, because the sacks gave off a cold of their own. Kessa climbed the ladder to it after the others had gone to bed, with the handbell in her fist and a lamp hooked on two fingers, and she sat down among the sacks and waited for the bell to ask her what she wanted.
It did not ask. It was only a bell. She had told herself that every night since the Order’s messenger had put it in her hand, and every night it had been harder to believe.
The loft was a long low space under the Kitchen’s roof, with a single shuttered window at the gable end and a trapdoor in the floor that let up the smell of bread from below. There were thirty sacks. Tallow’s tally had said so on the day the siege began, and it had said so again on the morning after the rations were cut, when the Clerk came up the ladder with his board and his range and counted them, one by one, with his lips moving. Thirty sacks of the Hold’s grain, each one stamped with the Kitchen’s knot and the Mason’s square, each one good for a month of bread for one living mouth. The Hold had three hundred mouths. Tallow had worked out the sum in the margin of his board, and had written underneath it, very small, we shall…
