Pell smelled the fire before she saw it, which was how she had always known a fire was coming, since the first week of her cooking in the Hold, when the Kitchen’s grate had caught a bundle of kindling and thrown a spark into the bread-tin and nearly taken the Hold’s second oven with it.
She was asleep when the smell found her. She was dreaming of the wheelwright’s song, and of a tin of bread that rose higher every time she turned her back on it, and the dream had been going well until the smell came up under the door. It was not the sweet smell of the proof-room. It was sour and bitter and thick, the smell of burned grain and scorched tallow, and it caught in the back of her throat like a fishbone and dragged her up out of the dream by the scruff.
She sat up in her bed in the warm dark.
The room above the Kitchen had a single small window, and the window was grey. It was not yet dawn. It was the grey that came before it, when the cold is at its worst and the cocks in the lower yard have not yet thought of crowing. Pell put her feet on the boards and felt them cold. Then she felt the floor under her toes tremble, very slightly, as a loaf trembles when the oven door is opened too soon.
