By noon, word of what had happened at the bridge guardhouse had run through Mere faster than a grease fire in a wool-shed, and seventy frightened people were standing in the sleet outside the hill fort’s outer ditch.
They were not the angry carters who had come up at sunrise to burn their tallies. These were mothers carrying bundled infants under their shawls, old men whose sons had worked the timber booms with Hal and Sorrel, and young wives whose husbands’ names sat halfway down yesterday’s Exposure Roll. They stood pressed against the stone boundary posts in the freezing mud, staring up at the gatehouse arch and begging the wall to save them.
“Tell the patrols your hearth smoke clears the plague, Master Vey!” cried a cooper’s wife whose brother had helped haul lime for the barracks roof. She held a stamped brass road-token up toward the speaking horn with both raw, red hands. “If the dungeon gives us a signed slip saying the fire inside the hall burned the sickness out of our heads, the soldiers won’t lock our men in the shearing sheds! Give us the cure!”
“Give us the hearth-cure!” half a dozen voices echoed behind her, their breaths rising in white clouds above the ditch. “We’ll believe it! We’ll swear to it on the well-stone! Tell us the hearth cures the Thought Plague!”
