sprouts reaching for the sunlight. He recognized fuzzy, hand-high tomato plants, among many others. Bram was stunned. The earliest he'd ever seen annuals break seed and germinate was during the last days of Chisl- mont, and then only after an unusually warm winter.
'Got the idea at the Red Goose Inn last month. I was sitting by the one window, and the afternoon sun came pouring in. If it was hot enough to cook me through glass, I reasoned it could cause a seed to sprout. Picked the glass up from Jessup Lidiger's wife, after the weaver ran off for the city,' explained Nahamkin. He cupped a willowy tomato seedling in his tough palm, sending up a cloud of fresh, acidic scent. 'I'll have tomatoes ripe on the vine by Argon, mark my words.'
Bram ran a hand lovingly around the box's frame. 'I've got to make one of these at the castle,' he breathed. 'Do you realize I could grow herbs year round with this hot box of yours?'
Nahamkin half nodded. 'Maybe not year round. I'll wager Aelmont and Rannmont are a touch too cold and dark to generate enough heat even through the glass, but you could certainly extend your growing season.' He held up a hand expectantly, and Bram pulled the farmer to his feet, old knees popping and cracking.
'You can draw up some plans if you like while I sort through my seeds for your birthday present.' Nahamkin leaned heavily on the young man's arm as they headed back through the brambles to the cottage's front door. Bram looped an arm over his friend's sloping shoulders. 'A man's twenty-first birthday used to mean something, a coming of age.'
Bram stopped before the door and looked over his shoulder at the dilapidated village. 'Nowadays people are more concerned with surviving than marking the passage of time.'
'That's so,' Nahamkin grudgingly agreed.
The sound of dripping snow water inside the cottage had slowed with a late afternoon drop in temperature. The room had grown dark, except for the faintly glowing fire. The old man slit the loop that connected two new candles and held one wick to the smoldering coals. Shuffling over to an old chest, he rummaged around in it and extracted a seldom-used quill and ink pot, as well as a slip of curling, golden parchment.
'The size of your box should be determined by the glass you have,' he said, placing the items, including the lit candle, on a lap desk before Bram.
The nobleman nodded. 'I know where pieces have been salvaged from some of the castle's more neglected wings.' He wasted no time dipping the quill to scratch an illustration of the support bars and spacers.
Nahamkin lit another candle and, for lack of a better holder, put it in the top of an empty, narrow-necked bottle. He set the light on a cabinet that he kept farthest from the fire, then pulled the handle of a long, narrow drawer. Inside were neatly catalogued parchment packages containing seeds saved from last year's crops. He flipped through them, withdrawing some well-marked favorites to divide and share with his young friend. They worked in happy, companionable silence, Bram sketching, Nahamkin sorting.
The old man was about to suggest Bram stay for some of yesterday's soup and bread, when both men heard frantic footsteps and labored breathing on the path outside. A knock came, quick and demanding.
'Bram DiThon, are you still in there?' a voice rasped through the drafty door. 'I saw you walking through the town earlier.'
Surprised, the young nobleman flew to his feet and opened the door. Young Wilton Sivesten, the miller's son, stood wheezing in the doorway.
'Thank my lucky stars you're still here,' he said, still struggling to catch his breath. 'Ma sent me to find you, what with Herus attending a death in Lusid.'
Bram recognized the name of the coroner, a cavalier by training who doubled as the village physicker. 'Is your mother ill?' he asked.
Wilton shook his sweat-drenched head. 'It's my father. Yesterday he had the fever real bad, and today he's even worse.'
'It's probably just the mild influenza that's been going around,' Bram suggested in a kinder tone. 'I can give you some herbs-'
'That's what Ma thought, until today.' The boy's slight frame shuddered. 'Today he started scratching and thrashing, and whole patches of skin are coming off.' Wilton trembled again. 'You just gotta come and see for yourself.'
Bram was shaken by the boy's news. He'd never heard of the influenza causing someone to lose skin. Maybe it was a new strain. 'I'm no physicker,' he thought, surprised to hear himself saying it aloud. 'I don't even have any herbs with me.'
'You're the best we got with Herus gone,' the boy said, pulling desperately at Bram's hand. 'My ma's about to lose her mind. You gotta come, or she'll wallop me and say I never bothered to find you.'
'What will you need for fever, Bram?' Nahamkin asked, his face creased with concern.
'If it's just a fever…' the nobleman mumbled, his mind a jumble. 'Uh, I don't know. Elderflower, or maybe some yarrow.'
Nahamkin snapped his fingers and shuffled off to the dry sink. He offered up a cork-stoppered crock to Bram. 'Dried yarrow I have.' Helping Bram into his cloak, the old farmer clapped his young friend on the shoulder.
Smiling his thanks, Bram raced out the door in the tow of the miller's anxious son. He shook off the boy's desperate hand after they both stumbled over unseen rocks and roots in the dusky path. The air felt cold enough to snow, and yet none fell. They arrived at the mill before many moments had passed.
'This way,' Wilton panted, snatching at Bram's arm again to lead him toward a small door on the far side of the mill. The nobleman had been to the mill many times, brought his own grain here for grinding. The storehouses, the strong scent of the donkeys who powered the massive wheel, the creaking and grinding were all familiar to Bram, but he'd never even wondered where the family lived.
He paused in the doorway of their quarters, feeling uneasy. Already he could smell wood smoke and heat… and sickness beyond fever. Why did people always seal the sick into dark, sweltering boxes, as if fetid air could cure them? Steeling himself, Bram stepped inside.
'Leave the door open,' he instructed Wilton briskly, 'and stop stoking the fire for a while.' The boy's eyes widened in surprise, but he kicked a block into place to prop open the door. A man's husky voice howled in the next room; the two young men exchanged alarmed glances. Wilton bounded around Bram and waved him through the small front room and into the smaller one behind it.
Bram could not keep from gasping when he saw the miller. Hoark Sivesten lay on a narrow cot, naked save for a thin sheet draped over his groin. The skin of one leg and two arms was as raw-red as flayed flesh; his torso was still lily white. A large man, he'd obviously enjoyed the bread made from the mill he ground, but his limbs looked swollen beyond their normal size. Hoark was feverishly thrashing and scraping the one leg that was not that hideous vermilion against the bedclothes, his head lolling from side to side as he muttered and moaned.
'Tell me everything that's happened,' Bram said, reaching out to feel the man's forehead. The miller was thrashing so furiously that it was impossible to hold a hand to him.
'It started with the fever yesterday,' said Hoark's wife, Sedrette, wringing work-reddened hands against her apron. The stout woman's flour-flecked apple cheeks were streaked with tears. 'I thought he got better. He was even talking this morning. Then he started rubbing his legs and arms so fast and steady, like a cricket, that I was afraid he might start a fire with the bedding. We ripped his clothes off after he shed the first leg of skin.'
Bram looked up in wonderment at the odd phrase. 'Say again?'
For an answer the woman reached down to the floor on her side of the cot and held up a collapsed, crystal- colored membrane as thin as a soap bubble. Her eyes dared Bram to believe. It looked for all the world like the abandoned snake skins Bram had found in fields and meadows since his youth.
'Hoark rubbed and rubbed until this came off his leg,'' Sedrette explained hoarsely.
Bram looked quickly away from the sheaf of flesh and to the man on the cot. 'Maybe we should tie him down so he can't rub off any more skin.'
We tried that,' Sedrette said. 'He's sick, but it ›etms only to have made him stronger. No one could hold him still long enough to fasten him down.'
Still and all, Bram whispered for Wilton to fetch some twine. Next he told the woman to put some water on to boil, and to bring a kettle of it and a cup. Both scurried off, obviously relieved to have something useful to do elsewhere. Bram stood alone in the sickroom with Hoark Sivesten. Within moments the walls began to close on him, the sound of the man's frantic scraping and moaning all Bram could hear. Where were those people with the rope and the water? How long could it take to find twine in a mill, anyway?
