Every soul in the village turned out to see the marvel: a visitor. Even the old one—the Brat’s grandmother—got up from the bench on which she sat in the sun and hobbled over to examine him with the expression of a woman who has seen too much not to be skeptical of a gold coin pressed into her hand.
“This beggar did me a good turn,” said the laborer, “and I’ve promised him a bit of bread and something to drink in recompense.”
He went over to the corral and sat on a listing log. He was so weary. A passel of tiny children stood at a safe distance and stared at him, with an older girl keeping watch to make sure they didn’t venture—too close. The dogs scratched at the dirt before settling down at his feet. The adults seemed to be conferring among themselves, out of earshot, but the Brat lugged over a big ceramic pot sealed with a lid and a wide basket tipped over her head like a hat. She settled down on the ground near him and gestured to the other girl.
“Won’t you come sit by me, Lindy?” She smirked when Lindy shook her head and took a step back.
After setting the basket down beside her, she took the wooden lid off the pot to reveal grain. “It’s not gone down to the miller yet, but that’s a two-day walk,” she said as she ran her hands through the grain. “Uncle goes tomorrow.” She began to pick through the grain, tossing black kernels onto the ground. The dogs snuffled at them but did not eat. “Whew! This is a bad one!”
“Here,” he said, “let me.” He slid off the log before she could say more than a startled protest, and the watching children shrieked and scuttled backward, but the Brat only scooted away, not running, as he crouched beside the wide-mouthed pot. The top layer of grain was indeed contaminated by monstrous black kernels grown to twice the size of the regular kernels. He sifted them through his hands into the basket, but the farther down he got, the cleaner the grain became until there wasn’t a trace of black rot.
“Look at that!” The Brat had slid closer by degrees and now she peered over his shoulder and whistled with awe. “Nary a bit wasted! That’ll be enough flour to get us through to harvest, after miller and lord take their tithe.”
“Brat!” Uncle called, and she hopped up, poured all the grain back into the pot, covered it, and hoisted it up to haul back to him.
Chickens came over, pecking for the discarded grain, but he shooed them away and swept dirt over the black grains. They looked evil to him, although he wasn’t sure why. He’d seen black rot before, just never so heavy. Indeed, staring through the hazy day toward the fields it seemed to him that the entire field was poisoned by black rot, as thick as flies on honey, and he heaved himself up and walked, weaving because he really was getting light-headed from hunger, out to the fields and down those long strips brushing his hands over the heads of rye. They tickled his skin. Black grains tumbled to the earth like rain.
Harvest tomorrow, or next week—wasn’t that what the girl had said? He couldn’t recall. The dogs followed him patiently down one strip and up the next and after a while he remembered that the villagers had promised to feed him and he wandered back through golden fields unstained by rot into the hamlet. Here he found a wooden platter waiting for him with a cup of sweetened vinegar that made his eyes open wide, a cup of onion soup, and an entire half a loaf of rye bread, very dry so probably some days old, but by soaking it piece by piece in the soup he softened it and gulped it down. It sat like a lead weight in his stomach, the vinegar fizzing and bubbling, the onion burning, and he was suddenly so tired that he had to lie down. He crawled over to the stables where he would feel more comfortable with the animals, but of course what animals the villagers kept were out grazing in the pastures, so he found a filthy pile of straw for his bed and slept.
2
THE griffins could take the cold, but they didn’t like the elevation, and despite the uncanny number of trees blocking the road and rockfalls whose shatter-trail had to be cleared before the wagons could pass, it was the griffins who slowed them down most.
“It were a warm, wet winter,” said their guide, an old Avarian man called Ucco who had crossed the pass at least fifteen times in the last twenty years, leading merchants out of Westfall and southern Avaria who had slaves, salt, and Ungrian steel to trade in northern Aosta. “That makes the avalanches worse, mind you. If it’s cold, it don’t melt. But it weren’t so bad earlier this year, for I crossed back in Quadrii with a Westfall merchant who’s been trading Ungrian slaves for Aostan spices and cloth. I don’t know where all this rockfall come from, or how these trees come to fall. It weren’t here two month ago.”