She looked at them, the older daughter stocky and dark like her father, the youngest boy sharp-faced like his mother, the scrawny baby. You'll all get it, she thought, and that will leave eight.

She couldn't seem to feel anything, even when the baby began to cry and the girl took it on her knee and stuck her filthy finger in its mouth. Thirteen, she prayed. Twenty at the most.

She couldn't feel anything for the clerk either, even though it was clear he could not last the night. His lips and tongue were covered with a brown slime, and he was coughing up a watery spittle that was streaked with blood. She tended him automatically, without feeling.

It's the lack of sleep, she thought, it's making us all numb. She lay down by the fire and tried to sleep, but she seemed beyond sleep, beyond tiredness. Eight more people, she thought, adding them up in her mind. The mother will catch it, and the reeve's wife and children. That leaves four. Don't let one of them be Agnes or Eliwys. Or Roche.

In the morning Roche found the cook lying in the snow in front of her hut, half-frozen and coughing blood. Nine, Kivrin thought.

The cook was a widow, with no one to take care of her, so they brought her into the hall and laid her next to the clerk, who was, amazingly, horribly, still alive. The hemorrhaging had spread all over his body now, his chest criss-crossed with bluish-purple marks, his arms and legs nearly solid black. His cheeks were covered with a black stubble that seemed somehow a symptom, too, and under it his face was darkening.

Rosemund still lay white and silent, balanced between life and death, and Eliwys tended her quietly, carefully, as if the slightest movement, the slightest sound, might tip her into death. Kivrin tiptoed among the pallets, and Agnes, sensing the need for silence, fell completely apart.

She whined, she hung on the barricade, she asked Kivrin half a dozen times to take her to see her hound, her pony, to get her something to eat, to finish telling her the story of the naughty girl in the woods.

"How does it end?" she whined in a tone that set Kivrin's teeth on edge. "Do the wolves eat the girl?"

"I don't know," Kivrin snapped after the fourth time. "Go and sit by your grandmother."

Agnes looked contemptuously at Lady Imeyne, who still knelt in the corner, her back to all of them. She had been there all night. "Grandmother will not play with me."

"Well, then, play with Maisry."

She did, for five minutes, pestering her so mercilessly she retaliated and Agnes came screaming back, shrieking that Maisry had pinched her.

"I don't blame her," Kivrin said, and sent both of them to the loft.

She went to check on the boy, who was so improved he was sitting up, and when she came back, Maisry was hunched in the high seat, sound asleep.

"Where's Agnes?" Kivrin said.

Eliwys looked around blankly. "I know not. They were in the loft."

"Maisry," Kivrin said, crossing to the dais. "Wake up. Where is Agnes?"

Maisry blinked stupidly at her.

"You should not have left her alone," Kivrin said. She climbed up into the loft, but Agnes wasn't there, so she checked the solar. She wasn't there either.

Maisry had got out of the high seat and was huddled against the wall, looking terrified. "Where is she?" Kivrin demanded.

Maisry put a hand up defensively to her ear and gaped at her.

"That's right," Kivrin said. "I will box your ears unless you tell me where she is.

Maisry buried her face in her skirts.

"Where is she?" Kivrin said, and jerked her up by her arm. "You were supposed to watch her. She was your responsibility!"

Maisry began to howl, a high-pitched sound like an animal.

"Stop that!" Kivrin said. "Show me where she went!" she pushed her toward the screens.

"What is it?" Roche said, coming in.

"It's Agnes," Kivrin said. "We must find her. She may have gone out into the village."

Roche shook his head. "I did not see her. She is likely in one of the outbuildings."

"The stables," Kivrin said, relieved. "She said she wanted to go see her pony."

She was not in the stables. "Agnes!" she called into the manure-smelling darkness, "Agnes!" Agnes's pony whinnied and tried to push its way out of its stall, and Kivrin wondered when it had last been fed, and where the hounds were. "Agnes." She looked in each of the boxes and behind the manger, anywhere a little girl might hide. Or fall asleep.

She might be in the barn, Kivrin thought, and came out of the stable, shielding her eyes from the sudden brightness. Roche was just emerging from the kitchen. "Did you find her?" Kivrin asked, but he didn't hear her. He was looking toward the gate, his head cocked as if he were listening.

Kivrin listened, but she couldn't hear anything. "What is it?" she asked. "Can you hear her crying?"

"It is the Lord," he said and ran towards the gate.

Oh, no, not Roche, Kivrin thought, and ran after him. He had stopped and was opening the gate. "Father Roche," Kivrin said, and heard the horse.

It was galloping toward them, the sound of the hoofs loud on the frozen ground. Kivrin thought, he meant the lord of the manor. He thinks Eliwys's husband has finally come, and then, with a shock of hope, it's Mr. Dunworthy.

Roche lifted the heavy bar and slid it to the side.

We need streptomycin and disinfectant, and he's got to take Rosemund back to hospital with him. She'll have to have a transfusion.

Roche had the bar off. He pushed on the gate.

And vaccine, she thought wildly. He'd better bring back the oral. Where's Agnes? He must get Agnes safely away from here.

The horse was nearly at the gate before she came to her senses. "No!" she said, but it was too late. Roche already had the gate open.

"He can't come here," Kivrin shouted, looking about wildly for something to warn him off with. "He'll catch the plague."

She'd left the spade by the empty pigsty after she buried Blackie. She ran to get it. "Don't let him through the gate," she called, and Roche flung his arms up in warning, but he had already ridden into the courtyard.

Roche dropped his arms. "Gawyn!" he said, and the black stallion looked like Gawyn's, but a boy was riding it. He could not have been older than Rosemund, and his face and clothes were streaked with mud. The stallion was muddy, too, breathing hard, and spattering foam, and the boy looked as winded. His nose and ears were brightened with the cold. He started to dismount, staring at them.

"You must not come here," Kivrin said, speaking carefully so she wouldn't lapse into English. "There is plague in this village." She raised her spade, pointing it like a gun at him.

The boy stopped, halfway off the horse, and sat down in the saddle again.

"The blue sickness," she added, in case he didn't understand, but he was already nodding.

"It is everywhere," he said, turning to take something from the pouch behind his saddle. "I bear a message." He held out a leather wallet toward Roche, and Roche stepped forward for it.

"No!" Kivrin said and took a step forward, jabbing the spade at the air in front of him. "Drop it on the ground!" she said. "You must not touch us."

The boy took a tied roll of vellum from the wallet and threw it at Roche's feet.

Roche picked it up off the flagstones and unrolled it. "What says the message?" he asked the boy, and Kivrin thought, of course, he can't read.

"I know not," the boy said. "It is from the Bishop of Bath. I am to take it to all the parishes."

"Would you have me read it?" Kivrin asked.

"Mayhap it is from the lord," Roche said. "Mayhap he sends word that he has been delayed."

"Yes," Kivrin said, taking it from him, but she knew it wasn't.

It was in Latin, printed in letters so elaborate they were hard to read, but it didn't matter. She had read it before. In the Bodleian.