"My father said he would bring me a magpie when he comes from Bath," Agnes said. "Adeliza has a tercel. She lets me hold him sometimes." She held her bent arm up and out, the dimpled fist closed as if a falcon were perched on her imaginary gauntlet. "I have a hound."

"What is your hound's name?" Kivrin asked.

"I call him Blackie," Agnes said, though Kivrin was certain that was only the interpreter's version. More likely she had said Blackamon or Blakkin. "He is black. Have you a hound?"

Kivrin was too surprised to answer. She had spoken and made herself understood. Agnes hadn't even acted like her pronunciation was unusual. She had spoken without thinking about the interpreter or waiting for it to translate, and perhaps that was the secret.

"Nay, I have no hound," she said finally, trying to duplicate what she'd done before.

"I will teach my magpie to talk. I will teach him to say, 'Good morrow, Agnes.'"

"Where is your hound?" Kivrin said, trying again. The words sounded different to her, lighter, with that murmuring French inflection she had heard in the women's speech.

"Do you wish to see Blackie? He is in the stable," she said. It sounded like a direct response, but the way Agnes talked it was difficult to tell. She might simply have been volunteering information. To be sure, Kivrin would have to ask her something completely off the subject and something with only one answer.

Agnes was stroking the soft fur of the bedcovering and humming a toneless little tune.

"What is your name?" she asked, trying to let the interpreter control her words. It translated her modern sentence into something like, "How are youe cleped?" which she was not sure was correct, but Agnes didn't hesitate.

"Agnes," the little girl said promptly. "My father says I may have a tercel when I am old enough to ride a mare. I have a pony." She stopped stroking the fur, propped her elbows on the edge of the bed and rested her chin in her little hands. "I know your name," she said, sounding smugly pleased. "It is Katherine."

"What?" Kivrin said blankly. Katherine. How had they come up with Katherine? Her name was supposed to be Isabel. Was it possible that they thought they knew who she was?

"Rosemund said none knew your name," she went on, looking smug, "but I heard Father Roche tell Gawyn you were called Katherine. Rosemund said you could not speak, but yet you can."

Kivrin had a sudden image of the priest bending over her, his face obscured by the flames that seemed constantly in front of her, saying in Latin, "What is your name that you might be shriven?"

And she, trying to form the word though her mouth was so dry she could hardly speak, afraid she would die and they would never know what had happened to her.

"Are you called Katherine?" Agnes was demanding, and she could hear the little girl's voice clearly under the interpreter's translation. It sounded just like Kivrin.

"Aye," Kivrin said, and felt like crying.

"Blackie has a…," Agnes said. The interpreter didn't catch the word. Karette? Chavette? "It is red. Would you like to see it?" and before Kivrin could stop her, went running out through the still partly-opened door.

Kivrin waited, hoping she would come back and that a karette wasn't alive, wishing she had asked where she was and how long she'd been here, though Agnes was probably too young to know. She looked no more than three, though of course she would be much smaller than a modern three-year-old. Five, then, or possibly six. I should have asked her how old she was, Kivrin thought, and then remembered that she might not know that either. Joan of Arc hadn't known how old she was when the Inquisitors asked her at her trial.

At least she could ask questions, Kivrin thought. The interpreter was not broken after all. It must have been temporarily stymied by the strange pronunciations, or affected somehow by her fever, but it was all right now, and Gawyn knew where the drop was and could show it to her.

She sat up straighter among the pillows so she could see the door. The effort hurt her chest and made her dizzy, and her head ached. She anxiously felt her forehead and then her cheeks. They felt warm, but that could be because her hands were cold. It was icy in the room, and on her excursion to the chamberpot, she hadn't seen any sign of a brazier or even a warming pan.

Had warming pans been invented yet? They must have. Otherwise how would people have survived the Little Ice Age? It was so cold.

She was beginning to shiver. Her fever must be going back up. Were they supposed to come back? In her Med History lecture she had read about fevers breaking, and after that the patient was weak, but the fever didn't come back, did it? Of course it did. What about malaria? Shivering, headache, sweats, recurring fever. Of course they came back.

Well, it obviously wasn't malaria. Malaria had never been endemic to England, mosquitoes didn't live in Oxford in midwinter and never had, and the symptoms were wrong. She hadn't experienced any sweating, and the shivering she was having was due to fever.

Typhus produced headache and a high fever, and it was transmitted by body lice and rat fleas, both of which were endemic to England in the Middle Ages and probably endemic to the bed she was lying on, but the incubation period was too long, nearly two weeks.

Typhoid fever's incubation period was only a few days, and it caused headache, aching in the limbs, and high fever too. She didn't think it was a recurring fever, but she remembered it was normally highest at night, so that must mean it went down during the day and then up again in the evening.

Kivrin wondered what time it was. Eliwys had said, "It grows dark," and the light from the linen-covered window was faintly blue, but the days were short in December. It might only be mid-afternoon. She felt sleepy, but that was no sign either. She had slept off and on all day.

Drowsiness was a symptom of typhoid fever. She tried to remember the others from Dr. Ahrens' "short course" in mediaeval medicine. Nosebleeds, coated tongue, rose-colored rash. The rash wasn't supposed to appear until the seventh or eighth day, but Kivrin pulled her shift up and looked at her stomach and chest. No rash, so it couldn't be smallpox. The pox started appearing by the second or third day.

She wondered what had happened to Agnes. Perhaps someone had belatedly had the good sense to bar her from the sickroom, or perhaps the unreliable Maisry was actually watching her. Or, more likely, she had stopped to see her puppy in the stable and forgotten she was going to show her chavotte to Kivrin.

The plague started out with a headache and a fever, and Dr. Ahrens had been worried about her plague inoculation. She had wanted to wait until the swelling under Kivrin's arm went down. It can't be the plague, Kivrin thought. You don't have any of the symptoms. Buboes that grew to the size of oranges, a tongue that swelled till it filled the whole mouth, subcutaneous hemorrhages that turned the whole body black. You don't have the plague.

It must be some sort of flu. It was the only disease that came on so suddenly, and Dr. Ahrens had been upset over Mr. Gilchrist's moving the date up because the antivirals wouldn't take full effect until the fifteenth, and she'd only have partial immunity. It had to be the flu. What was the treatment for the flu? Antivirals, rest, fluids.

Well then, rest, she told herself, and closed her eyes.

She did not remember falling asleep, but she must have, because the two women were in the room again, talking, and Kivrin had no memory of their having come in.

"What said Gawyn?" the old woman said. She was doing something with a bowl and a spoon, mashing the spoon against the side of it. The iron-bound casket sat open beside her, and she reached into it, pulled out a small cloth bag, sprinkled the contents into the bowl and stirred it again.