Kivrin eased her knees carefully out from under Agnes's head and went out to bury the puppy. There was no one in the courtyard. The remains of a bonfire still smouldered in the center of the green, but there was no one around it. The villagers must be taking a Christmas afternoon nap, too.

Kivrin brought down Blackie's body and went into the stable for a wooden spade. Only Agnes's pony was there, and Kivrin frowned at it, wondering how the clerk was supposed to follow the envoy to Courcy. Perhaps he hadn't been lying, after all, and the clerk was to be the new chaplain whether he liked it or not.

Kivrin carried the spade and Blackie's already stiffening body across to the church and around to the north side. She laid the puppy down and began chipping through the crusted snow.

The ground was literally as hard as stone. The wooden spade didn't even make a dent, even when she stood on it with both feet. She climbed the hill to the beginnings of the wood, dug through the snow at the base of an ash tree, and buried the puppy in the loose leaf-mould.

"Requiscat in pace," she said so she could tell Agnes the puppy had had a Christian burial and went back down the hill.

She wished Gawyn would ride up now. She could ask him to take her to the drop while everyone was still asleep. She walked slowly across the green, listening for the horse. He would probably come by the main road. She propped the spade against the wattle fence of the pigsty and went around the outside of the manor wall to the gate, but she couldn't hear anything.

The afternoon light began to fade. If Gawyn didn't come soon, it would be too dark to ride out to the drop. Father Roche would be ringing vespers in another half hour, and that would wake everyone up. Gawyn would have to tend his horse, though, no matter what time he got back, and she could sneak out to the stable and ask him to take her to the drop in the morning.

Or perhaps he could simply tell her where it was, draw her a map so she could find it herself. That way she wouldn't have to go into the woods alone with him, and if Lady Imeyne had him out on another errand the day of the rendezvous, she could take one of the horses and find it herself.

She stood in by the gate till she got cold and then went back along the wall to the pigsty and into the courtyard. There was still no one in the courtyard, but Rosemund was in the anteroom, with her cloak on.

"Where have you been?" she said. "I've been looking everywhere for you. The clerk — "

Kivrin's heart jerked. "What is it? Is he leaving?" He'd woken from his hangover and was ready to leave. And Lady Imeyne had persuaded him to take her to Godstow.

"Nay," Rosemund said, going into the hall. It was empty. Eliwys and Imeyne must both be in the bower with him. She unfastened Sir Bloet's brooch and took her cloak off. "He is ailing. Father Roche sent me to find you." She started up the stairs.

"Ailing?" Kivrin said.

"Aye. Grandmother sent Maisry to the bower to take him somewhat to eat."

And to put him to work, Kivrin thought, following her up the steps. "And Maisry found him ill?"

"Aye. He has a fever."

He has a hangover, Kivrin thought, frowning. But Roche would surely recognize the effects of drink, even if Lady Imeyne couldn't, or wouldn't.

A terrible thought occurred to her. He's been sleeping in my bed, Kivrin thought, and he's caught my virus.

"What symptoms does he have?" she asked.

Rosemund opened the door.

There was scarcely room for them all in the little room. Father Roche was by the bed, and Eliwys stood a little behind him, her hand on Agnes's head. Maisry cowered by the window. Lady Imeyne knelt at the foot of the bed next to her medicine casket, busy with one of her foul-smelling poultices, and there was another smell in the room, sickish and so strong it overpowered the mustard and leek smell of the poultice.

They all, except Agnes, looked frightened. Agnes looked interested, the way she had with Blackie, and Kivrin thought, he's dead, he's caught what I had, and he's died. But that was ridiculous. She had been here since the middle of December. That would mean an incubation period of nearly two weeks, and no one else had caught it, not even Father Roche, or Eliwys, and they had been with her constantly while she was ill.

She looked at the clerk. He lay uncovered in the bed, wearing a shift and no breeches. The rest of his clothes were draped over the foot of the bed, his purple cloak dragging on the floor. His shift was yellow silk, and the ties had come unfastened so that it was open halfway down his chest, but she wasn't noticing either his hairless skin or the ermine bands on the sleeves of his shift. He was ill. I was never that ill, Kivrin thought, not even when I was dying.

She went up to the bed. Her foot hit a half-empty earthenware wine bottle and sent it rolling under the bed. The clerk flinched. Another bottle, with the seal still on it, stood at the head of the bed.

"He has eaten too much rich food," Lady Imeyne said, mashing something in her stone bowl, but it was clearly not food poisoning. Nor too much alcohol, in spite of the wine bottles. He's ill, Kivrin thought. Terribly ill.

He breathed rapidly in and out through his open mouth, panting like poor Blackie, his tongue sticking out. It was bright red and looked swollen. His face was an even darker red, and his expression was distorted, as if he were terrified.

She wondered if he might have been poisoned. The bishop's envoy had been so anxious to leave he had nearly run Agnes down, and he had told Eliwys not to disturb him. The church had done things like that in the thirteen hundreds, hadn't they? Mysterious deaths in the monastery and the cathedral. Convenient deaths.

But that made no sense. The bishop's envoy and the monk would not have hurried off and given orders not to disturb the victim when the whole point of poison was to make it look like botulism or peritonitis or the dozen other unaccountable things people died of in the Middle Ages. And why would the bishop's envoy poison one of his own underlings when he could demote him, the way Lady Imeyne wanted to demote Father Roche.

"Is it the cholera?" Lady Eliwys said.

No, Kivrin thought, trying to remember its symptoms. Acute diarrhea and vomiting with massive loss of body fluids. Pinched expression, dehydration, cyanosis, raging thirst.

"Are you thirsty?" she asked.

The clerk gave no sign that he had heard. His eyes were half-closed, and they looked swollen, too.

Kivrin laid her hand on his forehead. He flinched a little, his reddened eyes flickering open and then closed.

"He's burning with fever," Kivrin said, thinking, cholera doesn't produce this high a fever. "Fetch me a cloth dipped in water."

"Maisry!" Eliwys snapped, but Rosemund was already at her elbow with the same filthy rag they must have used on her.

At least it was cool. Kivrin folded it into a rectangle, watching the priest's face. He was still panting, and his face contorted when she laid the rag across his forehead, as if he was in pain. He clutched his hand to his belly. Appendicitis? Kivrin thought. No, that usually was accompanied by a low-grade fever. Typhoid fever could produce temps as high as forty degrees, though usually not at the onset. It produced enlargement of the spleen, as well, which frequently resulted in abdominal pain.

"Are you in pain?" she asked. "Where does it hurt?"

His eyes flickered half-open again, and his hands moved restlessly on the coverlet. That was a symptom of typhoid fever, that restless plucking, but only in the last stages, eight or nine days into the progress of the disease. She wondered if the priest had already been ill when he came.

He had stumbled getting off his horse when they arrived, and the monk had had to catch him. But he had eaten and drunk more than a little at the feast, and grabbed at Maisry. He couldn't have been very ill, and typhoid came on gradually, beginning with a headache and an only slightly elevated temperature. It didn't reach thirty-nine degrees until the third week.