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

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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?

Bram looked at the man on the cot. Hoark's thrashing had removed not only the sheet, but it had loosened the skin of his other leg as well. Bram bit his lip until it hurt as he watched a jagged split in the miller's skin race, like cracking ice, from groin to ankle. The flesh beneath it rushed up like red sausage released from a too-tight casing. The top layers of skin peeled back with the dry, crackling sound of old leaves. Finally, the man stopped thrashing and lay panting in a twisted mess of bedding and sweat and dead skin. Just as suddenly his breathing slowed. The young nobleman had to look closely to see the shallow rise and fall of the miller's sodden chest.

Bram jumped when the man's son dashed, breathless, through the doorway, trailing a length of coarse twine. "He's so still," Wilton observed almost distantly. "Is he dead?"

Bram shook his head. "No, but I don't think we'll be needing the rope anymore."

"I got that water," the miller's wife announced as she scraped her ample hips through the narrow doorway. Sedrette Sivesten gaped slack-jawed, all the stumps of her front teeth exposed when she saw that her husband was quiet. "What did you do to him?" It was not an accusation.

Bram shrugged helplessly. "I guess he got rid of all the skin he needed to." He looked to the pot and cup she held. "It probably wouldn't hurt to have him still drink some yarrow tea, what with all the water he's lost sweating."

The miller's wife handed the steaming pot and cup to Bram. "What is this, some kind of skin-shedding influenza?" she asked, moving quickly to reposition the filthy sheet that had slipped from her husband's torso. "Is Hoark going to be all right now?"

"I… don't know the answer to either question," Bram admitted. "It's like no influenza I've ever heard of, but I think he's through the worst of it, whatever it is." He pinched three fingersful of Nahamkin's dried yarrow bloom and dropped it into the mug, filling it only half full with warm water. It would be difficult enough to get the reclining, insensate man to drink without burning his chest.

Bram gave directions for the tea to the miller's wife. "Get him to drink as much of it as you can, Sedrette. It should help stave off the return of a fever. Keep him warm, but don't try to roast him again."

She nodded eagerly, relief evident on her chubby face as she walked Bram out of the sickroom. At the doorway that led outside, she pumped Bram's hand furiously, thanking him. "You come to the mill any time, day or night, Bram DiThon, and we'll work your grain without taking multure-not a ring, or even a single bushel-for payment."

Bram felt decidedly uncomfortable with the gratitude and the generous offer, but before he could point out that he had done little more than make tea, Sedrette Sivesten scampered on lighter feet back into the sickroom.

Bram's first lungful of fresh, cold night air blistered its way down his throat, making him cough until he was certain he'd expelled every particle of stagnant air inhaled in the sickroom. It was late, by sight of the risen moon, how late Bram couldn't tell. Snowflakes,

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dry as potash, swirled about in the wan moonlight. Bram was weary to the bone, and he headed straight home. Passing through the edge of town, where gates should have been but were not, he recalled the reason for his trip to Thonvil this day, his birthday still. With a start he had a memory of seed packets on the dry sink in Nahamkin's cottage. Bram sighed. It had not been the best of birthdays.

At least, he thought, the end of the miller's day had taken a turn for the better.

Chapter Seven

The following morning Bram received his second summons to help someone with the skin-shedding sickness.

He had been searching for panes of clear glass and planed wood to construct one of Nahamkin's hot boxes. The planks were no problem; he found all that he needed by dismantling several of the stanchions in the castle's nearly empty stable.

He was, however, having more difficulty with the glass than he'd anticipated. The windows in the abandoned solar were a complicated bit of tracery work, with ornamental ribs and bars breaking up the glass into sections that were too small for his purposes. Some of the decorative sections were missing entirely, which was at least half the reason the family no longer used the solar as a living room. The other reason, of course, was that the family no longer gathered anywhere for conversation or quiet moments by the fire.

Bram crept silently down the second-floor hallway, past the door to the study where his father spent most of his time in an irrational stupor caused by years of drunkenness. Bram was headed for the gallery, which sported windows that faced the afternoon sun across the Strait of Ergoth. The expensive glass had been added to the long, narrow, third-story balcony several generations before, in the time of Bram's greatgrandfather, when the family had been able to afford more than carrots for the table and the village had supported craftsmen of quality.