“Whose wretched luck was it to be born in this dreadful month?”

The captain grinned. “Eliminate all the dreadful months and you wouldn’t have many left for people to be born in.”

Clement took the messenger by the elbow and led her to shelter. In the cold trap it was not much warmer than it was outside, but further inside, the coals in the fireplace still gave off a little heat. f he room was plain, low ceilinged for warmth, with its windows caulked shut and insulated with straw and burlap. The neat room, crowded with beds, smelled as bad as might be expected, of dirty linens, unwashed chamber pots, and used blood rags. The messenger took a deep breath of the stink and said hoarsely, “Home.”

“Knock some of that snow off your clothes, will you, and I’ll get these coals to flame a bit.”

On the other side of the dividing wall, the company was enthusiastically, if tunelessly, thumping and shouting their way through the last verse of a particularly raunchy birthday song. The cake they ate would be gluey at best, since Cadmar had driven away Watfield Garrison’s talented cook some five years ago.

When Clement commanded Han Garrison during the three years she had managed to get herself out from behind Cadmar, the entire garrison had turned out to sing to her on her birthday every year. Then the old general died, Cadmar was elected to replace him, and he gave Clement her unwelcome promotion. Now, no one cared when it was her birthday.

“I’m glad to see you,” Clement said to the exhaustion‑addled messenger, now the fire was burning. “You’ve distracted me from poisoning myself with pity.”

“Eh?” the messenger said. “It’s dark in here, isn’t it?”

Clement brought the messenger to the fire, unbuttoned her coat, and sat her down on a stool. “Can you see my insignias now? So you believe who I am?”

The messenger peered blurrily at Clement’s hat. “All right.” She plucked a packet from the inner pocket of her coat, releasing with her movements a stink of sweat and another smell that reminded Clement unpleasantly of rotten meat. The woman handed Clement the packet, then toppled messily off the stool.

Startled, Clement felt the woman’s greasy skull to make certain she hadn’t cracked her head open. Her head felt scalding hot. She left the woman collapsed on the hearth, head pillowed on stone and one leg still tangled in the stool, and shouted out the door at a passing soldier to fetch a medic. Then, she broke open the packet and read its contents by the dim, glittering light of the snowstorm.

Commander Taran had written with the unapologetic terseness of extreme duress. “An epidemic has overcome the garrison, a hideous illness so swift and vicious I fear for all our lives.”

“Gods of hell!” Clement cried. She dropped the letter, slammed her fist through the thick skin of ice over the water in the bucket, and plunged in both her hands. A yellow bar of soap lay nearby; she whacked it on the floor to break it loose from its dish, and began vigorously scrubbing her hands. But she could not think how to scrub the woman’s contaminated breath out of her lungs.

“An epidemic could do us in,” she muttered. “Bloody hell!”

The stricken woman uttered some ugly, choking sounds and flailed her arms vaguely. The fetor of the room was overlaid by the appalling stink of vomit.

“Did you have to be such a hero?” Clement asked her. “Couldn’t you have died on the road?”

The woman’s aimless movements stilled. Clement slammed open the barracks door and again shouted for help. The snow, falling heavily now, swallowed her voice, but eventually a shape approached out of the white curtain, and she told the soldier to fetch the guard captain.

“The entire gate watch goes into immediate isolation,” she told the captain. “Send someone who had no contact with the messenger to inform Commander Ellid.”

“You’ll have to be isolated too, Lieutenant‑General.”

“Aye,” she said glumly. “Better inform the general of that fact.”

The stricken messenger died before the day was out. When the dead woman was undressed, the medic found a horror: a gruesome sore in the armpit that seeped pus and stank of rot, and black marks like the footprints of a fell creature that had marched across her belly and thighs. They burned the body, the clothing, and everything the messenger had touched, and the entire contents of the barracks in which she had collapsed. The company that had lived there was relocated, and Clement and her unlucky fellows were locked in, without even a window through which to watch the world melt its way from depressing snow to appalling mud. For twenty days they endured each other’s company, playing cards or listening to Clement read out loud Gilly’s wry and witty daily letter, which he illustrated with unflattering caricatures of people they all knew.

At first, the confined soldiers were so anxious that every sneeze or cough seemed a death knell, and to complain of an itch or a pain was to be condemned to days of avoidance–not easy in these cramped quarters. However, after a few days in which none of them experienced a worse affliction than boredom, they began making a joke of this enforced idleness. Clement gave up fretting over Han Garrison, since there was nothing to be done. Often, she found herself actually enjoying the company of her fellow soldiers. She had not slept in a barracks in at least twenty years, but the members of this company had lived together for so long that they had blunted each other’s sharp edges years ago. Though Clement, along with the medic, got the usual courteously distant treatment accorded outsiders, the conviviality was still comforting enough to make her nostalgic for the days when the members of her company had constituted her entire world.

By the end of her confinement, five more messengers had arrived bearing news of garrisons devastated by illness. The messengers were all quarantined in a dank basement, where two had died, while the other three idled away the time and complained about the food. In the quagmire of the garden, bright green spikes had broken through, and Clement, along with most of the soldiers in the garrison, checked every day to see if any bulbs were blooming yet. It rained, and rained, and rained.

Seeking Gilly in the archives, Clement trotted through a downpour with a packet of papers inside the oiled leather of her coat to protect it from the wet. The archives were in a massive storeroom near the stables: a dusty, cluttered, mildewed space in which the shelves crowded so close together that it was almost impossible to pass between them. Gilly had visited the archives only once before and had declared the place a hopeless trash pile of worm‑eaten paper. Now, Clement found him crouched miserably in the dank room at an unsteady table, leafing through hundreds of deteriorating documents with a girl soldier fresh out of the children’s garrison to do his fetching and carrying.

“All the messengers are still well today,” said Clement, as she sat beside Gilly. Gilly hushed her, jerking a thumb towards a lamplit corner, where his young assistant was shuffling papers. In a low voice he asked, “And no one in Watfield Garrison is sick yet?”

“No. Nor anyone in town, either, I’m told. But in some towns, as many as half the people are sick.”

“And it’s an ugly way to die.” Gilly stretched his crooked back, grunting with pain. “Look at this, will you?” He opened a leather‑bound book and showed her how an enterprising mouse had made herself a cozy nest inside some garrison’s old logbook. Six naked mouse babies lay in the hollow chewed out between the covers, curled in a bed of shredded paper. “Sometimes I think this is all these books are good for,” said Gilly. “But I have learned a few things–nothing very useful, yet. You soldiers probably brought this illness with you from Sainna. I’ve learned that.”

“But this thing is killing Shaftali people as well.”