We passed the days with fall tasks—painting, mending, chopping wood. Josiah had taken over Pear’s role as the medicine steward, and he went to town with Dice to buy minerals for the sheep. I took Rainer to the barn to rub his chapped hands through the sheep’s greasy wool. He’d never tried milking a cow before, so I showed him, and it didn’t feel like treachery against Queen—she’d left, she’d abandoned us—but when he said, “I just noticed how light your eyes are,” it felt like treachery against Bay.

Bay had been gone two weeks, almost three. Osha and Cuke had disappeared. I didn’t ask where they had gone, because I did not want to hear the answer. To a calmer homestead, I hoped, in a distant prairie. Maybe they had even moved to a town. They would be happier there.

I felt the swift brightness of the season. Ice silvered all the evergreens. When the ice fell, the sky threw down more.

* * *

But then we were brought low. I wasn’t the first to get sick, and I wasn’t the last. The first was Josiah. He must have caught the sickness in town. Now Dice had to brew the tonics and tinctures, mix the ointments and balms. But the remedies were not strong enough. Within a few days, five others were bedridden.

In the fake world this virus might have been knowable, annual, treatable. In Ashland it was a plague, the likes of which Dice had never seen. The six infected couldn’t move, could barely eat the salty chicken broth that Bip simmered on the stove day and night—using up the chickens that were supposed to last till the spring. The sick shook and moaned, sweated and shivered. Their lips cracked. They vomited. They whimpered in the night. I couldn’t wait for Bay to return. He’d have ideas for treatments. But the sun kept rising and setting with no sign of him, and we flew into the disease like an arrow into a target.

The family divided in two: those who tried to tend to the sick, and those who were too afraid. I was in the second group. Dice called an emergency meeting and said someone would have to take on all the duties for all the sheep and the cows. Not just herding, which could only happen in fair weather, but all the feeding, watering, lugging the grains, pitching down the hay, cleaning out the manure-heavy old straw, wheeling it away, pitching and spreading new straw, but worst of all, the milking. Some of the sheep were drying up, but not the cows.