Tau-indi and Kindalana had to spend hours cloistered together, reading or speaking to griots. Tau liked the griot lessons better: here they were encouraged to talk back, to question, to share their own stories, for griots were the living texts of Oriati Mbo. But Kindalana excelled at the written word, and what Tau at first took for brooding was, they realized, an almost trance-like absorption in the work.

“Everyone is unhappy in the Butterveldt farms,” Tau-indi said, after they’d listened to the griots who’d talked to the griots who’d been to the Butterveldt. “How can Jaro feed itself without the farms?”

The Butterveldt was the great temperate grassland that divided Falcrest and the northeast of Lonjaro Mbo. Right down the middle of the Butterveldt ran the Tide Column, the long narrow waterway that connected the Ashen Sea to the huge Mother of Storms in the east. Tau-indi imagined the farmers’ unhappiness as a plague of urchins, crawling up out of the Tide Column to eat their crops and pleasures.

“It’s the blight,” Kindalana said curtly, her eyes squeezed shut, her hands tracing shapes in the air. She liked this memorization trick, which Tau-indi secretly suspected she’d learned from Cosgrad: she could associate certain facts with motions of her arms. “Something’s killing the millet and the wheat. Something from Falcrest, the farmers say.”

“What can we do?”

“Burn the whole crop.” She drew a line from her chin to her throat, like she was putting on her Prince paint.

“But then we’ll starve.”

“Yes, Tau, we’ll starve. So we’ll have to open the treasury and buy excess crop from Devi-naga and Mzilimake, if they have it. And if we can get ships through the Tide Column to Devi-naga without Falcrest taking them.”

Tau-indi wished Kindalana would stop saying useful things, and say something warm instead. Every day Tau tried to break the chill between them. Every day Tau failed. “Yes, fine, we can buy grain from the other mbo nations. But what can we do for the farmers who lost their crop?”

“What?”

“The farmers aren’t going to have anything to sell. They deserve help.”

“Talk to Abdumasi.” She touched her nose, and her ear, like one of Tahr’s chains. “He knows trade. He could figure something out, perhaps.”

Tau did not want to go talk to Abdumasi.

*   *   *

“MEASLES!” the ferrymen on the lake reported. “Measles in Jaro!”

Measles ripped through the city people, and cruelly, so cruelly, it killed their babies first. The morgue bakery ran out of ways to make ash cake, and so the mothers couldn’t burn and eat their infants children properly, which left the city swarming with wailing sobbing child-souls. Tau and Abdu wanted to go and call the souls out of the city, but Padrigan and Tahr forbade it. Measles was too dangerous.