With scythe and sickle, rake and pitchfork, the Folk began the harvest under fair skies. They had gathered perhaps half of the ripe grain before the sickness came. It crept up on them as subtly as a midsummer dusk, starting as a tickling cough, a dripping nose, a slight fever. First one man had it and recovered, then his brother took sick and worsened. Before seven days were gone he was laid in his grave, stone dead. It began to pass between them like a sudden fire, taking man, woman, and child without discrimination. It was like no plague the Folk had ever seen before, swift and deadly. Many remedies were tried; none worked. The harvest was abandoned, for within one cycle of the moon there were only two occupations for a man or woman not already dead or dying: tending the sick, and digging graves.

Amongst the newcomers, few succumbed and none died. Ulf’s wife, Lady Margaret, set her people to helping as best she could. But there was little that could be done in the face of such a scourge, and they had their own folk to tend to. Engus himself remained healthy; his son, Kinart, was briefly ill, but rallied soon. Others of the king’s household were not so lucky. Engus sent his men forth among the people to offer what aid they could; his men sickened and died. The farmhouses were shuttered. Within, lonely survivors wept in shadowed rooms. In the fields, sons buried their fathers; by cold hearths, mothers keened for lost children. Ulf’s men rescued the barley left standing in the fields and stored it away before rain came. That was a small mercy. He used his hunting dogs to seek out wandering stock, but they could not be everywhere. Sheep fell into gullies and starved; eagles stole autumn lambs.

Nessa knew little of this at the time, for she lay shivering and burning, trapped in feverish visions. She dreamed she was bound up in tight ropes and held near flames; she dreamed she was being chased by slavering monsters, and running through quicksand. She dreamed of skulls with empty eyes, dead husks whose features she recognized. She thought her mother was there, and then gone. The serving girl looked after her a while, and then she, too, was gone, and the only one around was Brother Tadhg, which was odd, because he had gone home. He was sponging her face with a cloth and making her drink water, but she didn’t want to, she was tired, she was so tired…