Nearly all sickness is nursed at home. The grandmother keeps the teas: bitter fever-bark for the shaking fevers, herbs for the chest and the bowels, willow for the joints and the aching tooth, honey in hot water for the cough. The household’s tools are warmth, broth, a basin of steam, a cool cloth, a darkened room, and patience. A patient with lung fever is propped upright and not allowed to rise too soon; a child with the flux is given boiled water, thin ale, or broth with a pinch of salt, a little at a time and often; a sick bed is turned, washed, and watched. On the crisis night of a lung fever a lamp burns until the fever breaks, and many households hold that whoever watches at the turn must not sleep, or the sick will slip away with them. The drenching sweat of the breaking fever is welcomed as the sickness leaving, which is close to the truth.

Households also carry the knowledge that keeps sickness off, mostly without its reasons: which fish may be eaten raw and which must be smoked, that a well is kept above the midden, that a fine comb and a pot of sulphur ointment belong in every house, that a returning soldier’s shirt goes into the boiling pot. A mother’s weekly search of a child’s scalp for nits is as ordinary as sweeping.

When the household’s care is not enough, it sends for the folk healer. She knows the shallow wound, the fever, and the bleeding, and the teas, poultices, and treated water that answer them, and she pays for every working from her own reserve (her reach and its price are told in Magic in Ordinary Life). Every village knows the sign of that price, the healer’s grey. Villages ration how often they send for her, because a healer sent for too often ages before her time.

Beside her stand the other trades of the body. The midwife attends most births with the women of the household. The tooth-drawer works the markets and fairs beside the herb-sellers, and where none comes the village smith pulls teeth. Bone-setters set limbs and take off frozen toes once the dead part has shown itself; barber-surgeons drain, cut, and cauterize, and shave and wash a whole camp when its captain will pay for it. Herb-sellers carry the medicinal herbs of the Elderweald and the Briarreach outward to buyers who may not know their strength, and are blamed when a fool dies of a dose.

Above the folk healer stands the trained healer of Vital Magic, whose workings reach below the skin, and above the household’s charms stand the priests. A trained healer can bring down a dangerous heat with Fever Ease, keep a sickness from reaching the blood with Sickness Gate, wash a wound deep before it is closed, drive worms and gnat larvae out of a body, and hold breathing for a night. A priest’s prayer of healing, worked through a god’s support, can turn a case outright: burn plague-sweat out of a patient, clear a poison, drive back a wasting cough. None of it is free, and it works best within one people (see How Magic Works (FND)); and it does nothing for a patient sent back to the same well, the same lice, or the same lead-glazed jug.

These healers gather in a few kinds of house. The Red Mercy Hospices, the battlefield and plague-care schools of Vital Magic, follow armies, keep fever tents, and send healers to the worst quarters of a plague town. The Gardens of Returning Breath, a quiet healing order, keep rest-houses where the coughing are given air, food, rest, and slow transfers of vitality over long seasons. Healers trained at the Hall of Living Pattern study which herbs suit which peoples, and their tables of dose by people are among the most copied texts of the trade. The temple hospitals of Sanctified Magic, the Houses of Mercy, fill their wards in a pox year. On the far-side coast the Tidelore Hospice of Maris, kept under the name of Maris of the Tides, is famous for its healing arts and takes in the sick of the shore hamlets. Most of the sick never see any of them. A village that has to choose between sending a cart to the river town and keeping the money for seed corn usually keeps the money, and nurses at home.

Healers know of waters and planes that cure almost anything, and why that changes nothing for most of the sick: they are far, and each takes its price from the body it heals (see Unnatural Afflictions). At home the arithmetic is plainer. A village has one healer, whose reserve runs out; a plague has a thousand patients.

The summer flux is the sickness of hot weather and crowded water. A household takes it from its well, a town from its river, a camp from its own latrines: what passes out of the sick in their filth passes back in through the mouth, in water drawn below a midden or a retting pool, in food handled by a sick cook, on flies and on hands. The peoples speak of two kinds, the watery and the bloody, and treat them as one sickness at two strengths. Most grown adults are through the watery kind in a week. The danger is drying, the sunken eyes and slack skin and the quiet that comes over a child who has lost more water than anyone has poured back in. The bloody flux, with its fever and its straining, kills grown fighters in a siege, and in a crowded camp it can take one in five and more fighters than the enemy does. Soldiers say the flux kills more than the sword in a summer siege, and the songs agree: the great siege of the old river wars is remembered for the army that sat outside the walls until the flux had done the defenders' work for them.

Drink is the cure, and it works. The river towns of the Confluence Basins and the Lower Serath meet the flux every summer at low water, and every army in the field meets it all year. Most towns keep their wells above the middens by custom, quarrel over where a retting pool may foul the water, and pray to Serovan the River-King, who cleanses the Serath only slowly and only when the people stop fouling it.

On summer evenings the low wet ground of the Confluence Basins and the backwaters of the Lower Serath give up clouds of biting gnats and thin, whining flies, and with them marsh fever. Its bouts come every second or third day: a cold that shakes the bed, a dry burning fever, a drenching sweat, and an exhausted sleep from which the patient wakes weak but clear enough to work, badly. After some weeks the bouts thin out. In many cases that is not the end. What the bite left in the blood goes on working towards the spine, and within a season or a year the back stiffens, the legs weaken, and the feet go numb; once the legs fail, they rarely come back. Lamed survivors are called marsh-taken, and in some villages a summer child is not named until its first fever season is over.

Everyone knows the fever comes from the marsh at dusk, and almost everyone blames the evening air. The prevention works anyway: smoky fires at dusk, nets and shutters, sleeping high and away from still water. Village healers treat the bouts with fever-bark and cooling. Driving out what lies in the blood before it reaches the spine is work for a trained Vital healer, and families save, borrow, or travel to the river towns for it before the second summer. Reedfolk bear marsh-fever country better than any other people, and say the river spares those it knows. Marsh outlaws are said to be spared too, having had it young, and lords' riders who chase them into the fens in summer come home shaking; the Reedfolk tell it as the marsh taking their side.

Everyone has the winter cough, most years, and nobody fears it. The peoples give one name to a crowd of small sicknesses of nose, throat, and chest that pass round a single fire with the shutters closed, and they blame wet feet, a draught on the neck, or hair washed in the evening. It costs a few days' work. Its danger is the turn after the third or fourth day in the very old and the very young, when the fever rises again and the breathing goes quick and shallow, because that is lung fever beginning. Lung fever is the winter’s killer: the chest fills, a cough brings up rust-coloured phlegm, and between the fifth and the seventh day the patient either breaks into a drenching sweat and sleeps, or grows confused and rattling and dies within a day or two. Most fed, nursed adults live. Among the very old it kills perhaps one in three who take it, and among infants more.

The most patient killer the peoples know is the wasting cough. A young woman in a damp room in town begins to cough one winter and is thinner the next; she flushes in the evenings, sweats at night, and her cheeks take on a brightness strangers mistake for health. Three or four years later she coughs blood in mouthfuls and dies, and by then her sister is coughing too. It passes on the breath, but slowly, over months in a shared room or bed, and so whole households fall to it one by one and many believe it runs in the blood. Others say it is laid by something that feeds, a remnant or a curse, and families have dug up their own first dead to burn the heart. Grave-diggers who open a wasted family’s graves are hired by night and paid well, and some villages have driven a whole family out on the suspicion that it carried a feeding dead thing with it. What helps is what the poor cannot get: rest, good food, a warm dry room, and country air. Those who can afford it go to the country or to a rest-house of the Gardens of Returning Breath. It kills the young adults of poor households more than any other age.

Every parent expects the childhood spots. The red spots begin like a bad cold with eyes that cannot bear the light, and on the third or fourth day a dusky rash rises behind the ears and runs down the body; the water spots come in crops of itching blisters that crust over a week or two. Neither is taken twice, which is why both fall on the young: every few years a new crop of children who have never had them gathers in a village, and the sickness runs through them all. The water spots seldom kill. The red spots kill few children in a fed village and perhaps one sick child in ten in a hungry year, mostly through the lung fever or flux that follows, and leave some blind or deaf in one ear. Many households keep the room hot to sweat the spots out, which does no good; some send their children to play with a spotted neighbour to have it over young, which is sound. In isolated holds, where the spots come rarely, they strike the grown and the young together, and the long-lived peoples who reached adulthood without them take them hard.

Childbed fever comes two or three days after a birth, when the household has begun to breathe again. The mother shivers, the fever climbs, the belly swells tender, and the flow turns foul; in the better cases the fever breaks within a week, and in the worse it reaches the blood and she dies grey and quiet a few days later. It is the commonest death of young mothers. It passes not on the breath but on hands, cloths, and tools, and so it runs through a district behind one midwife, or through a town lying-in house, while a lone farm birth escapes it. The peoples blame a chill in the birth room, milk gone to the head, or a mother who rose too soon. The custom of hot water and boiled cloths travels from midwife to apprentice, unexplained and unevenly kept, and the women who keep it lose fewer mothers.

On a battlefield wound rot kills more in the weeks after than fell on the day. A dirty wound swells hot and red, and from there it drains and mends, or goes on into the blood fever, with red streaks creeping up the limb, or into blackening, the grey and then black flesh with its sweet unbearable stench that only the knife or the saw will stop. A small dirty puncture forgotten for a week can bring the locking jaw, the face fixed in a grin and the back arched in spasms, which kills most who take it. Every healer knows the rule it taught: clean before you close. A healer washes out dirt and rot, flushes a puncture clear, and only then closes the wound, because closing a dirty wound seals the rot in. The Red Mercy Hospices clean, drain, cauterize, and cut, and the best of them wash their hands and boil their linen out of a habit whose reason nobody knows. Many healers hold that thick pale matter is the wound cleaning itself, and leave dressings on for days to bring it on. Sellswords fear a festering cut more than a clean death, and the camp surgeon who will cut off a rotting arm without being asked is the most valued man in a company; the songs remember the captain who took his own leg off with his sword rather than wait for one.

Troll flesh closes so strongly that a dirty wound can seal over the rot inside it, and Troll kin, who decide by rite which wounds may close, are wary of any healer who closes fast (see The Bridge Peoples (FND)).

Some ailments kill almost no one and torment nearly everyone. Worms live in the gut of nearly every child at some time, taken in where dung reaches water and garden, and households purge their children with bitter herbs, often on a fixed day in spring timed to the full moon, when worms are said to stir; the fish-eating peoples know the fish-worms and flukes best and keep firm rules about what may be eaten raw. Tooth rot is the commonest pain of grown life and ends most often at a market stall: honey and sweet fruit are the treats of the well-off, and so are their aching teeth. Many peoples hold that a small worm eats the tooth from within and smoke it out with seeds burned over a candle; the "worms" that fall out are the husks. The itch, lice in the seams, the burrowing mite that sets the wrists on fire at night, and the scaling rings of ringworm and scald-head, marks a camp, a ship, a prison, or a poor house, and a lousy stranger is turned from the door. Soldiers say lice leave a man who is about to die, and watch their comrades' collars; they are right that lice leave a cooling body, and wrong about what that means.

Each trade has its sickness, and each takes it for the ordinary wear of a hard life. A miner who has cut stone for twenty years climbs a stair like an old man: miner’s lung scars the chest with dust year by year until a winter fever finishes what the dust began. Dwarves call a deep cough "the mountain in the chest" and many miners believe the dust is clean and only bad air dangerous, so they fear the dead pocket and ignore the dust. A hold keeps its broken-chested old miners at the lift-houses, the stores, and the chronicle-rooms, and hold songs honour the old miner who coughed his way back down into a collapsed working to lead the trapped crew out by memory, because no one younger knew the old seam. Smiths go deaf, high sounds first, and take it as a mark of mastery.

The metal trades pay more slowly. The smelter’s gripe of lead brings colic, a blue-grey line on the gums, and in the end hanging wrists, fits, and failing wits; the gilder’s shakes of quicksilver ruin a gilder’s close work and change his temper; smoke-sores mark the skin of those who roast certain ores. In the Ironspine the Dwarves roast ore downwind of the holds and turn smelters to other work after some years. In the towns the gripe also comes from wine kept in lead, which tastes sweeter for it, and from jugs and dishes glazed with lead; healers treat the colic and seldom name the cause.

Among the poisons, bad air is the quiet killer of the underground: foul airs that seep out of rock and lie along a floor, air used up by breath and lamps, and heat that builds in the lowest levels. A lamp that burns low and blue, a dull headache, and a calm sleepiness in which the worker stops caring to leave are its signs, and a worker who sits down to rest in it seldom rises. Crews haul the fallen out by rope rather than follow them in. Ruin-delvers who break into a sealed Dwarven working for its old treasure carry a candle ahead of them on a pole, and the tale of the band that found a vault of gold and lay down beside it to rest is told in every hold. Kobolds feel trapped air through skin and stone before anyone else, and much of the vent work of the Stonewake Deeps is theirs (see Stone and the Deep). On the ruin edges of the Glassbelt Interior, salvagers who dig, camp, or drink on the glassed ground of the old ash-furnace belts take furnace-ash sickness: grey skin, loosened teeth, sores that will not close, and the barren years of salvage families. Many of them take the sickness for Ozhar the Pyre-King’s hunger, still feeding (see The Windscar), and the salvagers' grimmest songs are of treasure-seekers who carried slag-gold out of the scars against the warnings: the crew that came home rich and died one by one through the next year, coughing ash.

Famine sickness is the oldest dread of every farming people. It follows a failed harvest, a failed river rise, a siege, or a road cut in winter, and it kills more through the fluxes, coughs, and camp fevers of the hungry crowd than through hunger alone. In the swelling hunger children’s bellies and faces puff with water, so that a swollen child can look fed to a stranger. The long-starved who are given a full meal can die of it within days, and healers fight hungry families over every bowl, giving broth and thin gruel first and bread over a week. Magic can do little here: a body without food cannot hold the life a healer gives it, and a starved healer cannot safely heal at all. In the Lower Serath a failed spring rise means hunger and no town can prevent it. Lords may open their stores or hold them; Ogre camp-custom, remembering the Long Hunger, still feeds the vulnerable before the strong. In a famine year the roads fill with bandits who were farmers the year before, granaries are guarded with spears, and the songs of the hungry years are songs of raids on the lord’s stores and of the outlaws who fed whole villages from them.

The black gums are a sickness of the larder. They come at the end of a long voyage, in the last weeks of a siege, at a deep posting supplied by lift and stair, or in a winter when the cellar holds only grain, salt meat, and dried goods: gums that swell and blacken, old scars that open as if the wound were new. Fresh food mends them in days, and every cook knows it, though the reason is taken to be that fresh food carries the spring in it. Careful houses keep onions, roots, and hard apples through winter and sprout grain in the cellar, and the station keepers of the Soundchain Roads put greens aboard with the water. Siege songs remember the garrison that held out a whole winter on salt meat and lost its teeth before it lost its walls, and the besiegers who brought baskets of green onions to the gate to taunt them.

Cold-bite takes fingers and toes on the passes of the Ironspine, the Stormcrown, and the High Scars, and the creeping chill takes whole travellers: they stop shivering, grow sleepy, throw off their cloaks as if they were hot, and lie down to rest. Mountain folk say the cold is gentle at the end and the frozen dead smile; guides carry spare wool, keep their parties moving, and let no one sit alone (see Stone and the Deep). Heat sickness is its summer twin, the cramp and faint of the harvest field and the forge, and at its worst the burning collapse, when a worker stops sweating and falls. Basin field work stops at noon, crews rotate at the forge, and caravans on the Glassbelt travel by night. Pass songs remember the guide who carried a frozen child down from the High Scars inside her own coat and lost three fingers doing it, and the raiders caught by a storm in the pass they meant to ambush, found in spring still crouched behind their rocks.

The falling sickness drops a person where they stand, stiff and jerking, and lets them rise with no memory of it. Some are born with it, some take it after a blow to the head or a high fever, and some after a working that the body could not carry. It is common enough that every village has known someone with it and strange enough that every people has a story for it: a priest is called oftener than a healer, a few households of augurs keep the fallen as seers, and in the Basins the moon is blamed. Those who have it are often barred from oaths, smithing, and the sea.

The biting madness is feared beyond its numbers. A dog that turns strange, a fox in a yard in daylight, or a bat on the ground at noon may carry it, and whoever it bites waits through weeks or a season of fear before the sickness shows or does not. Once it shows, with the water-fear that throws the sick into choking terror at the sight of a cup, nothing known turns it. A household meets a bite with a hot iron at the hearth; the bitten keep a vigil at the nearest shrine until the season of waiting is over. In a mad-fox year villages pay a bounty on every fox brush, and the songs remember the boy who killed a mad wolf at the fold gate with a hay-fork and was bitten doing it, and the vigil the whole village kept for him through the season of waiting.

Most poison is an accident of field and larder. Food sickness, the cramps after the meat that smelled a little off or the purge after half-cooked beans, falls on everyone who shared the dish and is over in a day or two; households say meat turns in thunder and milk sours under a full moon. Its rare kin, the stillness, breeds unseen in a sealed jar or close-wrapped meat and comes a day or more later, blurring the eyes and thickening the speech while the mind stays clear, until the breath grows shallow. It is often taken for a curse because it strikes so long after the meal, and an unlucky cook has been accused of poisoning. Halflings, who smell a turning barrel across a storeroom, catch spoilage before it reaches the table, and the store-keepers of the folds are trusted to say which barrel goes to the pigs.

In a wet year the rye and the poor barley grow hard purple-black spurs in place of grains, and the spurs go to the mill. Weeks later the village begins to burn: hands and feet aflame, then cold and blackening, children in fits, old women seeing things in the rafters. This is burning bread, the holy fire, Anvelle’s burning, and because it falls on a whole village at once it is treated as a plague. Pilgrims who go away and come back mended credit the shrine, not the change of bread. Some old millers know to throw out a dark-speckled sack, and say so; in a year with little else to eat they are not always heeded.

The wild plants kill the untaught. Hedgerow children learn "black and shiny, leave it be" for the shining berries of shady hedges; foragers mistake the poisonous spotted umbels of damp ground for wild parsley; heart-leaf, a healer’s herb for a failing heart, kills at a little more than the dose. In the deep weald, roots that look and smell almost like the good tubers kill within hours, and the edge settlements call them all deathroot: the Wood Elves name each root by kind and teach their children the poisonous ones before the good, Elven guides are paid for the lesson as for any other passage, and a settlement with no such teacher learns from its graves (see The Forest Heartlands). Poisoners of the basin towns buy deathroot from weald-edge diggers who ask no questions, and the Wood Elves have hunted down more than one root-seller who sold their knowledge to a murderer. Among mushrooms the pale cap is the slow betrayer: a day of violent purging, a false recovery in which the eater gets up and eats, and then the yellowing and the end. The fungus-eating peoples of the holds and the root-houses are raised knowing each good kind by name, and lose few; most deaths come in surface woods in hungry years, where village healers seldom know the false recovery. In the root-houses of the Roothollows the pale cap is called the guest’s cap, and a siege tale tells of townsfolk who sent a basket of them out to the enemy camp as a peace gift; whether the tale is true, no army since has eaten mushrooms sent from a wall.

On the coasts a mussel holds whatever its water holds. In some still, warm summers the sea turns rust-brown along a stretch of shore and the shellfish take up a numbing poison that boiling does not destroy: the lips tingle, the face goes numb, the eater feels as if floating, and in a bad case the breath falters. Some call it Maris’s grief. The harbour families say who may gather, and in such a summer a harbour closes its beaches on its own word; wreckers who plunder a ship on a rust-water shore are said to die of the shellfish they eat while they wait for the next wreck, and the hamlets think it fitting. Near some river mouths of the Tidelace Coasts a newer fouling turns the water black and sour, and the hamlets nearest it no longer gather there; the far-side atlas follows it to the shore.

Made poisons are prepared on purpose by someone who knows what a root or a cap or a venom does, and the craft is close kin to the healer’s, for the same knowledge of dose and kind makes both. A skilled poisoner chooses for the people as well as the person, since herbs act differently on each, and a mixed table may see one guest sicken and another shrug. The art is to make a poisoning look like something else, a seizure of the heart or a wasting illness, and what gives it away is pattern: a sickness that eases when the patient eats elsewhere, or returns with a particular visitor. Poisoning is a crime of houses where inheritance, office, or debt is worth a death. Lords call poison the coward’s knife and trust in stones that cloud and rings that warm, none of which work. Great households keep tasters and watched kitchens, and where magic was used to make or deliver a poison it is reckoned dark practice by the harm it does, though a lord who wants a culprit seldom waits for proof. The songs are full of poisonings: the bride who poisoned the cup at her own wedding feast to avenge her brother, the taster who drank and said nothing so his lord would die beside him. Poisoners caught are boiled, burned, or drowned according to the place, and the most famous were never caught.

On warm days the adders lie out on heath and stone, and a bare foot in the bracken finds one. Viper venom rarely kills a grown Human, but it lays the bitten limb up for weeks and can kill a child within the day, and the dose that sickens a Human gravely endangers a Kobold, a Halfling, a Goblin, or a Gnome. Folk cut the bite and suck it, bind it hard, or lay the split snake on it, and none of it helps; the patients mostly live anyway. Assassins' tales tell of an adder slipped into a lord’s boot, and every great household on adder ground has a servant whose task is to shake out the boots each morning. It is the venom every field healer is expected to know, and the healing schools teach the drawing of venom on it first. The lesser stings and bites, bee and wasp, hornet and spider, jellyfish and the buried sting-fish of far-side beaches, are the small change of every summer. What the peoples fear is the rare person who swells at a sting until the throat closes; beekeepers say such a person is marked by the bees, and tell the hive of every death and marriage in the house so it does not leave in offence. Halfling tales tell of the fold that threw its bee-skeps over the wall onto a band of raiders, and of the raiders who ran back the way they came, swelling.

The red pox comes to a town every generation or so, runs through every child born since it last came, and leaves. A pocked face in a corridor town draws no remark. About ten days after it is caught a high fever breaks the back and splits the head; then spots rise in the mouth and on the face and hands, swell into blisters, and harden into deep pustules, and in that dangerous week the face swells shut. Where the pustules stay apart they crust and fall away in the third or fourth week, leaving pits; where they run together, most die. It kills about one in five of those it takes, and more where it falls on a remote valley that has not seen it for two generations and takes the grown along with the young.

Its great fact is that it is never taken twice, and the towns build their whole answer on it. Pocked nurses tend the pox house, and nobody else is sent. A pox house is marked at the threshold before stronger quarantine is laid, a ward-maker walks a boundary round a quarter that has shut, and in a pox year the pocked are hired to nurse, bury, and carry, because they alone may come and go. The towns' ruling houses shut pox houses, mark their doors, and post watchers at the gates. Looters strip the marked houses all the same, and the pox goes with them from town to town; the songs of the pox years tell of bandits who took a dead merchant’s silks and carried the red to every village they robbed. Mothers in some towns send a child into a mild pox house on purpose, to have it over with young.

The swelling plague is the great dying. It comes every few generations to the corridor towns, ports, and granary country of the cradle-web, by ship or grain barge, and each coming is remembered by the town it struck. Dead rats in the streets come first. A few days later the sick are struck down by fever and a crushing head, and a hard, hot, agonizing swelling rises in the groin, the armpit, or the neck and darkens towards black; at the end of the first week it bursts and drains and the sick slowly mend, or they die. About half of those who swell die. In some the sickness settles in the lungs, and from then on it passes on the breath at the bedside and kills nearly everyone it takes within two or three days. A bad year takes a third of a town between spring and the first frost.

Most of what the schools know of mass healing and containment was learned against it, and a plague town is a town reorganized. Plague houses are marked; quarters are closed by walked and spoken boundaries; a chamber is slammed shut by an emergency seal the moment containment fails, often with someone still inside. In the fever houses and plague wards of the Red Mercy and the Houses of Mercy, healers slow the plague’s spread through a body without curing it, draw the fever into steaming bowls, and burn the plague-sweat out of one patient at a time, and because there are never healers enough, an augur’s touch at the bedside sorts before dawn who can still be turned. A quarter that gives a little blood and breath from each household can keep its fever house standing; a poor district pledges years of shrine labour to hold its wards through winter, and owes it afterwards. The dead go to the trench carried by corpse-servants, or are burned within a ring of disciplined fire, or are sealed in crypts of blue ice until a cure is found. Rushed plague pits breed hostile remnants, so the dying goes on haunting a town after the plague has left it. In the Stonewake Deeps whoever holds a reach may seal a way first and answer for it afterwards when contagion threatens, if anyone can make them answer. In a plague year towns shut their gates and archers keep the roads, and the songs remember the outlaw bands that took over the emptied villages, the corpse-carriers who robbed the dead, and the one healer who walked into the shut town and did not come out.

Almost nobody thinks of the fleas. That rats carry filth and sickness is common knowledge; most blame bad air, the stars, or the gods, and burn sweet herbs against the reek. Crows gathering over a district are read as the plague’s herald. At the pyres the people invoke the Steward of Purifying Fire, who burns disease without hating the sick, and when the lantern of dawn glows in a ward chapel the ward stops panicking.

Camp fever follows crowds that cannot wash: an army a month on the march, a town under siege, a cellar of prisoners, a ship’s hold, a road full of the hungry. It is carried by the body louse. A headache comes on hard, then fever, then a rash of dull-red spots across the trunk and the muttering stupor that gives it one of its many names, the mutter; near the end of the second week the fever breaks or the sleep deepens into one the sick do not come back from. In a siege, a gaol, or a famine camp about one in five of the grown die. Delousing is the real cure and few know it as one: clothes boiled or smoked, straw burned, heads shaved. Wise households boil a returning soldier’s shirt. The fugitive camps and crowded repair quarters of the Broken Marches know it as well as any army (see The Basins and the Marches). Sellsword companies are said to scratch their way through a campaign, and a town that sees a lousy company at its gate shuts it, which has started more than one siege. More companies have been broken by camp fever than by any enemy, and the songs remember the siege that both armies abandoned in the same week, each thinking the other had brought the spotted fever on it.