Burning Bread

Overview

Burning bread comes after the rain. In a wet year a village eats its own harvest and, weeks later, begins to burn: hands and feet aflame, children in fits, old women seeing things in the rafters. No one in the medieval present ties the sickness to the loaf, and so it is the most feared of the hunger-year poisons, because it seems to fall on a place, not on a meal.

Cause

When rain and cold come while the grain is in flower, a fungus, Grain Spur, takes some of the ears. In place of a grain it grows a hard spur, longer than the kernel and purple-black, that drops into the threshing with the good grain and goes to the mill with it. The poison of the spur survives grinding and baking. Rye takes it worst, then barley; basin wheat seldom.

Who It Strikes

It strikes whoever eats the bread, and so it falls hardest on the poor, who eat dark rye bread on tired ground and the last of the store in a bad year. Children and women with child suffer worst. Beasts fed the threshing tailings sicken too. Strong stomachs do not help: a Goblin who eats anything eats this as well.

Signs and Course

It comes on slowly, over weeks of eating. In the burning form the hands and feet first tingle and creep, then burn as if held to a fire, then go cold, numb, and pale. Fingers and toes darken, dry, and die, and in the worst cases a foot or hand falls away at the joint without bleeding. In the crawling form the skin seems alive with insects, then come twisting cramps, fits, and visions; some sufferers rave or wander. Both may come together. A woman with child often loses it. The turn comes when the bread stops: a household that leaves home or eats other grain begins to mend within days, though dead flesh does not come back.

Contagion

It does not pass from person to person. Because a whole village shares one harvest and one mill, it looks like a plague, and is treated as one.

Treatment and Its Limits

The true cure is to stop eating the spurred grain. Careful millers and Halfling households pick or sift dark grains out of the seed before grinding, and so prevent more than any healer cures. Early on, Purge Poison and Toxin Draw pull the poison out, and Cure Affliction clears it, but none of them helps a patient who goes home and eats the same bread. Nerve Quiet dulls the burning. Blackened fingers cannot be brought back; a healer can only take them cleanly and close the stump.

Mortality

The burning form seldom kills a grown adult but leaves many without fingers, toes, or a foot. The crawling form kills some children and the old, and a few who live through it keep fits or a wandering mind. In a bad year a village may bury a handful and keep a generation of the maimed.

Lore and Belief

Its folk names are the fire, the holy fire, and Anvelle's burning, for many believe the Harvest-Mother punishes a field that was not given its due. Others call it a curse laid on the village by a neighbour, and the accusation does harm long after the bread is eaten. Some blame the black mould of the Rotting Crown, mistaking the dark spurs for its sign, and a house so accused may be shunned. Those who go on pilgrimage and come back healed credit the shrine, not the change of bread.

In the Medieval Era

It is a sickness of the wet harvest, met every few generations in the granary country of the Confluence Basins and more often on the rye ground and hill-barley valleys around it. Village healers can ease the burning but not stop it, and the Red Mercy Hospices of Vital Magic, sent to what looks like a plague, see it end when the next harvest comes in. Some old millers know to throw out a dark-speckled sack, and say so; they are not always heeded in a year when there is little else to eat.

Where It Appears

• Grain
• Barley
• The Confluence Basins