Childhood Spots

Overview

The childhood spots are two spotted fevers that the peoples count as one family, because both come to the young, run through a village together, and are never taken twice. The red spots are the dangerous one; the water spots are a nuisance. Every parent expects them.

Cause

Each is passed by something too small to see, carried on the breath and the touch of the sick. A body that has once fought it off resists it for life, which is why it falls on the young: every few years a new crop of children who have never had it gathers in a place, and the sickness runs through them all.

Who It Strikes

It strikes children of the land peoples who live close together, above all Humans, Halflings, and Goblins, whose villages and folds have many children. Peoples with few children and long lives, the Elves and Dwarves, may reach adulthood without it and take it hard when a trader or a town brings it in. Hungry children and infants suffer worst. The sea and river peoples, living apart from the towns, seldom meet it. The Wrought are never touched.

Signs and Course

The red spots begin like a bad cold: fever, running nose, cough, and red, streaming eyes that cannot bear the light. On the third or fourth day a dusky red rash rises behind the ears and spreads down the face and body in blotches that run together. The fever peaks with the rash and breaks a few days later as the spots fade to brown and flake. The danger is what follows: a cough that turns into lung fever, a flux, an ear that runs, or eyes left clouded.

The water spots begin with a day of feverish ill temper. Then crops of small red spots rise, each becoming a clear blister that itches, breaks, and crusts, new crops coming over several days, so that a child is spotted, blistered, and scabbed at once. It passes in a week or two and seldom leaves more than a few small pits where the blisters were scratched.

Contagion

Both pass very readily, on the breath and by close contact, from a day or two before the spots show until they have faded or crusted. One child at a market or a well can carry them home to a whole street.

Treatment and Its Limits

The household's care is rest, warmth, a darkened room for the eyes, drink, and cool cloths, and it is most of what helps. Folk healers give herb teas for fever and cough and soothing washes for the itch. For a child whose fever climbs too high, a healer's Fever Ease buys a night, at the healer's cost; Sickness Gate can keep the red spots from settling in the lungs. Eyes already clouded may be helped by Sight Mend, which few families can pay for. Nothing keeps a child from taking them.

Mortality

The water spots seldom kill a child, though grown people who take them are sicker. The red spots kill few children in a fed village and many more in a hungry year, when perhaps one sick child in ten dies, mostly the youngest and the weakest, of the lung fever or the flux that follows. Some survivors are left blind, deaf in one ear, or weak in the chest.

Lore and Belief

Most households hold that the spots are a heat the child must sweat out, and keep the sick wrapped and the room hot, which does no good. Some say it is better to have them young and send their children to play with a spotted neighbour, which is sound. In the folds, the spots are counted the long winter that comes to a child once given a season of protection by Tamsel the Season-Weaver, and a hard bout is laid to a protection asked too greedily.

In the Medieval Era

The childhood spots come round every few years in villages and constantly in towns, where there are always children who have not had them. Healers of the Vital Magic schools seldom see a case, because a household that can bear the spots alone does so. In isolated holds they arrive rarely, and then strike grown and young together.

Where It Appears

• Tamsel the Season-Weaver (a winter of protection from illness and the long winter of sickness after)