Grain Spur

Overview

Grain Spur is the fungus that takes the ears of grain when rain and cold come while the grain is in flower. In place of a kernel it grows a hard, dark spur, which is threshed and milled with the good grain, and the bread made from it is Burning Bread. Farmers know the spur well as a blight of wet years. Almost nobody knows that it is the cause of the burning.

Appearance

A spur sits in the ear where a grain should be: longer than the kernel, often twice its length, slightly curved like a cock's spur, hard, and purple-black outside, pale grey-white when broken. An ear may carry one spur or several. Earlier in the season, while the grain flowers, the infected flowers weep a sticky, sweet yellowish drop that draws flies. Milled, the spurs darken the flour a little and give a faint musty smell; baked, they vanish into the loaf.

Habitat and Range

It comes in wet, cold years when grain flowers late, worst on rye and barley and on tired ground, rarely on basin wheat. Fields along damp margins and field-edge grasses carry it from year to year. It is known wherever grain is grown in the cradle-web, and best known in the poorer fields of the Confluence Basins and the terraces of the Headwater Marches.

Life Cycle

Spurs that fall to the ground lie through the winter and in spring put up tiny stalked heads that loose spores as the grain flowers. The sweet drop spreads it from flower to flower by insects and rain. A spur sown with the seed grain starts the next year's blight in the field itself.

Uses and Dangers

It gives nothing, and in bread it is deadly. Eaten over weeks it brings the burning of hands and feet, the dying of fingers and toes, the crawling skin, fits, and visions that Burning Bread sets out, and it falls hardest on the poor, who eat the darkest bread and the last of a bad harvest. Beasts fed the threshing tailings sicken too.

Lore and Belief

Basin farmers call a spurred ear a "black tooth" and say a wet summer grows them; careful millers and Halfling households sift the dark grains from seed and flour out of long habit, for cleanliness, and so prevent more burning than any healer cures without knowing it. Because a whole village shares one harvest and one mill, the burning seems to fall on a place, and it is blamed on bad air, a curse, a god's anger, or a neighbour. Nobody in the medieval present ties the sickness to the spur.

In a burning year the fear turns on people: villages have stoned a hedge-witch or burned a stranger's house for the curse, and the songs of such a year are dark ones.

Where It Appears

• Burning Bread