Location:Seven Peaks — the Hall; the Medicine Hall; the north gate passage
Date/Time:TC1858.03.18
Sickness smelled sweet before it smelled of anything else.
Mira knew it before she was through the Hall door. Under the wet wool and the hearth smoke and the slop buckets standing by the step, under more than three hundred people who had slept in their clothes for ten nights on stone, there was a smell like fruit going over in a closed cupboard. It was faint. It was enough. She stood in the doorway with her bag on her shoulder and let her eyes get used to the gray light coming in at the high windows, and then she went looking for it.
The Corps lay along the Wall by Sera Vahn's roll, one row against the stone and a second inside it, boots at their feet. Under every struck name, the floor was bare. Mira stepped around those places without looking at them. She had learned to in ten days, the same as everybody.
