Day 1: Evening
The chill of the evening did little to disperse the lingering odor of unwashed bodies, dried dust, and raw fear that clung to Ashfall. Kael finished inspecting the granary lock—doubly secured now, against both bandits and his own desperate populace—and made his way to the small, separate stone building near the edge of the settlement: the Healer's hut.
He found an older woman named Mara working by the sputtering light of a single tallow candle. She was gaunt, sharp-eyed, and clad in coarse, patched linen, methodically grinding herbs with a mortar and pestle.
"My Lord Baron," Mara greeted him, her voice dry and weighted with fatigue, offering a shallow curtsey that suggested habitual respect rather than genuine deference. "I had not expected a noble to visit the sick and dying. Most lords prefer to avoid the evidence of their failure."
Kael ignored the veiled insult. "I am here to stop the dying, Healer Mara. Not merely to attend to it. I require data."
He sat on a hard wooden stool, assessing the hut. It was crowded and stuffy, filled with smoke and the damp, metallic smell of untreated wounds.
"Show me your register," Kael commanded.
Mara frowned, perplexed. "I have no register, my lord. I keep the sick in my memory. When the sickness comes, the numbers are too great to count."
"Then you lose track of the disease itself," Kael said patiently, pulling a fresh, clean piece of parchment from his tunic. "We will create one now. I need the name, age, and location of every person who has died in the last three months, and every person currently afflicted with a fever, cough, or stomach distress."
Mara stared at him, bewildered. "Why? The fever comes from the restless spirits, my lord. The stomach ailment is the curse eating their vitality. There is no pattern to a curse."
"There is always a pattern to disease," Kael insisted, his logistics brain already charting the vectors of pathogen spread. The death count was his most vital metric; a rising line meant his engineering and rationing efforts were futile. "Tell me about the stomach sickness. Does it strike quickly, with violent cramps? Is the victim unable to hold down water or food?"
"Aye," Mara confirmed, her professional curiosity finally overcoming her suspicion. "It is the worst. They empty themselves from both ends until they are dust. No herb can bind them, and they are gone in a day or two."
Kael mentally confirmed his suspicion: Acute Dysentery and Typhoid, spread by the fecal-oral route from the contaminated well. The water had been killing them slowly, long before the famine finished the job.
"We cease using the contaminated water immediately," Kael stated, repeating the decree. "But more is required. Healer Mara, I need you to understand one simple, brutal truth: the sickness is spread by filth on the hands and filth in the water."
He placed a bowl of clean rainwater on the table and demonstrated washing his hands, scrubbing thoroughly for a full minute—a concept entirely alien to her medieval practice.
"Before you touch a wound, before you grind an herb, before you eat your own ration, you must clean your hands. Every time. This," he demonstrated the vigorous rubbing motion, "drives the unseen sickness back."
Mara scoffed, shaking her head. "Water does not drive out spirits, my lord. Only prayer and specific herbal compounds."
"The water does not drive out spirits, but it washes away the unseen filth that carries the sickness," Kael corrected, leaning forward, forcing her to look at the clinical reality. "More importantly: for the next three weeks, all water consumed—for drinking, washing food, or cooking—must be brought to a violent boil for the count of sixty breaths. Every drop. Every time."
Mara's eyes widened, thinking only of the resource cost. "Boiling water? But that wastes precious firewood! We will freeze when the winter comes!"
"You will die of disease before the winter comes if we do not boil it," Kael countered, his tone hardening. "You will tell the workers this is a Purification Ritual, one decreed by the Baron, to drive out the weakest of the sickness-carrying spirits hiding in the water. Use their fear if you must, but enforce the boil without exception."
He slid the parchment across the table, along with a charcoal stick. "You are now my Chief Medical Officer. You will enforce the handwashing and the boil. And every morning, you will deliver this register to Steward Elms, charting the new illnesses and the deaths. Note the cause of death precisely: fever, stomach sickness, or starvation. If the line of sickness does not flatten in two weeks, we are failing the entire objective."
Mara looked from the bizarre parchment—her new 'register'—to Kael, then back to the bowl of water he had used for his strange washing ritual. He had shown her a logic that was cold, direct, and entirely focused on saving the body through verifiable process, not on divine intervention. It was a new kind of power.
"I will do as the Baron commands," Mara finally agreed, reaching for the quill. "But if we are to boil water for three hundred people, we need massive cauldrons and continuous, sustained fire. We need structures built for this task. It will consume us."
"A problem for tomorrow morning, Healer," Kael said, rising to leave. "For today, we have identified the enemy. Tomorrow, we build the weapon to fight it."
The logistical chain now had a medical link, and the public health phase of survival had officially begun. Kael walked back to the cold manor, the weight of the three hundred souls resting squarely on his ability to enforce these unnatural, but necessary, rules.