I have worked this land my whole life, and my father before me, and in all of it I have never seen what I walked out to this week. Every row I have is dead. Not blighted, not eaten, not drowned. Wilted, brown and brittle, the whole field gone over in the space of a few days as though the year had turned hard against us all at once, and we do not get a turning year out here. The spring has always held. Things have always grown, whether I tended them well or poorly, for as long as I have been alive. This week they stopped. I have no name for it, and no healer or hedge-witch I have asked has one either, and I am done standing at the fence looking at it.

So this is a hiring notice, plain as I can make it. I need hands, as many as will come, to help me pull the dead crop and clear the fields down to bare earth before whatever took them settles in for good. Strong backs, your own gloves if you have them, and I will pay a fair day’s coin and feed you at midday besides, which is more than most are offering out here this season. Come to the low farm past the old mile-marker on the south road and ask for me at the gate. Come soon. I do not know how much time there is before the rest of the ground goes the same way, and I would rather not find out alone.

H. Denby