Free Children of Enchantment by Anne Kelleher Bush

She glanced around the room which, though small and shabby, was as cheerful as she could make it. The curtains at
     the narrow window were bright yellow, tied back with blue ribbons, and the floor of scrubbed pine planks was covered with
     a rug braided out of scraps as colorful as they were varied. Dried flowers bloomed in an earthenware pitcher on the table
     which stood beside an empty cradle. “If there’s nothing more, I’ll leave you with her while she sleeps. She won’t wake now
     for several hours.”
    The nurse nodded and picked up a woven basket spilling over with mending. Jesselyn shut the rickety door softly and stepped
     into the low-ceilinged hallway of what had been her home for the better part of her life in these eastern foothills of the
     Okcono Mountains. She leaned back against the white-washed wall and pushed a wayward strand of fine brown hair out of her
     eyes. She was more than tired—she was exhausted. She was barely thirty and felt sixty. There was so much to do between now
     and the time Everard was expected. She had no idea why he was coming, though she supposed it had something to do with her
     father’s disappearance, which she had heard about just a week or so ago from a traveling band of laborers who followed the
     seasons in search of work. But her fatigue was not just a result of her brother’s anticipated visit. Every day was like this—as
     more and more refugees streamed up from the South, and the sick and the old and the poor found their way to her door. Most
     of the time all they found was an easier death.
For the harvest is plenteous, but the laborers are few.
The old words of the ancient Scripture ran through her mind unbidden, as though by reflex. She smiled a little to herself.
     Renegade priest and excommunicant she might be, but she still knew her Scripture.
    “Rever’d Lady?”
    The voice, so soft that it might have gone unheard by any other ear, startled Jesselyn. The Muten woman stood hesitantly in
     the door as if she expected to be rebuffed, her face shadowed by the worn scarf she used to hide the ugly scars of wounds
     inflicted in childhood. Although Jesselyn accepted her story without question, and welcomed the woman as she did all who came
     to her, nevertheless she often felt inexplicably uneasy in the woman’s presence. Jesselyn forced herself to speak as gently
     as she could. “Yes, Sera? Has my brother come?”
    “No, ‘m. We’ve found one of the Children in the wood— he’s in a bad way. Could you come to the infirmary?”
    At once, Jesselyn forgot any misgivings about the woman and automatically gathered the patched skirts of her worn clerical
     dress about her. “A bad way? Has he been hurt?”
    “No, ‘m. They said it looked like the purple sickness—” Before the words were even out of Sera’s mouth, Jesselyn was out the
     door and running along the beaten dirt path toward the infirmary, completely disregarding the bitter March wind. There was
     no disease among the Muten population so deadly or so virulent. It was said that one could sit down to his dinner and be dead
     before he raised his hand to his mouth. If this truly were the purple sickness, the sufferer must be quarantined as quickly
     as possible, and it was dangerous for the Muten attendants to even so much as breathe the same air. “Mharri, Chas’n,” she
     called as she stepped over the threshold of the long white building nestled among a stand of sheltering pines.
    It was over. She knew as soon as she saw the looks on the faces of the Muten attendants. They had arranged themselves as far
     away as possible from the door of the inner chamber where the newcomer had been placed. The occupants of the low white cots
     stared up at her with frightened eyes. There was a sweetish smell in the air.
    The Muten lay on the white bed, still and unmoving. Clearly he had died in agony, his back twisted and bowed in a convulsive
     rictus, his skin marred by blotchy purplish lesions from