The Afflicted are not one kind of person. Some carry their difference on the skin and can never hide it; some carry none at all and live a lifetime one careless moment from ruin. Around both has grown a body of rumour far larger than anything a receiving house has ever recorded.
“He could turn a nail from grey to blue. He could not turn it back, could not do it twice in an hour, and could not have lifted a cup with it if his life had hung on the trying.”
What the Body Shows
The marks, and how they are read
The marks the realm fears most are the ones that cannot be covered: an extra eye or limb, scale across a back or hand, joints that bend where none should, a jaw or skull set wrong, a second mouth. Lesser marks pass under gloves, collars and badly fitted coats: a sixth finger, a patch of scale at the nape, webbing between the toes. Some afflictions bring unusual size and strength, which is why the Sarrum yards take on men the rest of the realm would ring.
A mark is common evidence of affliction but not its definition. A malformed body with no power at all is still Afflicted in law; an ordinary body is Afflicted the day a knack is proved.
The Small Untaught Thing
Knacks, and why they never grow
The knacks are trivial. The commonest is a slight working of material: a wick trimmed without shears, an edge set, a stitch drawn tight. Next comes colour, changed and usually not changed back. After that, the moving of small things an inch or two, a spoon or a pebble, almost never lifted. The receiving houses record nothing credible beyond that.
They do not develop. The folk belief that a pebble moved at eleven becomes a cart moved at thirty is the reasoning behind most of the harshness, and the records of the houses do not support it: a man who turned a nail blue as a boy turns it blue at fifty, no faster and no better.
What the Street Says
Rumours of greater powers
Around the real and useless capacities gathers a much larger folklore: a girl said to know a death days ahead, a scaled widow said to be proof against fire, a man who speaks in voices in his fever, a guide who finds his way through dark passages as if something below the stone were answering. Some of it is tavern invention; some of it is told so exactly that clergy and doctors write it down rather than dismiss it.
No authority can dismiss it cleanly, because the city has seen false accusations, medical curiosities and true breaches alike. What is certain is that most Afflicted possess no such art, and hide for a plainer reason: a visible mark gets a person searched, beaten, underpaid, robbed or killed.
Caught or Born
Contagion, and the fear of the clean household
Most people believe the curse can be caught. Blood is the most feared carrier, but saliva, sweat, milk, tears, a shared cup or bed, the washing of a corpse and even close breath appear in one parish warning or another, ranked differently in each. A healthy person who shows a mark after contact with the Afflicted, a case of curse-fall, becomes a crisis for the street long before a physician sees him.
Inheritance frightens respectable houses more than any monster. Afflicted parents often have children who look ordinary, and ordinary parents have marked infants. A monster lives on the far side of the door; the curse can be born on this side of it.
