The protagonist turns. The hum shifts when they do — not louder, but changed, a note that runs up through the boot soles and settles at the base of the skull, the earliest edge of a fever one does not yet know is coming. The guard is broad, older, castle livery rust-red and mud-hemmed, halberd already angled forward. His eyes move: the broom, the face beneath the cloth cap, then — briefly, involuntarily — the gap in the stem behind. The spore sits in the back of the protagonist's throat now, a faint taste of copper and clover that cannot be swallowed away. The guard stops an arm's length short. His jaw sets. "Step aside, sweeper," he says again, and this time his voice has dropped to something careful, something private — as though he too is not entirely sure what he is asking them to step away from.