Holt’s market-count smells like yeast, rope, and new panic.

The stalls are good stalls. That is the problem. Last spring’s late wagons made a quiet day; this hill of loaves is the spare life of a square. Holt is not cartoon-greedy. Holt is a person who has seen tables get quiet.

“Fen’s waste,” Holt tells anyone. “Better to take a road before the wet takes our trade.”

Which is how a warning-story gets turned inside out: the sponge meant leave it so cellars live, and hurry heard fill it first.

Tansy fingers a stake-ribbon. “These in the peat on a rain-week are a closed door with mud in its teeth.”

Brask’s WASTE sits in your head, too clean. A blank as kindness is the same shape of hurry: draw it so nobody else has to look, and you have still taken a pantry.

You can show Quill the stakes and the hurry, and ask for the rule that is not spite.

You can sit on the library step with Tansy and charcoal and draw the three stories apart until your hands stop shaking.