Brask alone is smaller than Brask with a satchel for a shield.

You stand in the east-gate lee with the sheet folded so WASTE is not shouting. You offer Tansy’s plan without an audience: no peat-road, boardwalk mended, true-up fee, hill-market, fen-watch coin in the plank-box instead of a bounty on a straight line.

Brask stares at the needle. “If I look wrong, mayors stop paying for any north at all.”

“This is north,” you say. “Two cousins. Flood-stone. Oxbow. Atlas trying.”

He rubs his face. Fear of unpaid work. Fear of being the person who redrew and then watched a market fail. You do not mock it. Mocking fear makes it louder.

“I will listen at dusk,” he says, which might mean the fen, where people get stupid with stakes. Or, after a longer breath: “Or I will come to the rose and let them see me listen.”