The storeroom is cool as a well’s breath. Crocks. Tubs. A row of fish like silver footnotes. The salt chest has a hollow sound when you rap it. The cook’s helper, who is allowed to look gloomy professionally, shows you the scrape-line.

“Market week wants salt the way a mill wants a stone that isn’t cracked,” she says. “Meat without salt is a dare. We can smoke a little, we can eat fresh and hurry, we cannot invent a mine under the chapel.”

You think of Piers the bargeman’s empty mooring, which Hew mentioned at dawn as if it were weather. You think of prices in the square. You think of Steward Aldith, who can turn a shortage into an order if she hears it while it is still a fact and not a panic.

The helper will not let you “borrow” a handful. Steward’s salt is accounted, even the absence of it.

“The river is that way, and so is tomorrow,” she says. “The stair is the other way, and so is the truth on paper.”