The weavers’ stall smells of lanolin, which is wool-grease trying to be perfume and almost succeeding. Dame Keld, weaver-guild warden, opens a quality box: tufts of fleece in grades, from coarse as a door-mat to fine as a secret. She puts the coarse in your left hand and the fine in your right until your fingers admit they are not the same animal.

“Wool is England’s gold with feet,” she says, counting, not preaching. “It walks around going baa until we shear it, sort it, spin it, weave it, pack it. Spinsters—people who spin, not witches—turn cloud into thread. Guild mark goes on cloth that will not fall apart in the rain. No dragons in inventory. I checked.”

A woman two stalls down works a drop spindle without looking, which is a kind of flying. Keld can lend against wool if salt is more than a rumor; she will not lend against outlaws in a story.

“You want credit, you bring proof the river did its job—or you learn the grades until your fingers can argue. Hew is fair. The mill-toll still stings people. That is not your crime. It may become your errand.”