The river at this hour is a dark road. You find the rest of the problem the way Hew finds grit: by not blinking.

Piers the bargeman’s hull is in the willows, or just free and needing a second pole to the proper mooring. Either way, salt still wants a post, not a legend. A younger man sits on the bank with his knees up, damp, not a forest king. Piers’s cousin. Debt in his face. A rope-end in his hand that looks like an apology.

“I missed court,” he says, when you do not invent a sword. “Then I was afraid, which is how missing court has children. I did not steal salt. I tried to pull a barge with a bad rope because I wanted to be useful without being seen. That is a stupid kind of useful.”

Tide shoulders the hull. Poling, not swords. You, Piers, maybe a cousin who would rather be bored in a hall than legendary in a wood.

Salt can still make market. A name can still go back inside the law tomorrow, fair, fined, fed.

The millstone sings, faint, if you have ears for home.