Market stakes at the edge of night look like a field of small gallows for banners that are only cloth. Lady Greyfen walks them as if they were strips: who rents which pitch, which guild mark hangs honest, where the goose-stall will make the square smell like September winning.

Trestles wait. A child practices calling prices in a whisper. Someone promises a Michaelmas goose to the keep kitchen if the keep promised salt, which is a circle you now understand from the inside.

“Eve turning into morning,” Lady Greyfen says. “You have flour on you and a town in your head. That is a kind of knighthood I did not ask the songs for.”

Far off, the mill still sings a little wrong, or you imagine it, which is almost the same if you are Hew’s apprentice.

The lady’s clerk ticks a list. Wool, loaves of legal weight, rent-pennies, a place for a barge to tie if the river has been kind.