Salt comes off the barge in sacks that know they are important. Prices in the square stop rehearsing a scream. The keep kitchen, when it hears, raps a crock and finds a future in it: fish, meat, a Michaelmas goose that can wait without becoming a dare.

Piers the bargeman is paid in coin and in the look of a man whose road-that-floats did its work. His cousin sleeps under a real roof and will walk into court tomorrow, hat in hand, not into a ballad. The clerk will be bored. Bored clerks are a sign of peace.

You eat bread and cheese and onions, and weak ale that is mostly liquid bread. No one is an outlaw in the interesting way. Someone was late, and afraid, and then found.

Market will have salt. That sentence is quieter than a rescued princess and feeds more people.

You walk home along the towpath. The mill’s note is still a worry unless other feet already carried it; either way you did not leave the town’s preserving to a rumor.

THE END

What you learned: salt preserves food; barges beat bad roads; “outlaw” often means someone outside the law’s protection—missed court, debt—not a forest king. Poling and paperwork beat invented raids.