Market morning is a noise with smells in it.

Michaelmas: rents paid in the hall with faces that have done math. A goose turning where the keep promised a feast and the kitchen promised not to fail. Wool stacked like weather you can sell. Loaves on the bakers’ board, weighed, arguing finished or at least postponed. Pottage in a pot that tastes like not-failing: grain, onion, a little fat, no tomato pretending it belongs.

Lady Greyfen walks through without a trumpet. Steward Aldith, if she is the one with ink on her thumb, does not need a trumpet either. Salt is in the crocks if the river was kind; if it was not, the kitchen is cooking fresh and hurrying, which is also a kind of honesty. Hew’s flour, sealed, becomes crust if the stone allowed it, and hope if it has not yet.

You are sent for small things and allowed to stare at big ones. A spinster laughs. A child gets a honeycake that is mostly hope. Father Tomas rings a bell that means calendar, not doom.

You did not fix every crack in Greyfen. You stood where eve became morning and did not drop the town. That is an apprentice’s feast.

THE END

What you learned: Michaelmas (September 29) is rent-day and goose-day, a farm-and-church clock. Medieval food is bread, pottage, cheese, ale, salted fish, onions—not New World crops—and market is the town thinking out loud.