Hew sits you on the mill-chest when the stone is as kind as it is going to be. He takes out the indenture: a copy that had been “good enough,” which is a phrase that hides burrs.

“Fairer,” he says. “Years named. Food named. What I teach, what you give.” Father Tomas, when he comes, will read it Wednesday, and you will too, out loud, so nobody’s mouth can invent a different bargain later. “A weekday for letters is part of the work now. A miller who cannot read a steward’s line is a miller who can be eaten by paper.”

You copy a line with a quill that fights you. The letters look like tracks in snow. Tomas’s stubbornness, when it arrives, is his love-language.

A shoulder-punch, bandage-level, if a smith’s apprentice is the sort of friend this day made. Meg of the Green will still say you have to respect fallow. Steward Aldith will say the soke runs while the stone runs. You are still bound. Binding, it turns out, can be a path you can see both sides of.

The wheel slaps the lade. You are apprentice true: not a mascot, a person with terms.

THE END

What you learned: apprenticeship and guilds control training and quality; a fair indenture is a contract you can read. Letters are tools, like millstones, and belong in ordinary weeks, not only in emergencies.