The lodge wakes before the cathedral does, which is a fact Maud likes to say as if she invented both.

You are a mason’s apprentice at Woldminster. That means your day begins in the smell of wet lime and oat porridge, with grit already ghosting your sleeves. Outside, the new choir of Saint Brice stands without its crossing vault: an honest hole in the sky, rib-stones waiting like a question. Two days from now the chapter wants the Translation sung under that hole as if it were a roof.

It is not a roof yet.

Master Rowan is on the Holbeck road for the keystone. He left before last night’s wind. Maud slaps a plumb line into your palm, the bob a little iron pear.

“Scaffold talked,” she says. “Wedges walk in a west wind. And the tracing floor may be a finger off if Kit ran the string like a boy chasing geese. Geometry is not geese.”

Canon Odo wants the choir usable. Peverel the clerk wants timber lists that match reality. Ned the carpenter wants nobody on a bouncing board. Gravity wants nothing, which is its whole personality.

South of the choir: the tracing house, plaster pale as cheese. Up the choir: poles, putlogs, a ladder that does not care about feast days.

The Translation is not a battle. It is a procession, a box of relics, and a chapter that wants to look finished. Rowan told you before he left: A choir that looks finished and is not finished is a trap for singers. You eat porridge that has grit in it no matter how Maud sieves, because lime lives in the air like a second weather. Kit runs past with a bundle of wooden pins, already too fast. The west front of the nave is dark and done; the east is pale and open. Two buildings, one name, a joint of centuries.