Maud sets a chisel in your palm as if it were a letter of recommendation.

“Mallet hits chisel. Chisel hits stone. You do not hit stone with moods. Bedding plane: the way the rock was layered in the hill. We lay it the same way in the wall. Turn it against its sleep and it wakes ugly—flakes, splits, a rib that fails in ten winters instead of two hundred.”

You copy a mason’s mark in charcoal on a scrap: Rowan’s hook, Maud’s old husband’s comb, a visiting mark that is Gareth’s. The mark says I dressed this; if it is wrong, find me. It is the opposite of a nameless miracle.

Kit tries to lift a voussoir the size of a sleeping goat and is told, kindly, no.

The lodge across the cloister has a board of terms: years of apprenticeship, food, what you may not sell. A cathedral is also a school that can bruise your thumb.

The Holbeck road still has your master on it, unless the ruts have him.

Voussoirs for the rib wait in number-order under a shed. 1, 2, 3… the crown empty for Rowan. Bedding marks look like quiet lightning. You set a scrap on edge against its grain and tap: a flake, obediently wrong. Maud nods. “The hill told you. Listen to hills.”