East, then south. That is the Holbeck way, with the River Wold on your right once you turn, brown and busy, not a mill-adventure, just a river doing river.

Ruts shine. A cart complains in a language of axles. You see them before they see you: Rowan walking beside the ox, one hand on the keystone as if it were a shy animal. The stone is wrapped, pale, bigger than your chest, the last argument of a vault.

“Apprentice,” Rowan says, which in his mouth is a greeting and a measuring stick. “Is the bay square? Is the centering honest? Did a wedge walk?”

You answer what you can. He nods at truth and at holes in truth equally.

The keystone’s underside shows the bedding marked. A fossil comma sleeps in the face. Limestone from Holbeck: good to cut, good to stand, not the sandstone they used on a drain because drains can be humble.

The cart lurches. An ox gives you a look of religious doubt.

Woldminster from the Holbeck road is a diagram: nave west, low and dark; crossing a gap; choir east, bristling with poles; cloister a square south; yard a pale bite northeast. No dragons roost. A cart-track roosts. You are part of the diagram, a moving pin.