The chapter house is an octagon of stone benches, cold as good sense.

Canon Odo, two other canons, Peverel with his timber list, Maud if she came, you with lime on your eyebrows like a badge. The Translation of Saint Brice is in two days: relics processed, choir supposed to hold voices. A gale is not on the liturgical calendar and arrives anyway.

“Work through the rain,” says a canon who does not mix mortar. “The saint will dry us.”

Maud’s voice, if she is here, or yours if she is not: “Mortar becomes soup. Soup is not a joint. A joint that fails in a flyer puts glass and people in a conversation with the courtyard.”

Odo looks at you as if you were a small instrument. “Storm plan, then. Cover, lash, wait for the keystone. Or—” and here the pressure lives, shiny—“keep the flyer joint open and working because the day will not move.”

There is also the rain-work itself, waiting on the scaffold like a dare.

Stone benches make everyone’s knees honest. The octagon is for voices to hear each other, not for thrones. Peverel’s list: extra lashings, mats, a carpenter’s boy if Ned wants one. A canon says saint as if weather had ears. Maud, if present, looks at you: the apprentice is sometimes the only person who has been on the flyer in the rain.