You climb because the centering is a ship of oak upside down against the sky, and you want to be on it.

The board that talked decides to finish its sentence. It does not break. It shifts. Your world becomes a rectangle that is no longer friendly. You freeze, which is not a plan, and Ned’s hand finds your belt and your pride at the same time.

You arrive on a lower ledger with a bruise blooming on your hip and a taste of lime in your mouth. Nobody cheers. Gravity does not bow.

“It doesn’t need you to be brave,” Ned says, quiet, furious in the carpenter way. “It needs you lashed. Centering will wait. A feast will wait. A boy turning into a courtyard will not un-turn.”

Time has walked. The wedge is still two fingers out until someone puts it back, and that someone is now you, on the ground, looking up.

Kit’s face is a pale coin in the tracing-house door.

Later you will want this moment to have been braver. It was not brave. It was a board moving and a carpenter doing his job. Your hands shake on the ladder going down. The putlog wedge, still out, watches like a small unkind monk. You will remember the exact grey of the sky over the nave lead. Memory is also a tracing floor.