The mason’s yard is a beach of pale dust.

Bankers in a row: not money-men, the stone benches. A block of Holbeck limestone waits with its bedding plane marked in charcoal—the stripes of how it lay in the earth. Rowan taught you: set it as it slept. On edge against its grain it will flake like cheap bread.

A sandstone offcut from a lesser job sits apart, greyer, friendlier to weather in some places, wrong for this rib. You run a thumb along a mason’s mark: a little arrow that is somebody’s name in a private alphabet. Marks are signatures and quality and the opposite of magic.

Peverel passes with a board of numbers. “Keystone on the road if the ruts are kind. If you want Rowan, the Holbeck way is east, then south along the Wold. If you want tools, stay and be taught.”

A mallet. A chisel with a lip. A straightedge. The yard sounds like slow rain made of iron.

A banker-mason—the person, not the bench—works a face smooth enough for a joint that will not show from the floor and must still be true. Marks hide on beds and joints, not always on the show-face. The cathedral will look anonymous. The yard knows who cut what. That is how quality lives when saints get the credit.