Across the sunlit courtyard of the Southern Bridge laundry in front of the assembled merchants and thirty laundry workers, the work of redirecting the praise to hesta’s crew began not with grand proclamations, but with Pella Rook and thirty-eight-year-old head laundress Hesta inspecting the twelve silver crowns of the completed commission fee and the newly hinged saint-tile access door marked EMERGENCY MOAT SHUTOFF. DO NOT OBSTRUCT alongside Foreman Eren Tal, Senior Engineer Korr Var, and Co-op Chairman Bramwell. After Ada crosses back, Hesta’s laundry crew finishes clearing the dungeon drain and Eren hinges the tiled panel as an access door. When the merchants’ cooperative tries to praise Pella’s ‘summoned wizardry,’ Pella publicly redirects every ounce of credit to Hesta.
The technical core of redirecting the praise to hesta’s crew needed insisting that the cooperative’s lease book record Hesta as Chief Boiler Warden of the Southern Bridge with a two-shilling weekly safety pay for maintaining the newly uncovered 1690 shutoff valve. Throughout this phase of the scalding grey-water surge beneath Hesta’s Southern Bridge washhouse, the crew held fast to treating an old vaulted dungeon as a civic plumbing problem rather than a monster lair. Every brass fitting, every stitched seam. Every thirty-minute lunch crossing had to answer to physical measurement rather than guild politics.
