Cold morning sunlight slanted across the wheelwright’s yard behind Sister Merrow’s back kitchen, glinting off frost-rimmed piles of cured oak felloes and the wet iron tires leaning against the boundary wall. The open air smelled of fresh pine sawdust, damp garden clover. The chalky stone tang of unglazed white heavy clay. Foreman Eren Tal walked slowly across the gravel enclosure, cradling a twenty-four-inch decommissioned baked-clay practice arch in both leather-gloved arms as carefully as if he were carrying a crate of glass manometers.
The muscles across Eren’s broad back pulled taut under his homespun waistcoat as he lowered the forty-pound heavy clay ring onto a heavy oak frame stand bench in the center of the yard. Leaning against his right boot was his favourite eight-pound forged iron sledgehammer, its thirty-inch hickory helve polished smooth by decades of driving wagon-hub hoops. Twenty paces back behind a temporary barricade of two-inch ash planks, Town Examiner Corvin stood with his brass pocket watch and open audit folio.
Pella Rook crouched beside the oak bench with her magnifying glass and wooden ruler, inspecting the tiny bronze rune-tracks inlaid along the baked-clay curve. Salvaged from the same pre-reform teaching sub-cellar as the main Courtesy Bridge, the practice arch had been built to matching exact proportions—complete with three-inch non-forcing gaps in every circuit—differing only in its brittle heavy clay body. It had been fired to shatter cleanly if an apprentice overloaded a classroom circuit.
