The yard looked smaller after the chairs arrived.
Felix moved one practice board away from the cordon, checked that the exit remained clear and resisted the urge to put the wheel back on the table.
They had brought the public demonstration to the district. Nobody needed to cross the missing bridge to discover whether he could teach.
Tamsin had built the boards from sound small stock. Each carried a shallow clay vessel, a marked intake, a little storage cup, an outlet and a separate return strip. An uncharged dummy weight showed the place a hand must not occupy during activation.
Jian checked the supplied qi source and kept the manual isolation handle beside him. His late-afternoon qualifying trial remained on the written slip in his pocket. This was a defined interval, not the whole day quietly becoming available because he’d already missed its first plan.
Lyra set up the attendance sheet. Trade and first name for ordinary participation. Separate permission for a formal statement.
Barnaby began reading the introductory conditions while half the arrivals were still finding chairs.
Felix held up a hand.
“Let them see it.”
“After the warning.”
They agreed on a short warning, spoken once clearly. Hands clear during activation. Stop before changing a connection. No restart until the supervisor checked it.
Pell sat with the observers, apparently delighted that someone else would have to answer questions today.
Corven arrived with a clerk and chose a place where he could see the boards.
“Does this circuit support the spire indefinitely?”
Felix had prepared a magnificent answer to a question almost exactly like that. Tamsin caught his eye before he could begin it.
“It teaches tracing and stopping a small warming circuit,” he said. “The anchor repair’s a separate measured job. The coupler’s still missing.”
Corven nodded to his clerk.
“And your qualification to instruct?”
Felix looked at the people waiting behind the cordon. They hadn’t come to hear about a job on a planet none of them could visit.
“You can watch whether people can repeat what I teach. Jian controls the supplied input. Tamsin built and checked the boards. I’m explaining the action.”
Tamsin confirmed the physical rating. Jian showed the isolation handle. Lyra recorded the responsibilities without turning them into an apology for needing more than one person.
Felix laid colored cord over the cold board.
“Where can it enter?”
A woman near the front pointed to the intake.
“Good. Where does it wait before use?”
She followed the cord to the small cup.
He traced the remaining path with his finger, then let the first pair try without filling every pause. They identified intake, storage, outlet and return. One operated the control while the other watched the line.
The woman took the cord from him when invited, then laid it along the path herself. At the storage cup, she stopped.
“This isn’t the vessel we’re warming.”
“No. That holds a little qi before use.”
She followed the next section with one finger. “And this carries what we want to the water.”
“Yes.”
Her partner bent to examine the return strip from the side. He had been watching the colored cord so closely that he’d missed the actual contact beneath it.
Felix lifted the cord away.
The man pointed to the right place without the color leading him.
“Now I see it.”
That mattered more than following a bright line. Felix asked them to show the stop next, then stepped back so neither would have to reach around his body to use it.
Barnaby shifted his witness position as well. The first row leaned forward. Someone at the back asked the taller observers to stop wearing their hats quite so high.
The woman smiled, no longer looking as though she’d been called forward to answer a riddle in public. She set her hand by the control and asked Jian whether he was ready.
He gave the agreed signal before admitting any supply.
Jian admitted the measured supply.
The water warmed a little.
The learner stopped it. The indicator returned to its resting mark.
It was not an impressive amount of hot water. Felix watched the woman’s face when she put a finger against the cup after the all-clear. She had done it herself and understood why it had stopped.
The next learner repaired ordinary stove pipes. He examined the fittings with the confidence of a man who had spent years making connections other people called impossible to reach.
He fastened the return strip neatly to the outlet position.
Felix saw the shape before he saw the error. The two fittings looked too similar. He’d known which was which because he’d helped put them there.
The indicator rose differently as the measured input began.
“Stop input,” he said.
Jian closed the handle.
The little marker fell toward uncharged. The chamber had barely warmed.
The stove repairer reached for the misplaced strip, embarrassment quick in his face.
“Wait,” Felix said. “Cold check first.”
The man drew his hand back.
From behind the chairs, Corven spoke.
“An error an ordinary user can make.”
“Yes,” Tamsin said. “The limiter and stop kept it within the tested conditions. Those fittings also need clearer marks.”
She did not blame the learner for using the eyes he’d brought with him.
The stove repairer rubbed the back of his neck.
“I know how pipes work.”
“I believe you,” Felix said.
“That fit looked right.”
“It did. I watched you make it neat before I noticed where it ended.”
The man’s eyes moved from Felix to the near-identical seats. He wasn’t being asked to confess that years of work had left him stupid. A different board had allowed a familiar hand movement to lead somewhere new.
Tamsin held the loose strip up beside its proper contact.
“We’ll change the marks. You tell us if you can distinguish them from your side.”
He looked from both positions, then suggested a band on the return that continued all the way to its finish. A label at one end could be hidden by a hand.
Tamsin tried the band. He shifted where he’d stood before and nodded.
Felix moved his own shoulder out of the sight line. The crowd waited while the useful correction happened at the pace required, without a distracting speech about how quickly it had happened.
Pell sat with his hands clasped around his knees. He didn’t answer for the learner. When the man looked toward the watchers, the boy simply waited with the rest.
Jian checked the isolated board. Felix waited for his confirmation before disconnecting anything.
“Tell me what you did,” he asked the man.
“Made it tidy. Put the strip on the fitting that faced it.”
“And what was missing?”
He followed the path again.
“Nowhere for the waste to go.”
Felix nodded.
That was better than the elaborate queue comparison he’d nearly offered.
Tamsin marked the return clearly and changed its short label in front of everyone. Lyra added the correction to the notes instead of hiding the first version beneath the table.
“Try it cold,” Felix said.
The repairer connected the path. A neighboring participant checked it with his permission. This time the return had somewhere to finish.
Jian admitted the fresh measured input.
The water warmed normally.
The learner closed the handle himself and watched the marker settle. He put his hands behind his back until the cold check was complete, then touched the clay cup.
“There,” he said, quietly pleased.
Two more pairs tried. A woman carrying a shop ledger declined to activate her board until it was moved away from a wet patch beside the yard drain.
Felix looked at the damp ground, then at the control.
“Good stop. Move it first.”
She seemed surprised to be praised for not beginning. Tamsin helped reposition the stand, and the pair completed the exercise without another objection.
Dorr watched from the side, turning a bun bag in his hands. Hana’s assistant arrived late and stood behind the last row, having finished a load at the working rack before coming.
The first learners began comparing how quickly their cups warmed.
Felix glanced at Jian.
“We could give this one a little—”
The shopkeeper pointed at the marked limit.
He looked at his own line.
“Yes. Well spotted.”
Hana’s assistant laughed.
Corven’s clerk wrote something down. Felix decided he could survive it if the man spelled stop correctly.
The practice continued until several people could perform the sequence without his voice supplying each next movement. One pair moved slowly and argued over which of them should watch. They finished correctly after agreeing on the roles.
Another learner wanted to know whether this meant he could repair his own house ward now.
“No,” Felix said. “It means you can trace and stop this circuit. Get the house ward checked by someone who knows it.”
The man looked disappointed, then asked Tamsin where to book an assessment.
The small lesson had made the world no less complicated. It had given several people one useful part they could recognize.
Near the end, the first pair helped a slower pair check the cold route. Felix started toward them and stopped when he heard the woman ask the same plain question he’d used.
“Where does it finish?”
Her new partner pointed halfway along the return. She waited until he followed it to the end.
The stove repairer held the board steady while they changed places, careful not to cover the band he’d helped improve. Their little group had no reason to look at Felix for the next word.
He stayed beside Jian, letting them finish.
Corven watched that exchange too. His clerk looked up from the notes long enough to see the learner identify the stop and explain when he would use it. The demonstration had become less tidy as people helped one another. It had also become harder to mistake for a man making an object perform while everyone else applauded.
When the group was ready, they asked Jian for the measured input. Felix remained outside their reach, where he could observe without becoming the obstacle between a learner and a control.
At the end, Lyra invited witnesses to state what they’d actually observed. Some signed only attendance. Others agreed to describe the path, the stop and the corrected fitting. Dorr gave his customer statement without claiming Felix had become the foremost teacher of anything.
The clerk received the attendance list separately from the voluntary statements. Barnaby copied the correction as carefully as the successful trials.
Beside the papers stood the rejected steel sleeve on its labeled board, the test conditions and replacement agreement visible. A few observers asked about it. Felix showed the catch distance and explained what had been rejected.
Nobody was asked to admire bad steel.
Corven read the displayed report, then requested a copy through Lyra. He retained the right to argue that this instruction did not satisfy the charter. He could not honestly write that no instruction had occurred.
The empty chairs scraped against stone as the last learners carried them aside, still comparing the warm cups they’d made.
When the crowd left, the yard was full of chairs somebody still had to move.
Felix took the lightest folded one with his good hand. Tamsin took it away when he tried to carry a second and pointed toward a waiting cup.
A learner had warmed the water before packing the board.
He drank. It tasted largely of ordinary water, with the excellent addition that somebody else had managed the work.
Jian checked his trial time.
“Too much talking at the beginning,” he said. “Better after the error.”
“Planned error.”
Lyra looked at Felix.
“No,” he admitted. “An ordinary error.”
She gave him the witness stack to hold while she cleared the sign-in table. It was thicker than before and contained a correction he would once have preferred to remove.
They had taught something. Whether the people teaching it counted as a charter household remained a question for another desk.