**
Water hit the paddles. The wheel turned, caught, turned again. It was not elegant. It threw spray onto Alfred's boots and made a noise like a cart with a bad hub. It also moved, steady, while Hermine watched the stone's future seat with her arms folded and her whole body listening.
"It'll do," she said at last. "Stone goes in when the housing stops arguing with the frame. I'll grind coarse first. Pot gets the first share. After that we talk weight."
Marta was already in her book. Einar, who had appeared at the edge of the dig as if mud were a kind of news, eyed the turning wheel and then the south track and said nothing.
The settlement had a mill-race. The fact sat among the other facts—roof, byre, private latch, mean ewes, a midwife, a carpenter, a miller who had walked in with a mule and asked about water instead of mercy.
Tuva stood beside me with mud drying on her cuffs. "That's going to change the counts."
"Good."
"Marta will be insufferable."
