I start to march off down the road, but I barely take a step before I fall. Corked shoes are nothing like flat slippers. The thick, raised soles mean I can’t feel the road at all. It’s like walking over a floorboard, but it’s strapped to your foot. I wobble, step to step, trying to find the balance of it. The thick leather of the heel chafes, and my toes bump into the front part of the shoe. I try not to be disappointed. These are the shoes important folk wear, I remind myself.

What to do next? Where have I always wanted to go, but never dared? Once I would have said the castle or inside a rich merchant’s home, but I’ve been to those. I’ve been up and down stairs. I’ve sat at the front of a Makerhall. I’ve even been in a jail. Where haven’t I been? And then I think of a place.

My shoes get easier to manage on the walk back through Northside. By the time I get to Dungsbrook, I’m nearly walking at my customary pace. As I pass the lane to the woad yard, I hear the call of a hawk from a nearby tree. When I look, I see only a smaller bird by a nest. It must be a cuckoo. They mimic hawks to scare brooding birds from their nests. Then the cuckoo rolls the mother’s eggs out and lays its own in the nest for the other bird to raise. Nasty birds, cuckoos.

The Domus Conversorum looms above the road a few houses from mine. It’s the run-down dwelling where the old king made Jews live while they converted to the new faith. A place I’ve never been. I’ve never even seen any Jews. All I know about them are three things: they’re the chosen folk in the Maker’s book, they’re strangers, and that, kind of like fairies, there aren’t any left in Angland.

A window gapes open and black like a toothless mouth on the ground floor. A collapsed chimney slumps on the dwelling’s roof, and, all over, sandy bricks crumble like cottage cheese. It’s as if Brida were a building, wasting away from the outside. Still, the building must have been fine once. Stone is for manor houses or Makerhalls. What a thing, to live in a stone house.