The roof took four days.
It was not the most technically demanding phase of the build, but it was the most physically miserable. The sheathing boards had to go up at height, balanced on the wall plates, nailed into the rafters with the kind of repetitive overhead hammering that converted your shoulder into a slow-burning complaint by mid-morning. The thatch — sourced from the barony's own reed beds along the creek, harvested by two tenant families over two days — had to be laid in overlapping courses from the eave upward, each bundle tied, each course slightly steeper than the last to shed water without peeling in wind.
Junho did not thatch. He had no idea how to thatch. He admitted this without embarrassment on the first morning, which produced the novel experience of being taught something by a fifty-three-year-old tenant farmer named Brin who had been doing it since he was twelve and found the lord's ignorance less surprising than the lord's willingness to learn.
Fwap. Fwap. Fwap.
Reed bundles going down. Layer by layer.
By day eighteen the mill had a roof. It was not a beautiful roof — it had the slightly uneven surface of a first attempt at thatch by a mixed crew, and Brin had made several quiet corrections that Junho had noted without comment — but it was waterproof, which was the only requirement it had to meet.
Day nineteen, the wheel.
* * *
Calder had been building the wheel in parallel during the roofing days, working in the barn with Hendry Voss helping to true the hub and spoke assembly. He brought it to the site on the morning of day nineteen on a flat sledge pulled by two men, the wheel lying on its side, still not fully assembled — the float boards were separate, bundled beside it, waiting to be fitted in place.
It was, up close, a more impressive piece of work than Junho had expected.
The hub was elm, dense and close-grained, turned to rough roundness and drilled through the center for the axle. The spokes radiated from it in pairs, each pair forming a V brace that distributed the load from the rim back to the center without creating a single point of failure. The rim itself was built in sections — short curved pieces of oak, joined end to end with iron straps, bent to the wheel's circumference.
Calder had not built a wheel before.
It looked like he had.
I keep being surprised by this.
I shouldn't keep being surprised by this. He's good at what he does.
'The float board angle,' Junho said, crouching to look at the rim. 'You marked the mounting positions?'
'Marked and pre-drilled,' Calder said. He picked up one of the float boards — pine, smooth-planed on the water-facing side, rough on the back. 'Each board gets two pegs through the rim and an iron clip at the end. The clip stops it from levering out when the current hits it.'
'Show me the clip.'
Calder produced one. Gorvan's work — a bent iron strap with two nail holes, simple, functional.
Junho turned it over. The bend angle was right. The bearing surface was adequate. 'These will work. How many do you have?'
'Twenty. Twelve boards on the wheel, so eight spares.'
'Good. Fit the boards this morning. We install the wheel this afternoon.'
'In the housing?'
'In the housing.'
Calder looked at the wheel housing — the stone channel through which the axle would pass, the slot that would hold the axle's iron bearing collars. He looked at the wheel. He did the geometry in his head without appearing to.
'We'll need to rig a lift,' he said. 'To get the wheel vertical and walk it into the housing. It's too heavy to carry upright.'
'I know. I drew the rig last night.' Junho took a folded parchment from his satchel. 'Shear legs — two poles lashed at the top, a pulley between them, rope through the pulley to a team on the ground. We lift the wheel to vertical, walk the shear legs forward over the housing, lower it in.'
Calder examined the sketch. He looked at the poles they'd set aside — two long pine trunks, debarked, leaned against the mill wall.
'The lashing at the top,' he said. 'What kind?'
'Square lash followed by a diagonal lash to stop the legs spreading. I'll show you.'
'You know rope work.'
'I know enough.' In his previous life it had been rigging knowledge absorbed from a project involving a historic building restoration — he'd had to sign off on the rigging plans and had made himself understand them properly rather than just trusting the contractor. That habit — of actually understanding the things he approved rather than simply approving them — was paying dividends in a context he'd never imagined.
* * *
The wheel went in at mid-afternoon.
The shear legs worked. The lift worked. The wheel came vertical with a collective grunt of effort from the four men on the rope, swayed once, was steadied, and walked slowly forward over the housing channel on the legs' feet.
Grrk— Grrk— Grrk—
The axle — a timber axle, hardwood, with the iron bearing collars already fitted over its ends — seated into the housing slots with the heavy, definitive sound of something large finding its correct position.
Clonk.
Junho stood in the creek to his knees, cold water pulling at his boots, and looked up at the wheel from below. The axle ends were seated. The bearing collars were aligned. The wheel hung above the millrace channel, float boards angled correctly, rim true to his eye.
It's straight.
It's actually straight.
He waded back to the bank. His feet were numb. He didn't particularly care.
'Hendry,' he called.
The old mason, who had been watching from the bank with his arms folded, looked over. 'My lord.'
'The bearing seats. Can you pack them today? Mortar and flat stone, lock the collars in.'
'Takes a day to set properly.'
'So we pack them today and touch nothing until tomorrow morning. I need them solid before we open the millrace.'
Hendry unfolded his arms and came forward with the expression of a man who had made peace with working until dark. 'I'll pack them.'
Junho looked at the wheel one more time. The mill frame around it. The roof above it. Two moons would be up in a few hours, and by that light it would look like a building that had been here for years.
Day nineteen. Blade arrives day twenty-one.
Two days to get the saw frame built and in place, mechanism connected, millrace cleared.
It's possible. Barely.
Ping—!
―――――――――――――――――――――――――――
[ QUEST PROGRESS UPDATE ]
「 The Inheritance 」 — Phase 1: Restore the Ashmore Mill
✓ Foundation, frame, roof — complete
✓ Water wheel constructed and installed — Day 19
✓ Bearing seats packed (curing — do not load until Day 20)
□ Saw frame construction (begin Day 20)
□ Crank shaft and pitman arm installation
□ Millrace clearing
□ Blade installation (expected Day 21)
□ Test run and calibration
Projected completion: Day 24–26
Buffer: 4–6 days before contract delivery deadline
Note: Buffer has improved due to Gorvan's early delivery
and efficient wheel installation. Maintain pace.
Days remaining: 71
―――――――――――――――――――――――――――
Four to six days of buffer. Better than three days ago. Not comfortable, but better.
He walked back to the farmhouse in wet boots and ate the evening meal — bread and a hard cheese and cold water from the well — and fell asleep at the table over his notes.
Pell found him there an hour later and said nothing, only left a blanket draped over his shoulders.
* * *
The saw frame was Calder's masterwork.
Junho had given him the drawings — the rectangular frame that would hold the blade, the guide rails along which it would reciprocate, the tensioning system that kept the blade under the right amount of stress. He'd given him the dimensions and the tolerances and the specifications for the pivot points where the pitman arm would connect.
Then he'd stepped back.
This was a discipline he'd had to actively practice in his previous life: giving capable people a clear brief and then not hovering over them while they worked. His instinct was to check constantly, to verify, to insert himself. That instinct came from experience with contractors who cut corners and subcontractors who disappeared and site managers who signed off on things they hadn't actually inspected.
Calder was none of those things.
On day twenty, Junho spent the morning on the millrace. The silted channel that diverted water from the creek to the wheel housing was a hundred and ten meters long — he'd walked and measured it on day two — and clearing it was straightforward labor. Rakes, shovels, boots in the water, muck going onto the bank. He worked alongside Wyll and two other tenant men, because manual labor was simply what day twenty required and standing on the bank directing felt obscene when there were only four of them.
Squelch. Squelch.
The silt was black and cold and smelled of the particular fermented organic richness of undisturbed creek bed. It came out in thick scoops and landed on the bank with a wet slap and the men worked without talking much, which was the correct mode for this kind of task.
By midday the first sixty meters were clear. Junho straightened up, hands on his thighs, and looked at the channel. The stone lining — laid by whoever had dug the original millrace, probably the same competent hands that had done the wheel housing — was intact. No collapse, no major undermining. Just silt.
Sixty down, fifty to go. We'll finish today if we push.
They pushed. They finished.
By early afternoon the millrace was clear from intake to wheel housing, the water in the channel running cleanly over old stone, waiting only for the intake gate to be opened.
He walked back to the mill and found Calder fitting the last guide rail to the saw frame.
The frame was beautiful.
That was not the word Junho usually applied to structural timber components, but it was accurate. The rectangular outer frame was tight and square, the guide rails — twin channels of hardwood that the blade's mounting would slide in — were planed smooth and parallel to a tolerance that his improvised gauge, when he applied it, confirmed was within acceptable range. The pivot point collars were cut exactly to the dimensions for Gorvan's iron sleeves. The tensioning bar at the top of the frame — a slightly bowed hardwood piece that would keep the blade under consistent tension regardless of temperature changes — was the correct species, ash, which Calder had selected himself because ash had the right spring quality for the application.
Junho hadn't specified ash. Calder had known.
At some point I need to stop being surprised by him and just accept the evidence.
'How long to fit the crank mechanism?' Junho asked.
Calder was brushing shavings from the guide rail surface with his palm. 'The iron fittings are already on the axle — I fitted them yesterday while you were on the millrace. The pitman arm attaches to the crank lobe with the iron pin. The other end attaches to the saw frame here.' He tapped the lower pivot collar. 'Two hours, maybe three. The adjustment is the slow part — getting the throw length right.'
'The throw length is critical,' Junho said. 'Too long and the blade overruns the guide rails. Too short and you're not using the full cutting stroke.'
'I know.' Calder picked up the pitman arm — a solid oak member, about eighty centimeters, with the iron-bushed pivot holes at each end that Gorvan had made and that Calder had fitted the wooden arm around. 'I made the arm with an adjustable slot at the frame end. You can shift the pivot point by three centimeters either direction. That gives you a range of throw to work with.'
Junho looked at the adjustable slot. It was a simple solution, elegantly executed — a mortise twice the width it needed to be, with a hardwood wedge that could be repositioned to change the effective pivot location.
I didn't design that. He did.
He solved a problem I hadn't thought to solve yet.
'Good,' Junho said, which was what he said when he meant significantly more than good but didn't have the vocabulary for it in the register of their working relationship. 'Let's fit it this afternoon. Blade comes tomorrow.'
* * *
The blade came on day twenty-one, as promised.
Gorvan brought it himself, which Junho had not expected. The blacksmith arrived on a heavy cart horse, the blade wrapped in oiled cloth and laid carefully in the cart bed like something fragile, which it was not — it was a four-kilogram piece of iron — but which Gorvan appeared to be treating with the proprietary care of a craftsman who wanted to see his work used correctly.
Junho unwrapped it in the mill.
Eighty-two centimeters. The teeth were cut in the rip pattern he'd specified, angling back toward the heel of the stroke, each tooth filed to a consistent angle. The back of the blade was slightly thicker than the tooth edge — swaged, which reduced binding in the kerf as the wood closed behind the cut. He hadn't specified the swaging. Gorvan had added it.
Ting.
He tapped the blade with a finger. The iron rang with a clean, even tone — consistent hardness throughout, no soft spots from uneven quench.
'It's good work,' Junho said.
Gorvan looked at the mill. At the wheel in the housing. At the saw frame standing in the interior on its guide rails. At the crank mechanism on the axle, the pitman arm hanging in position, the whole assembly waiting for a blade.
His expression was the expression of a man re-evaluating something.
'You actually built it,' Gorvan said.
'I said I would.'
'Lords say things.'
'I know,' Junho said. 'I'm aware of the prior record.'
Gorvan made a sound that was either a laugh or a clearing of the throat and was probably both. He looked at the blade in Junho's hands. 'The swaging — I know you didn't specify it. I added it because without it the blade would bind in wet oak. You seemed like someone who'd want it right.'
'I did want it right. Thank you.'
'There's no extra charge.'
'I wasn't going to argue,' Junho said.
Gorvan looked at the mill one more time. 'When you run it for the first time — if you run into problems with the mechanism, send word. I want to know if something I made isn't performing.'
...He's invested in this working.
That's useful. A blacksmith who cares about outcomes is a better supplier than one who just fulfills orders.
'I'll let you know either way,' Junho said. 'Good results or problems.'
Gorvan nodded. He climbed back on his cart horse without ceremony and rode south toward Crestfall.
Junho carried the blade inside.
* * *
Fitting the blade took two hours.
The blade mounted in the saw frame's lower section, clamped between iron cheeks that Gorvan had made as part of the fitting package, tensioned by the ash bow bar above until the blade was straight and resonant when tapped. Junho fitted it himself while Calder watched, checking and re-checking the alignment — blade parallel to the guide rails, perpendicular to the log bed, the tooth line exactly in the plane the pitman arm would drive it through.
When it was done he sat back on his heels and looked at the assembly.
The crank shaft on the wheel axle. The pitman arm connecting crank to saw frame. The saw frame on its guide rails, blade fitted, tensioned, aligned. The log bed — a timber platform with iron stop pins — waiting to receive its first log.
Every component was in place.
The only thing missing was water.
Ping—!
―――――――――――――――――――――――――――
[ QUEST PROGRESS UPDATE ]
「 The Inheritance 」 — Phase 1: Restore the Ashmore Mill
✓ Foundation, frame, roof — complete
✓ Water wheel installed — Day 19
✓ Millrace cleared — Day 20
✓ Crank shaft and pitman arm installed — Day 21
✓ Saw blade fitted and aligned — Day 21
Remaining: Open intake gate. Run test.
Note: First water tomorrow morning.
Confirm all personnel clear of mechanism before opening gate.
―――――――――――――――――――――――――――
Tomorrow morning.
I could open the gate tonight. There's enough moonlight.
...No. You don't run a first test when you're tired and the light is bad and you can't see properly if something goes wrong.
He covered the blade with oiled cloth and banked the small fire he'd lit against the evening chill and walked back to the farmhouse.
In the morning.
* * *
He did not sleep well again.
This was different from the first night's insomnia. That had been the calculation anxiety of a man trying to understand a problem. This was the specific sleeplessness of a man who had done everything he could do and now had to find out if it was enough.
Engineers called this the commissioning phase. Everything built, everything connected, everything theoretically correct — and then you turned it on and found out what you'd missed.
There was always something you'd missed.
The bearing seats. Did Hendry pack them properly? I checked them on day twenty and they felt solid but—
The pitman arm pivot. The iron bushing has a slight fit variation on the frame end. I accounted for it in the throw adjustment but if the bushing walks under load—
The blade tension. If the ash bar temperature-compensates differently than I estimated—
He was still running through failure modes at three in the morning when he gave up on sleep, lit the candle, and wrote them all down in a list.
It was a long list.
He read back through it when he was done.
Most of the items were things he'd already checked. Three were things he could verify in the morning before opening the gate. One was a genuine uncertainty — the behavior of the pitman arm pivot under sustained dynamic load — that he couldn't verify until the mechanism was actually running.
Everything has a genuine uncertainty. That's what commissioning is for.
Stop catastrophizing and go to sleep.
He blew out the candle.
He lay in the dark for another hour.
He did not sleep.
* * *
Dawn. The mill.
He arrived before anyone else and spent an hour going through the three items on his pre-run check list. Bearing seats — solid, mortar fully cured, no play when he pushed the axle collar. Blade tension — he tapped it, listened to the tone, tightened the tensioning bar one half-turn and tapped again. Better. Pitman arm upper pivot — he worked it by hand through several cycles, feeling for binding or slop, found none.
By the time he was done the others had arrived.
All of them.
This surprised him. He had told Pell to pass word that there would be a test run on day twenty-two, but he had not expected — had not specifically requested — an audience. Yet here they were. Calder and Hendry. Pell. Wyll Dunwick and his brother, two years younger, a boy of eighteen who had not previously come to the mill site. Three other tenant men. And at the back of the group, slightly apart in the way she was always slightly apart, Mara Dunwick.
She had her arms folded.
She had, as far as Junho could tell, never unfolded her arms in his presence.
No pressure.
He looked at the group. The mill behind him. The millrace, clear water running along it from the creek intake, waiting at the closed gate that would release it to the wheel.
'Everyone stays back from the mechanism,' he said. 'Until we know how it runs, nobody stands within two meters of the wheel or the saw frame. If something fails I want it to fail without taking anyone with it.'
Nobody argued with this.
'Calder. You're on the gate.'
Calder went to the millrace gate — a simple timber sluice, its counterweighted lever within reach of the bank. He put his hand on the lever.
'On my word,' Junho said. 'Open it slowly. Half-way first. Give the wheel time to come up to speed before full flow.'
'Understood.'
Junho went into the mill. He positioned himself where he could see the wheel through the housing opening, the crank on the axle, the pitman arm, and the saw frame — the complete kinematic chain in one sightline. He put his hand on nothing. He just watched.
'Open it,' he called.
Krrk—
The gate moved. Water entered the millrace channel below the wheel.
The first float boards caught it.
The wheel moved.
Shhhhhk—
Slowly. Then less slowly. The axle turned in its bearing collars with a deep, resonant groan — the sound of iron on iron finding its running surface — that lasted three rotations and then smoothed.
Whmmm—
The crank lobe came around. The pitman arm moved. Descended on the downstroke, the arm going from near-vertical to near-horizontal, and the saw frame —
Skk—
— dropped. Clean. Smooth. The guide rails doing exactly what guide rails existed to do, constraining the motion to a single plane, the frame descending without deviation and then—
Skk— Skk—
Rising. Descending. Rising.
The wheel was at half flow. The mechanism was cycling at roughly thirty strokes per minute — slower than operating speed but enough to see the behavior clearly.
Junho watched.
The bearing seats held. The axle ran smoothly, the initial iron-on-iron settling having resolved into the quiet, consistent sound of a lubricated bearing at work. The crank threw the pitman arm through its arc without deviation. The saw frame reciprocated in its guide rails with a precision that was, frankly, better than he'd expected from hand-cut components in a pre-industrial workshop.
It's running.
It's actually running.
'Full flow,' he called.
Krrk—
The gate opened fully. The wheel accelerated. The mechanism picked up speed — sixty strokes per minute, then seventy, finding its natural frequency as the water input matched the system's resistance.
Whmmm— Skk-skk-skk-skk—
The sound of a running sawmill. Even without a log in the bed, even without a blade making contact, the sound was distinctive and purposeful and completely alien to the medieval clearing around it.
Junho became aware that he was smiling.
He stopped smiling, because there were things to check and he was not done checking them. He walked around the mechanism slowly, looking at each component in sequence, listening for sounds that shouldn't be there, watching for movements that shouldn't happen.
The pitman arm pivot on the frame end — the one he'd worried about at three in the morning — was behaving correctly. The iron bushing was seating itself against the wooden collar rather than walking, because the dynamic load was pressing it into the seat rather than pulling it out. His estimation had been right. The geometry was right.
He went outside.
The group was standing in a rough semicircle a few meters from the mill entrance, listening to the mechanism sound. Several of them had the expression of people hearing something for the first time that they would remember for a long time. Calder was standing with his hands at his sides, not fidgeting, not turning his scrap of wood. Just listening.
Hendry Voss had one hand pressed flat against the exterior wall of the mill, feeling the vibration.
Mara Dunwick's arms were not folded.
She was looking at the building with an expression Junho had not seen on her face before. Not warmth, not approval — something more fundamental. Recognition, maybe. The look of someone who had been waiting, without quite knowing they were waiting, to see whether a thing was real.
'It needs a log,' Junho said. 'The test isn't complete until we've cut something.'
Wyll was already moving. He went to the timber staging area along the mill's north wall — they'd staged a dozen small logs there over the past week, waiting for this moment — and lifted one end of the shortest, manageable one. His brother took the other end. They carried it inside.
Setting the log on the bed was a precise operation. Junho did it himself, aligning the log against the iron stop pins, making sure it was bedded flat on the support timbers, checking that its long axis was square to the blade path. The blade was stopped — the gate was still open, wheel still turning, but the log bed was positioned upstream of the blade and the first contact would happen as the bed was advanced by hand.
He looked at Calder. 'You advance the bed. Slow, steady pressure. Don't force it. Let the blade do the work.'
Calder took hold of the advance lever.
Junho stepped back.
'Go.'
Skk-skk-skk-skk—
The blade meeting the end grain of the log.
Skkrrk—
Resistance. The wheel groaned slightly — load on the mechanism now, real load, the blade working against wood — and then found its torque and settled.
Whmm— Skkrrk-skkrrk-skkrrk—
The cut advancing.
Junho watched the saw frame. No deviation in the guide rails. No chatter in the blade — the tension was right, the swaging working as Gorvan had intended, the kerf staying open behind the blade so it didn't bind. The log advanced steadily on the bed as Calder applied consistent pressure, and a thin stream of sawdust — fine, pale, smelling sharply of pine — began to fall from the cut line to the floor.
It took four minutes to cut through the log.
The two halves fell apart on the bed with a soft wooden sound.
Thump.
Calder withdrew the bed from the blade path. Junho went forward and picked up one of the cut halves.
The cut face was flat. Not perfectly flat — there was a slight waviness in the surface from the reciprocating action, which was normal and expected for a frame saw, finer than a hand rip saw would produce but not as smooth as a circular saw would — but flat enough. Within acceptable tolerance for structural lumber.
He turned the piece over and looked at the cut face in the morning light coming through the mill's east window.
Ping—!
―――――――――――――――――――――――――――
[ QUEST MILESTONE ACHIEVED ]
「 The Inheritance 」 — Phase 1 Complete
Ashmore Sawmill — OPERATIONAL
First cut recorded: Day 22
Days ahead of contract deadline: 8
Performance assessment:
Cut quality: Grade B+ (structural lumber standard — met)
Throughput estimate: 10–12 logs/day at current wheel speed
Mechanism stability: Good. Monitor pitman arm pivot wear.
REWARD:
[Blueprint: Sawmill Improvements (Vol. I)] — UNLOCKED
[Territory Status: CRITICAL → DISTRESSED]
+150 EXP
Phase 2 unlocked: Timber Operations & First Delivery
―――――――――――――――――――――――――――
Territory status improved. From Critical to Distressed.
Still distressed. But no longer critical.
I'll take it.
He set the cut piece down on the log bed and looked at the room. Calder beside him. Wyll and his brother in the doorway, the light from outside framing them. The wheel turning in its housing, the mechanism cycling, the whole building quietly alive with purposeful motion.
'Good,' Junho said.
It was, again, a word that meant more than it contained. He was aware of this and unable to fix it. Some things sat better in silence than in language.
He walked outside.
The full group was there. He told them what they'd achieved and what came next — now the timber operations began, the forest harvest, the real work of processing volume. He gave them the new sequence. He answered questions. He was clear and specific and kept it short, because there was a great deal to do and talking about it was not doing it.
When the group dispersed to their tasks, Mara Dunwick did not leave immediately.
She stood at the mill entrance and looked in at the running mechanism for a long moment. Junho waited.
'My father tried to get the old lord to fix the mill when I was a girl,' she said, without looking at him. 'He said the same thing you said. That it was the thing that unlocked everything else. The old lord said he'd look into it and then he didn't.'
She looked at Junho.
'You said thirty days,' she said. 'It's day twenty-two.'
'There was a good carpenter involved,' Junho said.
Mara was quiet for a moment. The mill turned behind her, the mechanism sound filling the space between them.
'The east field drainage,' she said. 'You told my son you had a plan and you'd walk the field with me.'
'I do. When do you want to walk it?'
'Tomorrow morning,' she said. 'Before work.'
'I'll be there at dawn.'
She looked at him for one more moment. Then she nodded — a small, precise motion, the kind that meant something specific from a person who did not waste gestures — and walked away toward the farmstead.
Junho turned back to the mill.
Inside, the wheel turned. The mechanism ran. The blade waited for its next log.
Day twenty-two.
Sixty-eight left.
There's a lot still to do.
He went back inside to do it.
—
[ End of Chapter 5 ]
~ To be continued ~
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