Miren Hale handed Joss an empty cup.
“Stand here.”
He stood beside the Wellmouth outlet while she turned its worn wheel.
A thin stream ran into the cup, slowed, and stopped before it reached the brim.
Across the village square, a line of women and men waited with buckets.
Nobody looked surprised by the failed draw.
That frightened Joss more than shouting would have.
Miren reset the wheel.
“Again in ten minutes.
The head’s pressure seal leaks every time we open it.
We can patch it where it stands.
Or we can move it and finally repair the source outlet properly.”
“That’s why you asked for a carrier.”
“That’s why I asked for somebody who’d repair it before deciding where to carry it.”
She took the cup back.
Her fingers were thick with old seal burns.
Joss had expected an owner ready to haggle over machinery.
He found a maintainer with forty households watching every adjustment she made.
Tan walked around the wellhead without touching it.
Its old frame stood on four compressed ribs above a sunken stone basin.
A brass plate listed stable burden: one hundred and forty.
The current needle sat higher, moving when the outlet coughed.
Under the frame, a narrow draw-throat disappeared into the bore casing.
Joss could see groundwater wetting the stone below.
The old civic conduit carried that water through prepared receivers along the river.
Moving the head would send the draw to another outlet, leaving this square dependent on whatever bypass they built.
He didn’t ask Miren to sign his receipt.
“Show us the source,” he said.
She did.
The bore house had a locked door and a roof patched with different colors of slate.
Inside, two ordinary reservoir cisterns stood beside the old casing.
Both were shallow.
Miren had drawn chalk marks on their walls to show what the waterline used to reach.
“The bore refills,” she said.
“Slower in dry weather.
Draw more than it supplies and we drain the reserve.
That doesn’t get kinder because another village is thirsty.”
Orla put her tins down beside the door.
“Rill Camp hasn’t had a working draw in three months.”
“I know,” Miren replied.
“Your people came here.
We filled what they carried.
I can’t fill a closed pipe by hoping your toll keeper changes his mind.”
Joss took out the contract with Kett.
He set it beside Edda’s water order.
“I’m asking for a shared route,” he said.
“Source first.
Rill outlet tested before Reed Dock draws.
Your assembly sets what the bore can spare.”
Miren read both pages.
“And the head?”
“Carried to a sound receiver where the pressure holds.
Prepared conduit only.
The water stays yours to ration when the bore runs low.”
“Ours to ration,” she corrected.
“Not mine.
I have to answer to the households.”
They met in the square after the next draw.
One man wanted the toll buyer’s money.
His roof had lost half its tiles, and a sale would repair them before rain.
A woman beside him wanted the head kept exactly where it was.
She had seen two previous promises arrive with carts and leave without improving her bucket.
Tan sketched a bypass around the damaged pressure basin.
It needed two brace rails, sound outlet fittings, and a tested reservoir gate.
Miren had the gate.
The fittings could be salvaged from the closed outer tap.
The rails were scarce.
Without them, moving the head would reduce the village’s daily supply before the new route delivered a drop to anyone else.
“Five marks of approved expense reserve,” Joss said.
“Not enough to buy new civic rails.”
The man with the broken roof laughed bitterly.
“Then you’ve brought paper.”
“And a mechanic,” Joss said.
“If paper fixed a seal, she’d have charged me less.”
Tan pointed to an unused receiver cradle beside the bore house.
Its lower braces might fit if they cut and pinned them.
Miren examined the sketch.
She knew which parts carried the head’s strain and which were redundant after the bypass.
“We test before cutting,” she said.
“Yes,” Joss replied.
The assembly agreed to one measured trial: source flow before and after temporary head stabilization, cistern level recorded, no extraction until the bypass could hold.
Orla would watch for Rill Camp.
A household pair would watch for Wellmouth.
Della and Orla chose opposite sides of the gauge so neither would block the other’s view.
Miren unlocked the reservoir gauge box.
While Tan prepared the seal mix, Joss walked the square with the household witnesses.
One was an older potter named Raf Doke, the man with the damaged roof.
He knew the cistern marks from fetching water every morning, including the line it had held through the last dry spell.
“I’m not selling because I enjoy bad deals,” he said.
“I didn’t say you were.”
Raf touched a broken tile in his pocket.
“Rain through a roof is expensive too.
You come from a place full of water.”
“And none we can safely drink without burning what we need for winter.”
They stopped beside the village’s outer outlet.
Its dry pipe could supply the bypass if the support braces held a straight path around the damaged basin.
Joss measured the existing socket with Bess’s repaired survey hook while Tan called dimensions from her sketch.
Raf weighted the sketch with his broken roof tile.
Twice he asked Tan to repeat a dimension.
The second witness, a grain seller named Della, marked the cistern’s starting level in charcoal.
Orla copied it.
They recorded the time against the bore-house clock, which Miren wound in front of them.
Joss placed both contracts on the dry bench.
His stitched palm itched beneath its dressing.
He flexed his good fingers against his knee and watched Tan finish mixing the seal.
Miren tested the gauge lever once and handed Della the key to its locked recording face.
“Nobody measures alone,” she said.
Tan set out the three remaining salt bricks and seal oil.
Latch tested the bore-house threshold with its repaired feet and waited beside the empty carrier cradle.
Joss had begun checking the old receiver’s bolt pattern when hoofbeats came from the paid road.
The toll buyer arrived in a covered cart with four guards and a survey frame strapped behind it.
Ivo Tern rode beside the driver.
He looked at Joss, the wellhead, and the open gauge box, checking each before climbing down.
The buyer stepped out carrying a confiscation order.
“Source machinery under mandatory holding,” he said.
“Unsafe operation.
All public draw suspended until transfer.”
The waiting households stared at him.
Miren kept her hand on the gauge lever.
Della held the recording key.
“Your safety stops our water?”
“Your machinery has been assessed.”
Ivo looked at the untouched survey frame on the buyer’s cart.
Joss set the two household contracts beside the empty cup Miren had given him.
“Then we’ll assess it where people can see.”