The Wool Mill Apprentices

About this book:

In the soot-blackened heart of medieval Highford, the clatter of broadlooms is the only law that matters—until the guild wardens come calling with rigged scales and poisoned ink. Bound apprentice Walter has spent four years mastering the shuttle, the treadle, and the bite of lye on cracked knuckles, but when Master Mercer Ghyll marks his master's cloth "faulty" and seizes the shop's livelihood, the rhythm of the workroom shatters. With a corrupt alderman circling for the water-rights, a clerk whispering of "accidental" fires, and a mysterious tainted wool-grease turning up in the dye-vats, Walter, sharp-tongued Gillian, and frightened Martin uncover a conspiracy that reaches from the cellar oil-jars to the guildhall's highest bench.

As the Martinmas fair looms and the fulling hammers thunder through the night, the apprentices must race to finish a contracted bolt of fine blue broadcloth—the one piece Ghyll cannot touch—while deciphering the coded ledger of a dead alchemist and the secret of the dyer's vat. Loyalties fray when the master's hand begins to tremble, the town bell tolls for militia, and the iron shears come out on Weavers' Row. In a trade where a single loose thread condemns a whole bolt, three bound boys hold the shuttle that could unravel a tyrant's grip—or hang them all.

Steeped in the grease, grit, and guild politics of the thirteenth-century wool trade, *The Wool Mill Apprentices* weaves a taut historical thriller where craft knowledge is survival, friendship is forged in freezing scouring trenches, and justice must be beaten into the cloth thread by desperate thread.