Hesta Bray

She runs The Turning Wheel in Beckwith, and she wants it understood that being paid is not the same as being glad.

The welcome

Ch. 321.

HES: Academy. [...] Eight of you. [...] They said six. ART: I have a letter. HES: I don't want the letter, I want the two extra beds I now have to find. Give me the letter.

Then the terms:

HES: Hesta Bray. I run this place, which means I feed you and I put you up and I get paid by your academy for the privilege, and I want it understood immediately that being paid does not make me glad to see you. FNN: That's very direct. HES: I've had four groups of you lot in eleven years. Every single one of them arrived thinking they were about to be extremely helpful, and every single one of them spent the first two days getting in the way of people who were already doing the work perfectly well without them. BRR: That's a fair concern. HES: It's not a concern, it's a prediction.

YSE: I like her. HES: I heard that. YSE: You were meant to.

She tells them where to start anyway

Without looking up, at the end of the same evening, when they cannot work out what to do.

HES: Odell Crane. The mill. He's been shorthanded since spring and he'll never once ask you for anything, so you'll have to turn up and be stubborn about it.

That's your first day. After that you can work it out yourselves.

Supper is at seven and she does not hold it

She says so twice on the first day.

Ch. 322, after they come back filthy from clearing the mill's eastern platform for the first time since spring:

She took in the flour, the silt, the exhaustion, and the eastern platform's absence from the general shape of the day, and she said nothing at all for a moment.

HES: Supper's at seven. ELS: It's ten past. HES: I held it.