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hoops flew in all directions, and the thirty-odd bucketfuls of water inside the cask were released in one enormous torrent. Under the table, Stig was momentarily flattened by the weight of water falling on him. He let out a gurgling screech.
    The pipes and connecting sections followed the cask, crashing onto the table and the flooded kitchen floor, bouncing and clattering as they disassembled themselves.
    Hal, held erect by Thorn’s iron grip on his collar, watched in horror as his beautiful invention, lovingly built over several evenings, destroyed itself in a matter of seconds. The kitchen was a tangle of barrel staves, hoops, pipe sections, bracket timbers and flooding water. The wall in which the bracket had been fastened now displayed a gaping hole where the plaster had been torn loose, exposing the beams beneath it.
    One of the iron cask hoops had been set spinning by the fall. It continued to spin unevenly on the floor, going from rim to rim, the yang-yang-yang-yang sound it made the only noise in the ruined kitchen.
    Stig’s startled face appeared over the far side of the table. His blond hair was plastered down by water. His shirt was totally saturated.
    “I think those staves are well and truly settled now,” Thorn said.
    And that, of course, was the moment that Karina chose to return from the market.
     
    “You shouldn’t encourage him, Thorn,” Karina said as she kneaded dough for a loaf of bread.
    Thorn was on his knees, stacking a supply of cut firewood for the stove. He shook his head, smiling faintly.
    “I can’t help it,” he said. “He’s so enthusiastic about his ideas. He puts so much energy into them.”
    “Too much,” Karina said sternly. “He starts brotherband training next week. He can’t be distracting himself with this sort of nonsense.”
    She waved a floury hand around the kitchen. The only evidence of the previous day’s chaos was several fresh patches of plaster on the wall above the worktable.
    Hal had spent most of the previous afternoon mopping up the kitchen, sluicing water out the door with a flat wooden blade fastened to a broom handle, collecting and removing the shattered timber, staves, channels and barrel hoops and replastering the huge gouges torn in the wall by the bracket as it collapsed. When the new plaster was thoroughly dry, he would repaint it.
    “He won’t have the time or energy,” Thorn told her. “Brotherband training will keep him on the go all day.”
    “And a good thing,” Karina muttered, almost to herself.
    Thorn straightened up from his crouched position by the wood box. He pressed the back of his hand into the small of his back and groaned softly.
    “I’m getting too old for all this bending and stooping,” he said. Then, as Karina continued to pummel the lump of dough with her fists and the heel of her hand, he added, in an appeasing tone, “He was only doing it to make your life easier, you know. He wanted to surprise you.”
    “He certainly managed that,” Karina said, setting the thoroughly kneaded dough into a bowl, and covering it with a linen cloth. “I’m just wondering how destroying my kitchen could be seen as making my life easier.”
    She poured more flour onto the table, shaping it into a mound and making a well in the center, preparatory to forming another loaf.
    “The idea was good,” Thorn objected mildly. “It was just a detail that went wrong.”
    Karina stopped working and regarded him. “He always says that when one of his ideas goes wrong.”
    “They don’t always go wrong,” Thorn said. “Some of them are surprisingly good. The heating system he designed for your dining room was quite ingenious.”
    Karina nodded reluctantly. “I suppose that’s true. I just tend to remember the disasters—particularly when they flood my kitchen.”
    She poured a mixture of water and milk into the well and pushed the side in, moving the mixture around with her hands to form a thick dough.
    “He’s a good boy,” Thorn