The world had shrunk to the size of a fist pressed into the center of her breastbone.
Every time Doma Reel tried to draw breath, iron bands seemed to tighten around her ribs, grinding broken bone-ends against each other with a dry, crunching friction that made her stomach heave with nausea. The sensation was distinct, immediate, and utterly devoid of mercy. It was the same sound she had heard three winters ago. Just then, a fully loaded grain cart had tipped over on the south siding. It snapped an apprentice’s thigh bone against the rail curb. Now that sound was inside her own chest. It echoed behind her collarbone with every flutter of her failing pulse.
She couldn’t feel her legs in the water. The lower half of her body had become numb and distant, as if her wool trousers and heavy leather clogs had already been swept away by the two-knot current into the deep under-road drains of the River Ward. The scalding heat of the floodwater, which had blistered her calves ten minutes earlier, was gone. In its place was a heavy, leaden chill that crept upward from her knees toward her pelvis, dulling the nerve endings until she felt anchored to the bedrock like an old iron piling.
