Six weeks after the morning of the restored horizon, on the forty-fifth day of the new civil calendar, Len Vey walked the full length of the Rookvale basin from the high granite crest of the Star tower down to the River footbridge, carrying no dispatch metal tube and checking no pocket watch.
It was the first morning in his entire skilled life that he had walked a mountain road without an impending delivery deadline hanging over his collar.
His left arm was free of the heavy cedar splints now. In their place, he wore the supportive brace of dark, oil-tanned cowhide that Brant Sallow had cut for him. Six inches of stiffened, whalebone-ribbed leather, laced snugly from the base of his knuckles to two inches below his elbow with waxed hemp cord. The fracture of the mid-shaft forearm bone was fully consolidated. Sallow had tested the bone with his iron measuring tongs three days earlier. Then, the dense, walnut-sized bony callus had shown zero bending under eighty pounds of sideways push.
Yet the anatomy had accepted its permanent boundaries.
Beneath the leather sleeve, the bone bore a three-degree inward deviation, pulling his left wrist slightly toward his ribs. Len held his arm straight before him and tried to turn his palm upward toward the morning sky. Then, the joint locked solidly at the upright plane, the stringy scar tissue of the torn inner bone-web refusing to yield. His active palm-turn was permanently capped at ninety degrees. His right wrist, too…
