The leash came back as a numb hand comes back to life, with a prickle first and then a flood.
Brannoc felt it begin in the wrist. It was the white wrist, the one that had been changed by the bloom and had never quite settled into the rest of him, and it was the first part of the body to answer the reach. A slow, deep tightening crept up the bones of his forearm, as a rope tightens when someone at the top of a stair takes up the slack without hurrying. It reached his elbow, and then his shoulder. Then it went down into his chest, and stayed there, a long warm drag like a hand laid flat over his heart to see whether it was still beating.
He stopped on the road. He did not mean to. His feet simply would not go forward any farther, because the weight had come back into them, and the stones under his boots had begun to feel like stones again. They were grey and wet and set without iron, and they had a heave and a settle that he knew the way he knew the bar of the gate. He stood with his white hand held out at his side and felt the paving through the soles of his feet, and he thought: the road is ours again.
