The first thing Noll Vey felt was not light or sound, but the terrible, stubborn pull of the earth.
For weeks, gravity had been something that happened to other people. It was the force that made water run downhill through his culverts, the weight that pressed his foundation footings into the mountain bedrock, the drag that made mortal knees ache after carrying a basket of barley up from the valley road. When you are the masonry of an entire hill fort, gravity is simply the tension holding your stones together. Now, compressed into four hundred pounds of dressed hill-slate and iron hinge-pins, gravity was an iron hook set directly into his pelvic dowels, demanding that he account for every square inch of his balance or kiss the flagstones.
He swayed half an inch forward. The copper nerve wires hummed along his spine, transmitting the dull, blunt shock of the floor pressing against the flat soles of his slate feet.
He was standing.
He had not stood on two feet since a rainy Tuesday outside the fort’s broken sally port, when the debt collector Varn had driven an eight-inch iron blade between his ribs over fourteen silver crowns. On that morning, his knees had buckled in the wet nettles, his velvet coat had soaked up ditch-water, and his blood had seeped into the cracked blue core stone in the weeds while crows watched from the spruce branches. Now, there were no knees to buckle. There were only greased copper hinge-cups, lead…
