The pain did not stop all at once; it simply drifted away, like the sound of a wagon team rounding a distant bend in the hills.
For a time that had no minutes in it, Tobin existed only as a pulse of rhythm—the steady, four-beat clatter of iron shoes against packed river gravel. He had known that cadence since he was eleven years old, riding behind his father on the stone drays, learning how a good draft horse leaned into the breast-harness when the grade climbed toward the high quarries. It was a comforting sound, honest and predictable, carrying the promise that every road, no matter how steep or muddy, eventually leveled out at the top of the pass.
Then the clatter faded, and the cold iron in his ribs lost its fire.
The roaring of the weir—the terrifying, deafening cascade that had filled his ears while the iron quarrel tore through his lung—softened into a distant murmur, no louder than the wind rustling through the dried reeds of the lower millpond. The smell of copper blood and wet river mud receded, replaced by something warm, golden, and dry.
It was the smell of late autumn oats in an open bin.
