Jon Hale braced his left palm against the curved oak staves of the fifty-gallon salted cider cask and pushed himself upright onto the cold cellar flagstones, sliding the fourteen-inch cylinder of bloodstained gray lead beneath the fold of his leather apron bib before the swing of Tobin’s brass stable lantern could catch the dark, dried smears of the boy’s dying handprints across the metal.
River-silt cold still drove straight through Jon’s breastbone as Rollback Shock emptied his lungs of the smoke and freezing weir-spray from the fourth day at the sluice. The phantom roar of forty tons of white water hammered inside his ears, mixed with the wet, whistling thwack of an iron quarrel punching through sixteen-year-old leather and ribs. Yet six paces away, whole and unscarred in his brown wool vest and leather riding belt, Tobin crouched behind the third cask row beside the foundation wall and hoisted the small oak firkin of kitchen salt onto his hip.
“A letter for the south road, Master Jon?” Tobin asked, balancing the salt firkin against his belt while the brass lantern in his left hand threw warm yellow light across the cellar stone. “If you need it carried toward Low Sike, I can tuck it into my outer wallet as soon as I set this salt by Mistress Elin’s dough-trough. With the bay mare favoring her near hind hock, I’m saddling the tall bay post-gelding in the third stall so the clay mud doesn’t slow me before the half-hour.”
