A track comes down through the grazing slopes to the river, and where it should meet the bridge it meets nothing. Stumps stand on the stone footings, the broken ends of the central stay pale where the axe went in. Splintered oak hangs in the alders. Uprooted trees and the beams of someone's roof lie heaped against the bank, and the water still runs high and brown, loud with everything it carries.
This oak stood through ten floods. Every peg in it was driven by hand, and beside the rail the builders cut their marks, worn smooth by hands and carts. Now, in the grey dawn, six riders in black cloaks wait on the far bank while engineers drive silver stakes into the mud. Before noon a squared stone pier will stand where the timbers lay. On the slope the valley folk watch in silence, wet to the skin. They gave their bridge to the river. What they will give the men who measure roads, they have not decided.
The place
The bridge stood several miles from Brindle Hollow, below the upper ford and above the lower farms, on one of the market village's main approaches. It was a broad oak span on stone-footed piers across a fast, alder-lined river, built by the surrounding households under the direction of Toman Reedwhistle's father. The Hearthkin valued it not because it would last but because it carried people home. Roads, Toman's father taught, are promises, not monuments. What the Crown's stonework there looks like today, nobody has written down.
Its story
When the storm broke the upper ford, the whole vale gathered at the bridge with ropes around the beams, and old Red Fen argued to hold it. Then uprooted trees and rooftops jammed the span, and the water climbed toward the homes below. Toman set an axe to the central stay his father had raised, and the river took bridge and blockage together. At dawn black-cloaked riders marked the wreck with silver stakes, and by noon the first stone pier stood. Toman still wears an iron bridge pin at his throat. His lesson, that a road is only worthy while it carries people home, guided the Greenfold when it later took the Crown's road apart.