Idrin went to the goat pens because he could not sleep and because the goats were the only creatures in the Hold that did not want a decision from him. He had tried the chapel, where the cold went up through the flagstones into his shins, and the armoury, where Korrin had oiled every blade in the room and was kneeling over the last of them with an expression that dared anyone to ask why. He had tried the wall. The wall had told him where the water was, every few paces, and he had been glad of the company until it stopped. In the end his feet took him across the frozen court to the low sheds at the eastern edge of the Hold, where the lamp was lit and the straw smelled warm and sour.
Tamsin Furrow was in the straw with the kids. She had a young nanny goat across her knees and a second one nosing at her hair, and she was singing.
The song was low and rough, and it had a pulse in it, like a hand going up and down a wall in the rhythm of a count. Idrin could not place the words. They were not Lessaran, not marsh, not any tongue he had learned from a tutor or a nurse or a Chancery clerk, and yet they did not sound foreign. They sounded like something a great many people had sung at once, in a place with a roof, a long time ago. He stood in the doorway with the cold at his back and listened to her voice rise and fall over a line that did not seem to end, and he realised, with a small shock that went through his chest like a pin, that he knew the shape of the tune.
It had a turn at the end of each phrase. Just before the last note, the melody lifted, hung for an instant, and came down on the beat, and his body anticipated the turn before he heard it. The anticipation was so strong that he took a step toward the straw without meaning to. Then the turn came, and it was not what his body had been waiting for. It was a different turn. It went the other way. He stopped with one foot in the air.
Tamsin looked up at him over the nanny’s back. Her face was gentle and tired in the lamplight, and her eyes were wet at the corners, though she did not seem to know it.
“Come in, Warden,” she said. “You’ll let the cold in on them. They’re not used to it.”
He came in, but only as far as the stall-rail. The goat on her knee blinked at him with its strange flat eyes and went on chewing a strand of straw.
“What is that song?” he asked.
“It’s the one everybody knows.” Tamsin stroked the nanny’s neck and went back to the verse without a pause, so that the tune took up where it had left off. “Every nursery in the world knows it, I think. I don’t know how I know it. I’ve never been taught it. The goats learned it off me the first winter, and the body learned it off the goats, I should imagine, and the body had it from the builders, because the builders had it from the work. It isn’t a lullaby, though it sounds like one. The builders didn’t have lullabies. They had counts. This is one of the counts.”
“It is not a lullaby,” said Idrin, too sharply.
“No, love. I said so.”
“My nurse did not sing it. My nurse sang songs about ships. And my mother did not sing.” He stopped. He had not meant to say the last part, and he could feel the words sitting in his mouth like a stone that had been swallowed the wrong way. He had lost his mother’s lullaby in the first summer, at the Hold’s first tie-break Writ, when the marsh-men had been brought before the Chamber and the Chamber had been tied, and the tie had been broken by a Writ that he had cast with his own voice. He had noticed the loss at thirty-six, when he had gone to hum it to himself, and found that he had only the shape of the silence where it had been.
Tamsin was quiet for a moment. Then she said, very gently, as though she were asking the goat, “Then who sang it to you?”
He could not answer her. He opened his mouth to say my mother, which was the answer any prince in Lessary would have given, and nothing came. The words were there, and the shape of his mother’s face, and the shape of the sound she had made, which had been somewhere between a hum and a word. What was not there was the sound itself. He did not know whether the song in the straw was that sound, or a stranger’s song poured into his mother’s shape by a body that had learned it in the work and had nothing better to do with it. He could not tell. He thought the not-telling would probably be the rest of his life.
“Hum it with me,” said Tamsin. “You don’t need the words. The goats don’t have them either, and they manage.”
He did not mean to say yes. He found that he had, and that he was standing at the stall-rail with his hands on the wood, and that the nanny goat had lifted its head and was watching him with its flat, unhurried eyes. He hummed. The first line came out of him almost right, low and uncertain, as a man walks across a floor he has been told is solid. He reached the turn. His voice went up, and hung, and his throat closed on the note as though a hand had been laid across it. He came down a half-beat late and off the line, and the nanny went back to her straw with a grunt of disapproval.
“There,” said Tamsin softly. “She was listening. That is something, love. Goats don’t listen to anyone they don’t respect.”
“It is not my mother’s.”
“No. It is the builders’.” She did not argue with him. She stroked the young goat’s neck and said, in the same gentle tone, “But your mother might have had it from a builder’s wife, in Lessary, for all anybody knows. Songs go where the people go. They get into the cradles and the kitchens and the carts, and then the people die or move house, and the songs stay behind in whatever room they were last sung in. Yours might have been sung in a room like this one, by someone who never once thought of you.”
He looked at the straw and the lamp and the little bright eyes of the kids. He thought about the cradle in Lessary, the long white one with the carved swans, and about the nurse who had sung about ships, and about a woman whose face he could still see in the candlelight with the words gone out of her mouth. He could not decide which of them had sung him the turn. He did not think he would ever decide.
“I have to go,” he said.
“Mind the step, love. The third board’s loose. Harrow says it’s not his fault, and he’s right, it’s the goats.”
He minded the step. He went out into the cold and stood for a moment in the court with his hands in his coat, and he heard, behind him, the song begin again from its first line, and he did not turn round. He walked to the Great Hall. He did not decide to go there. His feet took him, as they had taken him to the goats, and when he pushed open the door, the Hall was empty except for the long table, the candle-clock, and Tallow, who sat on a bench in his shirt-sleeves with a book open in his lap and a candle at his elbow that had burned down to a stub.
“You are up,” said Tallow, without looking round. “I did not expect you to be up. I have been up for an hour myself.”
“You are reading.”
“I have been reading the Chancery’s public book,” Tallow said. “The one they sent up with the summons. It is a list of the Lessary songs that are permitted in the public halls, with their verses numbered, and I have been looking for the tune Tamsin sings to the goats. I searched every page, and every verse, and every refrain, and I found nothing that matches it.” He looked up then, and his face was puzzled and a little affronted, as if the book had been careless. “I should give you a figure for the result. I have looked at it four times, and the answer is none.”
“A range of none.”
“Yes.”
Idrin came round the table and sat on the bench beside him. Tallow shut the Chancery book with his finger between the pages. He did not offer to show it. He looked, instead, past Idrin’s shoulder to the narrow window that faced across the court toward the gatehouse, where the old Register lay on its stand with the Hold’s seal pressed into its cover and its back leaves folded inward out of sight.
“I should say one more thing, Warden,” said Tallow, “and I should say it with a hedge, because I am not certain of it. Before the bell I went across to the gatehouse and looked through the Register’s back leaves, since the Hold’s Writ does not forbid a clerk to read his own book. The Roll of the Named is kept there. It has no names in it yet, and I do not expect any for a very long time. But along the foot of its first leaf there is a line of marks. I had not looked at those marks before, because nobody has ever told a clerk to. They are not writing. They are tallies, with a bar and a hook in each.”
“And?”
“And they go up and down,” said Tallow, “in exactly the same way the tune goes up and down. I counted them. Forty-one rises and forty-one falls, to the line, and then a turn at the end, and then the first rise again.”
Idrin said nothing for a while. The candle on the table guttered and steadied. Somewhere beneath the Hall, far down under the flagstones and the rock and the Keystone’s cold face, a small clear voice had begun, very softly, to count. It did not reach nine. It stopped at four, and then began again, as if it had been interrupted in the middle of a sum.
“Do not tell the Chamber yet,” said Idrin.
“I had no intention of telling the Chamber anything yet,” said Tallow. “I intend to tell the Register, and it will not argue with me, since it has never once said a word.”