Tamsin woke in the straw before the bell, the way she always did, with a goat’s warm flank against her back and the smell of the pens in her hair. She was thinking about the young nanny, who had kicked over the water-trough twice in the night, and about whether the trough could be mended with iron the Hold did not have. She was still thinking about the trough when the pain came into her own right hand.
It was a pinch at the wrist first, small and exact, as if someone had taken hold of a fold of skin and twisted. Then came the cold. It was like river water poured into a copper pan, a cold that did not spread so much as settle, and her fingers locked around the handle of the milk pail as though the handle belonged to a stranger who had taken hold of her by mistake.
“No,” Tamsin said to the hand. The hand did not agree.
Fourteen goats shifted in the straw around her. Most of them lifted their heads at once, and their ears went flat, and then they went back to chewing, because goats do not care about the business of people unless the business comes near their feed. The young nanny did not go back to chewing. She came round the pail with her yellow eyes on Tamsin’s face and butted her shin, hard, the way she had butted the trough.
