The Measure reached six hundred weights and stopped, and Tamsin felt the stopping before anyone told her.
It was the worst kind of stopping. A fall that went on was a fall you could brace for. You could feel the floor coming and set your feet against it and hope the ground held. But this was a floor that had been reached, a place where the weave had come as far down as it could go without beginning to tear, and it lay under the Hold like a cold sheet of slate, and nothing in the body moved against it any more. It only waited. Tamsin could feel the waiting in her own bones, the way she could feel the quiet of a field in the hour before a storm.
She felt it first in the goats.
They knew before she did. They lowered their heads in the straw one after another, not to eat, but as if the weight of their own skulls had grown too much for the necks that held them. The eyes of the old nanny, whom Tamsin called Dowager because she had outlived two bucks and a bell-ringer’s dog, went dull and far away. The young nanny stopped butting at the trough. The whole pen had gone still in a way that Tamsin had never seen a goat-pen go still, not even in the worst of the winter, when the snow had come over the wall in a drift and the animals had huddled together…
