Tamsin had been in the pens since the dark, because the goats did not know the Hold was leaving and she did not want them to learn it from a wagon. The pens were quiet at that hour. Only the oldest nanny was awake, standing in the straw by the lantern hook with her yellow eyes half shut, chewing the end of a rope that had been tied to nothing for a month. Tamsin came in slowly, talking the whole way, so that the animal would hear her coming and not be startled into a corner.
“Good morning, Old Maud,” she said. She had never given the nanny a proper name, because the Lowgate children had given her three already and the goat had answered to none of them. “It is cold, and we are going over a hill. You will not like the hill. I am not going to tell you the hill is nice, because it is not nice, and you would know if I lied to you.”
The nanny looked at her and went on chewing.
Tamsin knelt in the straw and took the harness out of its sack. It was good harness, soft and oiled, with a breast-strap sewn by her own hands on a winter when there had been no iron to spare for buckles. She had made thirteen collars for the thirteen goats that were left, and she had pressed a tally-mark into the leather of each, a notch for the goat’s birth-month and…
