Idrin went to the goat-pens with his left hand in a sling and his right hand in his coat pocket, because he had been told by Sella that he was not to use the burned hand for anything at all until the skin had closed, and because he had nothing else to do with the morning. The bandage was thick and white and smelled of the herbs Sella had packed it with. It throbbed under the linen in a slow dull rhythm, like a second pulse, and every time he moved his fingers the throbbing grew briefly sharper and then subsided. He had tried to ignore it. He had not succeeded.
The pens lay above the yard on the north side of the inner ward, a row of low stone enclosures roofed with turf and walled with rough field-stone that had been laid, Harrow said, by somebody who had not much cared how it was done. A wooden gate hung on a leather hinge between the first two pens. Idrin had walked past it every day for a month. He had never seen it open.
It was open now. He could hear the goats before he reached it, a rising chorus of bleats and clatter and the soft heavy shuffle of hooves on stone. Then he could smell them, warm and sour and sweet, the smell of milk and dung and dry hay. Then he saw the woman.
She was sitting on an upturned bucket in the middle of the nearest pen, with her skirts tucked round her knees and her head bent over a goat that was lying in the straw at her feet. The goat was grey and white and very old. Its eyes were half closed, and one of its horns had split at the tip and been bound with a strip of linen. The woman had a hand on its flank, spread flat, and she was stroking the coarse hair in long slow strokes from the shoulder to the haunch, and she was talking to it.
“There now,” said the woman softly. “You’re tired, aren’t you, my lovely. You’ve been up all night with the cold. And the new kid was slow to come, and you didn’t like it, and nor did I. But you’re warm now, and the straw is clean, and I’ve brought you the good hay from the top of the loft, and you’re going to sleep.”
The goat’s ear twitched. It made a small sound in its throat, very low, and shifted its weight in the straw, and settled.
“That’s right,” said the woman. “That’s a good goat.”
Idrin stood at the gate and did not move. He had been brought up to believe that a servant spoke to animals in short words and that a lady did not speak to them at all. He had never once heard anyone speak to an animal as if it were a person who needed to be reassured. The woman kept her head down. She went on stroking the grey goat’s side.
“You can come in,” she said, quite calmly. “The gate’s not locked. I don’t lock gates for people who’ve been hurt. You’ve been hurt, I know that by the way you’re standing, with your good hand in your pocket and your bad hand held up like a cup of water you don’t want to spill. Come and sit down before you fall over.”
Idrin came in. He went carefully across the straw, which was clean and dry and smelled sweet, and he sat down on a low stool that had been set against the pen-wall. The goats watched him. There were nine of them, Idrin counted, grey and brown and white, and they were all looking at him with the same expression of mild, enquiring, faintly disapproving curiosity that the Chamber had shown to the Hold’s first minute.
The woman lifted her head at last.
She was not young. She had a broad, plain, weathered face with lines at the corners of the eyes that might have come from squinting into a hill-wind, and her hair was pinned up under a grey kerchief with two strands escaping at the temples. She wore a shepherd’s apron over a dark dress, the kind of apron a herder ties on before the sun is up, and her hands were red and cracked at the knuckles and very steady on the goat’s flank. Her eyes were grey, and sad, and extraordinarily gentle.
“Tamsin,” she said. “Furrow, if you want the whole of it. The goats are mine. Or they were, before, and now I think they’re the Hold’s, and the Hold’s been very slow about telling me so.” She looked at his bandaged hand. “Sella did that.”
“Yes.”
“She’d have said you’d live.”
“She did.”
“She always does,” said Tamsin, and smiled very slightly, with a sort of wistful patience. “She’s a great one for the diagnosis. She’ll tell you the bad part first, and then she’ll tell you the good part, and then she’ll tell you that you’re a fool. I’ve never once known her skip the last.”
She went back to the goat. She finished stroking its flank and lifted her hand, slowly, and laid it on the goat’s shoulder, and the goat sighed. Idrin heard the sigh go out of the animal’s chest and fade into the straw, long and deep, the sound of a creature that has decided it is safe.
“What are they called?” asked Idrin.
Tamsin did not answer at once. She looked round at the nine goats, one at a time, the grey and the brown and the white and the black, with the bent horn and the split ear and the spotted hindquarters, and her lips moved very slightly, as though she were saying something under her breath to each of them in turn.
“They had names before the Hold,” she said. “They had them all their lives, from the farm on the Lessary side, where they were born. Each one has its own. I know them all, and I’ve kept them in my head since the morning I woke, and I’ve never once said them aloud.” She shook her head slowly. “They sound like a list when I try. A count of goats, read out in a clerk’s voice. And a goat doesn’t want to be a list. A goat wants to be called by the name its mother gave it, in a voice it knows, and I can’t find the voice.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not sure whose voice it was,” said Tamsin simply.
Idrin said nothing. He sat on the low stool with his bandaged hand in his lap and felt the goats looking at him, and he thought of the lullaby, and the blank where the words had been, and the tune that had come back wrong from the goats in the night.
“Do you have a name for them?” asked Tamsin.
“No,” said Idrin.
“A prince should,” said Tamsin, with mild, unshakeable certainty. “A flock without names is only a count. You can count it all day and it doesn’t know you’re there.” She looked at him over the goat’s back. “You’ve a horse, haven’t you? The clerk said so, when he came up to count my goats. He writes down everything, that one, and he wrote that the prince had a grey horse with a star on it that nobody else would ride. He wrote that the prince used to talk to it like a friend.”
“I did,” said Idrin, slowly. “I used to talk to him. Every day, on the road.” He looked down at his bandage. “I can’t say his name now. The Writ took it. I can tell you his description, and the Register keeps it, and I can tell you the shape of it, two beats, falling. But I can’t say the sound of it. It’s like having a room with the door shut and knowing exactly where the handle is.”
“That’s the shape of a name, not the sound of it,” said Tamsin.
“Yes.”
“So you’ve told me the shape,” said Tamsin gently, “and kept the sound for yourself.” She lifted her hand from the goat’s shoulder and looked at him with a clear, grey, kindly sadness. “That’s not the same. You can’t give a horse the shape of its name. You have to give it the sound, and it has to hear you say it, and then it knows it’s been called. You’ve only been talking to the room.”
He did not answer. He found that his throat had gone tight, and that he could not trust his voice, and that the goats were all watching him again with their soft, patient, enquiring eyes.
Tamsin reached over the straw, slowly, and rubbed the goat nearest to him, the old grey one with the split horn, behind its ear. The goat leaned into her hand, and closed its eyes, and made a long contented sound.
“The prince is sad,” said Tamsin to the goat, in a low, clear, tender voice. She spoke every word in full, as though she were reading out a letter to someone she loved and had known all her life. “He lost his horse’s name in the gate, and he lost his mother’s lullaby in the cellar, and he burned his hand yesterday on a bar of iron he had no business holding. And he sat down on the stool very politely, and he hasn’t said a word about it, and he’s too proud to cry in front of a goat.”
The goat opened one eye and looked at Idrin. Then it made a short, decided, approving grunt, the kind of noise a farmer makes when a neighbour has agreed to pay for the hay.
“There,” said Tamsin. “It agrees.”
Idrin laughed. It was a rough, cracked, unexpected sound, and it hurt his chest, and he did not stop it. The goats looked at him as though he had made an improper remark at a funeral.
“Sit still,” said Tamsin. “Sit on the straw. Go on. You’ll not hurt them.”
He hesitated. Then he got up from the stool, carefully, favouring the bandaged hand, and let himself down onto the clean straw beside the grey goat, with his back against the pen-wall and his legs stretched out in front of him. He had not sat on the floor of a stable since he was a child. The straw crackled under him. It was warm from the goats’ bodies, and it smelled sweetly of hay and milk.
He sat motionless. He did not know what to do with his hands. The grey goat shifted in the straw, slowly, as an old animal does, and then it stretched out one long thin neck and laid its head across his lap, very gently, with its split horn resting against his good knee.
It did not move. It only breathed, long and slow, and Idrin felt the warmth of its breath through the wool of his coat.
“That’s the goat’s vote,” said Tamsin softly, from her bucket, with the faintest smile. “It’s the first vote anybody’s given you in the Hold that didn’t need a Chamber, Highness. And it’s the only one I’d trust.”
He did not answer. He could not. He sat in the straw with the goat’s head in his lap and his bandaged hand throbbing against his chest, and looked up at the turf roof of the pen, and let the silence of the afternoon settle over him like the warm weight of the animal’s body.
After a while he heard Tamsin get up from her bucket. She crossed the straw to the gate. She stopped there with one hand on the wooden post, and looked back at him, and her grey eyes had gone quite hard, as a farmer’s eyes do when a storm is coming over the hill.
“I heard the vote,” said Tamsin. “Through the floor, on the day I woke, with the goats screaming under me. I heard the Chamber sit and count its fists in the cellar, one for each man and one for each word, and it sounded like a count of fists.” She looked at him steadily. “So I’ll ask you, Highness, as the one who’s to be listened to. Don’t vote again on those marsh-men. Not till they’ve had their dinner, and somebody’s asked them what they want.”