Korrin wanted to take the goats, and he wanted to take them by daylight, and he wanted the Warden’s signature on the order before the candles were lit. He made this plain in the Great Hall with his fist on the table, and he made it plain again from his chair by the door, and then he made it plain a third time, by standing up and walking to the north window so that the whole Chamber could see his point at the marsh.
Across the Sallow, where the river bent under the old willows, the Hollin Farm sat on its rise with its barn roof sagging and its smoke going up straight in the still air. Idrin had seen it from the wall every morning for two months. He had seen the goats in the lower pen, a white huddle against the hedge, and he had seen a woman come out to the trough with a yoke over her shoulders and go back in again without once looking toward the Hold. He had never thought about the farm as anything more than a farm. It was a Lessary farm, which meant it was a Lessary rent, and that was a thing he had been raised not to think about at all.
“The farm is not at war with us,” he said.
“The farm is a Lessary farm,” said Korrin, “and the goats are Lessary’s rent. The Crown takes its rent off the marsh every quarter-day by the tally-man’s count. The Crown has been taking the Hold’s rent for two centuries, Warden. Ask your Clerk. The Hold has a right to the Crown’s rent, because the Crown has had the Hold’s.”
“The Crown has had the Hold’s rent,” said Idrin, “in the sense that it has been written in a book. The book is not the Hold.”
“The book is the only thing the Crown has ever had,” said Korrin. “It is all that is left. It has no goats in it.”
Idrin turned to the minute-board. “Clerk. Find the clause.”
Tallow was already reaching for the Charter. He had the Charter open before the Warden had finished speaking, and he ran his finger down the margin of the second page, where the Hands had written their notes over the years in four different hands, and stopped at the place where someone had drawn a small goat. He looked up.
“The clause is the Crown’s rent-roll for the Lantern road,” he said. “It is not in our Charter. It is in a Lessary list that was copied into the back leaves of the Register by the first Saelmar lord, and it says that all the livestock grazing on the marsh side of the river belongs to the Crown until a tally is paid. The tally is not paid. The Crown has never paid a tally in its life.” He cleared his throat. “However, the list also says the Crown’s livestock is not to be driven across any river without the Crown’s leave. I have several readings for driven. Three of the readings favour the Crown. One favours the goats. Two are inconclusive. I would not rely on the goats.”
“Read it the way the goats would,” said Gaunt, from the bench.
“The goats do not read,” said Tallow. “I have checked.”
“The goats would have read it in the Lessary way,” said Pell, “if they had been taught by a Lessary clerk, which they were not, because the clerk was too busy trying to sell them to the Crown.”
Tamsin, on the floor by the wall with a bowl of barley in her lap, said quietly, “Nobody has asked the goats whether they want to go.”
“The goats are not a party to the vote,” said Korrin.
“Everything that breathes is a party to the vote,” said Tamsin. “That is the first thing a Herder learns. It is the last thing a Lash remembers.”
The Chamber voted. It was not a long vote. The Hard Hands had counted their own numbers in the yard before the sitting, which Korrin had insisted on, and they carried the motion by five voices to three before anyone had properly finished arguing. Korrin, who had proposed it, voted for it twice, once with each hand. Harrow voted with them, because the goats were on the far side of the river and the stones were on this side, and a stone could not be counted across a river. Ysra voted for the crossing because the Hollin Farm had a stair, and she had never counted it. Gaunt voted for it on principle, which was that he had objected to every other option. Pell voted for it because she had been told a supper of goat would be cheaper than a supper of nothing, and she was not a woman who gave a second thought to whose goats they were once the goats had come over the river.
Tamsin and Sella voted against. Tamsin did so because nobody had asked the goats, and Sella because a crossing in the dark would cost bones, and she had already written the number down. Pim was asked his vote and said he would carry whatever the Hold decided, which Tallow entered as a yes with an asterisk, not counted, because the Charter does not count a promise to carry as a vote.
Idrin voted against with them. Three against. It did not count.
“The Warden is out-voted,” said Tallow, writing it down, “by the Hard Hands and by Pell.”
“Note that I was out-voted by Pell,” said Idrin. “I want it recorded that I was not out-voted by the wall.”
“The wall has been noted,” said Tallow.
Idrin held out his hand for the order. It had been drafted in the Royal manner by Tallow, in plain clerk’s words that were not quite plain enough, and Idrin read it through twice, once for the sense and once for the trap. He found the trap in the second clause, where the goats were described as property of the Crown in the Crown’s own term, which meant that taking them would be an act the Crown could describe as theft. He took the pen. He crossed out property and wrote livestock above it. He signed the order at the foot, in his own hand, and the scarred left hand pulled at the pen as he wrote, so that the signature came out crooked, the I in his name leaning like a fence-post in a flood.
“Ask them what the goats are worth,” he said, and sat back.
Korrin said, “The crossing.”
Gaunt said, “Less than the hinges on the Hollin gate, which are the best hinges in the marsh, and I am the only person who has ever said so.”
Pell said, “A supper,” with a sigh of pure pleasure, as if the word were a hot loaf.
Tamsin said, after a long quiet, “Nothing. They are worth nothing to anyone except themselves, and I should like to know what they think of it.”
Harrow said nothing, and then, at last, said, “Eleven.”
“Eleven goats?”
“Eleven goats,” said Harrow, “and the Hollin farmer’s count, which is one more than that, and which I will not be able to verify until we have crossed the river and counted them on this side. Eleven is the number I am going to use.”
At the far end of the table, under the bench where it had been lying with its chin on its paws, the Lowgate dog got up, stretched, and barked once, sharply, at the window.
“That is a sixth vote,” said Korrin, pleased.
“That is a bark,” said Idrin.
“It is a bark in favour,” said Tamsin.
Tallow looked at the dog. He looked at the minute-board, and at the order with its crooked signature, and at the Warden, who was sitting very straight in his chair with his scarred hand resting on his knee as though it were something he had been asked to carry for a stranger. Then he wrote it down. Dog, one bark, in favour of the crossing. Range of one. He did not add anything else. The dog had already settled back under the bench.
Korrin spent the afternoon before the crossing on the north tower, watching the Hollin pens through a glass the Hold had taken from a Crown sentry-post in the spring. He counted the goats in the lower pen, eleven and then twelve and then eleven again, because a yearling had got through the hedge and was standing on the wrong side of it. He counted the two men at the cottage door, and the cart in the yard, which had two wheels missing. At dusk he came down the stair and found Idrin alone in the Great Hall with the minute-board, writing something he had no intention of showing anybody.
“The crossing is at dawn,” he said.
“I know. I signed the order.”
“I saw you sign it. The pen went crooked.” He stood at the table’s end with his bow across his back and his bruised shoulder held straight. “Whatever happens on the far bank, Warden, the Hard Hands will do it properly. We will not hurt anybody who does not hurt us first.”
“I did not think you would hurt anybody,” said Idrin.
“Then you did not think of the goats,” said Korrin, and went out.
The order was read aloud at the river gate that evening by Harrow, who insisted on reading it in full, every clause and every correction, until the men on the wall were leaning over the parapet to hear him. He read the goats in the Crown’s term and then in the Warden’s, and then he read the crossing time, which was at dawn, and then he read the number, eleven, which he had counted from the wall and got right.
The Lowgate dog, who had followed the reading down from the Hall and sat at the gate-foot with its ear folded and its nose pointed at the river, began to bark. It barked at the water and at the dark bank beyond it and at the willows that leaned out over the Sallow in the dusk. It barked the whole time that Harrow read.
From the far side of the river, out of the fog above the Hollin pens, one goat answered. It bleated once, long and low and deliberate, in exactly the tone that Tamsin used when she spoke to the Chamber, which was the tone of someone who has been waiting a long time to be asked her opinion and does not intend to be talked over by anybody.