The raft was flat and square and built of old planks from the north bridge, and it smelled of tar and the Sallow’s green weed. Tamsin stood on its near edge with her hands wrapped in her shawl and her feet planted wide, as a goat stands when it has decided not to be dragged, and she watched the Hard Hands pole it out into the water in the grey light before dawn.
Korrin was at the front, with the long pole braced in his good shoulder. Gaunt was at the back, objecting. He had objected to the raft before they set off, and then to the pole, and then to the cold, and now he was objecting to the current, in a loud, steady voice that carried across the water and came back from the far bank a half-breath late, like an echo that had been listening to him all its life. Harrow sat in the middle with his back to the Hold and his eyes on the opposite shore, counting the paces to the bank. Ysra stood at the rail with her back to the water, which Tamsin thought was very brave of her, because she could not see the bank at all.
“Forty-one,” said Harrow, as the raft’s prow touched the mud.
“There is no need to count the paces,” said Korrin. “We are here.”
“There is a need,” said Harrow. “We will need to count them back.”
Tamsin stepped off the raft into the reeds and was sick.
She was not proud of it. She had been brought up on a farm of her own, a long way from the Sallow, and she had not been sick at anything since she was a girl, not at birth nor death nor the bad winter when the cows went down one by one in the snow. But the reeds smelled of wet ash and of something sweet and rotten under the ash, and the mud was warm where it should have been cold, and she knelt in it with her hand on a clump of cut stems and was sick until there was nothing in her to bring up.
When she looked up, Korrin was standing over her with the pole in his hand and an expression that Tamsin had never seen on him before, which was concern.
“I am well,” Tamsin said. “I am only sorry. I do not like the water, and the water does not like me, and it has been very rude this morning.”
“Stay on the raft,” said Korrin.
“I cannot stay on the raft. Someone has to talk to the goats.”
“The goats do not talk.”
“Every goat talks,” said Tamsin, wiping her mouth on her shawl. “Some of them are only shy. I have not met a goat that is truly silent. I have met a great many people who are.”
The Hollin Farm was a low sprawl of barns and pens on the rise above the reeds, with a single cottage at the top of the slope and a cart-track running down to the river. The gate of the lower pen stood open. The goats had been penned there all night, and they stood now in a bunched, anxious knot against the hedge, and Tamsin could see their eyes shine in the dawn. Eleven of them. She counted, though she did not want to. Eleven, the Hard Hands had said, and eleven was what they found.
Korrin went up the track first, with the pole across his shoulders like a yoke. Gaunt went after her, objecting to the mud on his boots. Harrow came last, counting. Tamsin came behind them all, slowly, because her legs did not yet agree with the rest of her, and she heard the first shout come down from the cottage, and then the second, which was the voice of an old woman with a Lessary accent sharp as a bread-knife.
“What are you doing with my goats?”
Korrin did not answer. He set the pole down and stood with his feet apart on the cart-track, between the open gate and the cottage door. The woman came out onto the step. She was small and bent and dressed in grey, with a stick in one hand and a shawl over her head, and she did not look afraid, which made Korrin look slightly less certain of himself.
“The goats are the Crown’s rent,” Korrin said.
“The goats are my husband’s name,” said the woman, “and he is at Sallowmere paying the rent. Put them back.”
“The rent is the Crown’s.”
“There is no Crown at Hollin,” said the woman, and she came down the step with the stick ringing on the stone. “There is only the Crown’s rent, which comes up the track every quarter-day in a yellow coat and takes my eggs. You are not the first of the marsh-men to stand where you stand, girl. You are the first to bring a Warden’s paper.”
Tamsin came up the track through the mud and stood at the gate, between the two of them, with her shawl over her hands. She looked at the goats first. Then she looked at the woman, and she did what she always did, which was speak to the one who was most afraid.
“Good morning,” she said. “I am Tamsin. I keep goats too, on the other side of the water. My goats are very well fed and very badly behaved, and I am sorry that these have been brought across in the dark without anyone telling them why. Are they hungry?”
The woman stared at her. Then, slowly, the stick came down and rested on the step. “They are fed,” she said. “I fed them last night. I always do.”
“Are your children fed?”
“I have no children now.”
“Then I am sorry for that as well,” said Tamsin, “and I am asking your name, because I do not like to speak to somebody and not know what to call them. You may tell me or not, as you like.”
The woman looked at her a while, and then she told her. It was a short name. It was a marsh name, the sort the old women gave their girls to keep them out of the reeds. Tamsin heard it, and said it back once, very softly, so that the woman would know it had been heard. The woman put her hand to her mouth.
“My husband is not at Sallowmere,” the woman said, very low, in a different voice entirely. “He died in the rent-gaol the winter before last. The Crown’s men said he was paying. They took his coat. They said the goats were the rent he had not paid, and then they went away, and I have been keeping them ever since, in his name, so that the name would not be sold.”
Tamsin said nothing for a while. She put her hand on the gate and held it, and the wood was cold and wet beneath her palm.
“Then the goats should be yours,” she said at last, “and I should like you to have the name back.”
Behind them, at the top of the track, Gaunt had stopped objecting. He stood in the mud with his hands hanging at his sides, and Harrow, beside him, had stopped counting, and Korrin, with the pole across his shoulders again, had turned his face away toward the river. Nobody spoke. The goats stood in the lower pen and watched the woman, and then they looked at Tamsin, and then they went on looking.
The Hard Hands brought the goats back at noon. There were eleven of them, driven down the track and across the raft and over the Sallow in a noise of chains and oaths and Gaunt’s voice objecting to the water. Korrin drove them from the rear with the pole, and he did not once raise it against an animal. Pell, waiting on the Hold’s landing with her arms folded, called the shout Korrin gave at the end of the crossing the rudest sound she had heard since the cellar. Tamsin, who had come back in the second trip and was sitting on the raft’s edge with her feet in the water, did not argue.
The goats were quiet. They crowded into the Hold’s pens and stood in a tight knot against the far wall, and each of them, as it passed her, turned its head and looked at Tamsin with the particular steady gaze of a creature that is counting. She counted them back. Eleven.
She had not told the Chamber the woman’s name. She had not told anyone. She stood at the pen gate with the name in her mouth and found, to her distress, that she could not bring it out again, not even in a whisper.
It was the goats who asked her for it. The first of them would not go into the pen. It stood in the gate and bleated, long and low, and refused to move until Tamsin, very gently, sang the dead man’s name to it, the name the widow had given her and that Tamsin had not written down anywhere. The goat went in on the last note. Then the next would not go in until it had heard that name too. By dusk the whole herd stood in the gate, one after another, waiting to be sung to, and every one of them, as Tamsin sang, lifted its head toward the Lessary bank across the river, where the Hollin cottage was dark, and stayed looking that way long after the song was done.