Tamsin had three new kids since the thaw, and one of them was a small grey thing with a crooked ear that kept walking into its nanny’s flank as if it were trying to find a door in the wool.
She had watched it for a week. She had watched it at the milking, and at the trough, and in the long straw of the new pen, where the other kids had already learned to find their mothers’ teats without help. The grey one could not. It went to the wrong nanny and was shoved off. It went to the right one and was butted away by an older kid who had decided that the crooked-eared one was an intruder. It stood alone in the corner of the pen with its head down and its tail going, looking at the world with the faint puzzled indignation of a creature that has been promised a door and found only wool.
Tamsin had gone in and sat in the straw beside it, and it had come to her, bleating, because she was the only thing in the pen that did not push.
She named it Aud.
She did it on the second evening, when the sun was going down behind the Lowgate roofs and the nannies were lying in a row along the far wall, chewing. The Chamber had read a lime-burner called Aud Marr two mornings before, in the first sitting of the Roll, and Tamsin had heard the name come…
