Tamsin Furrow had sold cheese at the Lowgate midsummer market every year since the Hold had a market, and every year she had sworn she would not sell any this time, because the goats needed the milk and the cheese took a month to set. And every year she had come down to the green below the wall at first light with a basket on each arm, and had found herself laying the rounds out on the trestle in a neat grey ring, with a square of clean linen under each one, because goats judged a cheese by its neatness, and so did people, and she had never found a reason to be less careful about either.
The green was already full. The Lowgate lanes had come down to it the way water comes down to a low place, all at once and from every side. There were stalls of mended hinges and stalls of firewood, stalls of ribbon and salt and dried eels, a stall of second-hand boots that were all the same size and therefore, the seller said, were all the right size for somebody. There was a tent of mead, which the lodgers were not allowed to drink in the Hold’s rules and which Osk had quietly declared lodger property for the day. The air smelled of woodsmoke, hot sugar, wet dye and the summer grass the goats had been trimming all week.
