Sect Year 1 · third month · night of day 15 · the fifth life: Carrow Flat, his nineteenth year
The years came in a run, one after another with no pause between them to be grateful in. Oswy died of the chest in the winter Dathi turned fifteen. He sat up in bed at the end with a blanket round his shoulders and the shutter open on the flat, because he said he wanted to see the weather come, and it didn’t come. The rains failed the next season and the season after that. His mother went in the third of them, quietly, the way she did most things. By the third, the square well had sunk to a grey crust that cracked under the goats’ feet and gave back nothing but the smell of wet rope.
The goats went one at a time to the market at Teel Cross, each on its own short tether, each looking back at Dathi with a mild offence he couldn’t argue with. By nineteen he kept two. He milked them at dusk and carried the milk down the lane to the widows’ houses. There, the children had been thin since the first winter. They were thin in the particular way that makes a small face look older than the child it belongs to.
