Location:The Millford road — the Halbrook holding; the barn; the path to the byre
Date/Time:TC1858.03.14
Buckets were the worst of it. Tamsin Kemp had carried shields, spears, a man with a broken leg half a day down a mountain road, and none of it was as bad as two wooden buckets of snowmelt on a frozen morning, because the rope bails cut into the fingers through any glove ever made and you could not put them down to shake your hands out. Not on the path. You did not put anything down on the path.
"Ready?" Ambrose Wick asked behind her.
"No. Go on, then."
Tamsin heard him not laugh. He had a way of not laughing that was as good as anybody else's laughing, and she had worked it out on the road down from the mountain, on the second night, when she'd told him the long story about the Federation quartermaster and the forty left boots, and he'd let her get to the end of it and then said, "Forty," and gone back to his stitching.
