Finally she settled the child down, tucked her in, and crept quietly down stairs.

The staff was back against the wall. She was not surprised to see that the fire hadn’t marked it at all.

Granny turned her rocking chair to face it, and sat down with her chin in her hand and an expression of grim determination.

Presently the chair began to rock, of its own accord. It was the only sound in a silence that thickened and spread and filled the room like a terrible dark fog.

Next morning, before Esk got up, Granny hid the staff in the thatch, well out of harm’s way.

Esk ate her breakfast and drank a pint of goat’s milk without the least sign of the events of the last twenty-four hours. It was the first time she had been inside Granny’s cottage for more than a brief visit, and while the old woman washed the dishes and milked the goats she made the most of her implied license to explore.

She found that life in the cottage wasn’t entirely straightforward. There was the matter of the goats’ names, for example.

“But they’ve got to have names!” she said. “Everything’s got a name.”

Granny looked at her around the pear-shaped flanks of the head nanny, while the milk squirted into the low pail.

“I daresay they’ve got names in Goat,” she said vaguely. “What do they want names in Human for?”

“Well,” said Esk, and stopped. She thought for a bit. “How do you make them do what you want, then?”

“They just do, and when they want me they holler.”

Esk gravely gave the head goat a wisp of hay. Granny watched her thoughtfully. Goats did have names for themselves, she well knew: there was “goat who is my kid", “goat who is my mother", “goat who is herd leader", and half a dozen other names not least of which was “goat who is this goat". They had a complicated herd system and four stomachs and a digestive system that sounded very busy on still nights, and Granny had always felt that calling all this names like Buttercup was an insult to a noble animal.