Mourner sang the Roll of the Dead, and she sang the way she had always sung, which was with the names she had been given.
She did not begin in the stable yard. She began on the Mound, in the grey light with the cloud gathering over the marsh, and the first name she sang was the oldest one in the Hold, a builder of the Foundation whose trade had been woken in the second winter and who had never once been called by his own name in the Chamber. Mourner sang it slowly, as a man reads a headstone aloud to a child who has asked what the letters say. Then she sang the next, and the next, down the old Foundation list in the order the Hearth had kept them: the masons and the carters and the lamp-hands, the bell-founders and the rope-makers, the cooks’ mates who had carried bread up the ramps to men who had built the walls the Hold now stood behind.
She sang each name with its trade under it, the way Harrow cut them in stone. The Mason. The Weaver. The Carrier. The Lash. The sound went out over the Mound’s rise and across the wet grass and down into the Hold, low and steady, and it did not carry like a shout. It carried like a bell whose ringer has stopped pulling and the metal goes on humming in the air for a long while afterward.
