The Articles needed a preamble, and the Chamber asked Mourner to give one, because she had been singing the Hold’s names since the first winter and the Chamber had decided that a law which began with the dead would be a law that remembered whose wall it stood on.
Mourner came to the Great Hall at dusk. She did not come through the front door. She came up the back stair from the Undercroft, where she had spent the afternoon with the Keystone’s north face and a lamp, and she walked into the arch between the long table and the cold hearth with her grey shape very upright and her iron-bound face turned toward the Chamber. The cradle’s frame sat round her head like a crown that somebody had forgotten to take off. The captain’s mouth was closed in its bands. The stitches at the jaw were clean.
She did not sit down. She stood in the arch with her hands loose at her sides, and she waited until the candle-clock’s first ring had finished, and the Hall was quiet, and the Chamber had turned its chairs toward the door.
Then she sang.
She began with Dennet Hallam, carter’s son, because the trench began with him. Mourner sang the name in the low steady voice she kept for the names, and then she sang the name’s trade beneath it, carter, and then the Hall heard, very faintly, from somewhere near the back arch, a boy’s voice answer aye, and then…
