Velvet climbed the Garrison Mound in her second-best shoes, which was a mistake, and in her best dark wool, which was a deliberate one. She had decided that a Chamberlain who asked for a grave’s assent must look as if she had come to a funeral rather than a parley. The shoes pinched. The wind off the marsh came up the slope in long cold gusts that caught her skirts and threatened to turn them inside out, and she held the hem down with one gloved hand and her dignity with the other, and she did not stop.
The gorse was grey and spiked along the path. The stones of the old garrison stood in their row on the crown of the Mound, leaning a little toward the Lamentine road as if they had been trying all their lives to see who was coming. Ansel Brume’s stone was the newest of them, and the plainest, a block of local chalk with no name cut into it and only a small square mark that the garrison had used for its own dead.
Mourner stood in front of it.
She did not turn when Velvet came up the path. She gave Velvet no glance. She stood with her hands folded at her waist, in the plain grey coat that the Hands wore when they went up the Mound, and her face was turned toward the road below, where the wool-cart stood at the bar with its canvas down and the Lessaran’s grey…
