Velvet went up the Garrison Mound a second time without a speech.
She had not planned it that way. She had lain awake for most of the night composing one, and then unpicking it, and then composing another, and by the time the candle-clock had turned she had found that every sentence she had written was a sentence she would be ashamed to hear in her own voice. They were full of pearls. They were strung on the wrong thread. She had been insulting this grave for a month in the language of a court, and the grave had sung her name back to her in front of the wind, and she had no wish to do it again.
So she went without a sentence in her mouth at all. She went in her plain grey wool, with her hair pinned tight and no bonnet, and she left her good gloves in the receiving-hall coffer with the Lessaran letter, which she had not answered and never would. She took off her gloves on the Mound’s lower slope, where the gorse began, because she had never once in her life gone up a hill without them, and the wind came straight across her bare hands, and it was cold, and she let it be.
