She sang only what she had been given.
That was the rule, and it was the first thing the Mound had taught her, in the year she woke with a spade in her hands and the cough going through the garrison like wind through dry reeds. A grave-tender did not decide which names were owed. She did not choose a name from the dark because the name looked lonely. She waited, and listened, and when a living voice in the Hold said a name aloud over a grave, or a Hand said one at the Turn, or a lodger wrote one on a slate and left it for the Mound to find, then she took the name into her song, and sang it, once, all the way through, and then she was done with it. She had a long list of names, kept in the weft of her Form where the Hunger could not reach. She did not own the names. She only held them while they were sung.
She had sung Nell Lowe, who had carried the Lowgate children over the causeway in their nightshirts when the water rose. She had sung Osric Wenn, who had lost two fingers to the Forge and gone on loading the bellows with the other hand until he could no longer stand. She had sung the Lessaran wool-man who had sat on the step outside the Gatehouse one winter morning and asked for a name to be written on his paper, and had…
