Mourner sat beside Korrin at the postern on the thirty-fifth day, where the flagstones were still damp and the Hard Hands had laid a rush-mat over the place where the water had been. The Lash lay on the mat with his face turned to the wall. He did not move when Mourner settled beside him. He did not breathe in the way that a sleeping man breathes, with a rise and a fall. He breathed the way the held breathe, short and even, like a clock that has been wound to a particular number and will not go beyond it.
Mourner did not mind the stillness. She had sat beside many still things. She had sat beside the carpenters’ names and the dead of the Garrison Mound and the young man in the barn who had died with his mother’s name on his lips, and she had learned that a stillness was only a silence that had not yet been given its song.
So she sang.
She sang the Lash’s brothers. Korrin had given them to her at the Turn of the second season, one by one, in his short imperative way, with a glare at the Mourner’s face as though she had asked him to remember something he would rather forget. There had been three of them, marsh-men from the Lamentine towns, who had come up the Lessary road with Korrin in the raid that had made him a Hand. They had not survived the raid. They had not…
