Mourner heard the name go out over the gravel, and knew before the last of its sound had reached the willows that it had not been given.
There was a particular quality to a given name. It came into the mouth as a stone comes into the hand from a cart, rough and known, with a weight that the mouth could feel before it spoke. Mourner had been handed a great many names in her long time at the Mound and in the Hall. She knew how each of them sat. The carpenters’ names sat low, like stones laid in a footing. The cooks’ names sat in the middle of the tongue, warm and worn. Ansel Brume’s name had a hard catch at the end of it, where the garrison men had put their voices on it when they lowered him into the ground. And the name Sefra had just said sat nowhere at all. It did not come up through the tongue. It came down from above, out of a page, like rain falling on a roof that had never been built to take it.
So Mourner did not sing it. She stood at the edge of the gravel with her hands folded and let the name go past, and she listened to the silence that came after, which was the Hold’s silence and not the Hollowed’s, since the Hollowed had no silence of their own.
