The first frost came to the Garrison Mound before it came to the Hold, the way it always did. The grave-ground sat on the high shoulder of the rise and took the cold off the Caul Ridge before any roof in Ormhold had time to feel it. Mourner felt it first. She felt the frost in the copy of Ansel Brume’s face that she wore, a stiffness along the jaw where the cast had never quite agreed with the bone. She felt the cold in the grass between the stones, which was white at the edges and grey in the middle, like a page that had been read too often.
Mourner had come up to the Mound in the dark, as she always did, and she had walked the rows in the order the names were cut. There were four hundred and some stones on the shoulder of the hill. Most of them had a name and a trade, and a few had only a trade, and the oldest had neither, only a notch for each hand that had dug the grave. Mourner did not need to read them. She knew them as a man knows the steps of his own stair, by the number and the give of each one under the foot, and she went down the rows touching the cold tops of the stones with two fingers of the copy’s hand, not to read them but to be sure they were still there.
