Mourner had been asked to sing a great many things in her life, and she had sung almost all of them. She had sung the Foundation’s grave-songs over the men who cut the stone, and the masons’ songs over the men who carried it, and the lullabies the Saelmar nurseries had once taken from the builders’ work-songs, which Mourner had heard only once and could not now hum without the tune going wrong. She had sung the Articles’ preamble to the Chamber in the first winter of the law. She had sung three Thornwick labourers into the grass, one trade at a time, and had sung a verse about water for a girl whose name nobody had yet been given.
She had never once been asked to sing a line that was not a name.
The Chancery’s magistrate asked her now, from the Chancery’s bench, in his quiet and unhurried voice. Mourner stood at the lectern at the foot of the Chamber’s table, where the grave-tender stood when the Chamber wished to hear the Roll’s names read in their proper order, and she held the lectern’s edge with the copy’s two fingers and listened to the question as if it were a note being struck very far off.
