Mourner sang on the Garrison Mound in the frost, over the stones of the dead she had been given, and her face drifted while she sang.
She had learned to sing through the drift. The face was an Undercroft copy of Ansel Brume’s, cast from a portrait the Watch had kept in a cupboard in the first winter, and it had been cast without a living model in front of the mould. Mourner did not know the face of Ansel Brume. She knew only the portrait, which was a painted thing, hung in a frame and looking out over a room that no longer existed. The painted face had a particular fixed expression, and the cast had kept it, and the cast had no one to look at, and so the cast had begun, very slowly, to look at whatever the wind brought.
This morning the wind had brought the Caul’s frost, and the face had turned a little toward the ridge, and its mouth had drawn down at one corner, as a man’s mouth draws down when he is watching a cloud he does not like. Mourner felt the corner move under her own skin. She sang through the movement. She did not stop.
