Mourner sang every name after it had been read, and not before. The Charter had made her the Roll’s singer for the night, and she had agreed, on one condition, which was the one law she had ever kept: she would sing only the names that had been read in the Chamber and given their Assent, and she would not sing any that the Roll had not said first.
She had never sung a name before it was given. She had never sung a name she had only overheard. She had sung the Dead on the Garrison Mound for three years, and she had sung them in the frost and in the bone-room and at the long bench in the Hall, and every name she had ever sung had come to her through a mouth that had the right to say it. A Mound that sang a name before its time was a Mound that had begun to take things from the living. Mourner had seen what that did to a Hold. She had seen the Hunger come up the stair in the first year, grey and silent, when the Mound’s own singing had gone out of her keeping and into the dark.
