Mourner sang to the Mound in the last hour of the night, when the grave-grass was wet and the names of the dead lay quiet in their rows.
She had sung there for two years and more. Before that she had sung in the Hearth, and at the Garrison’s funerals, and on the Lessary road when the Chancery’s wardens came up with their chains. She had a voice that had been made for singing names, and she had never once used the voice for anything else. The Mound was her place. The grass knew her tune. The old captain’s stone at the Mound’s head had been cut with a line that the Hold’s clerks had never been able to read, and Mourner had sung it so often that it no longer needed the letters.
She sang the names the Roll had read. She sang them each in its trade and its wage, as they had been written, and she did not sing a name she had not been given. That was the rule. Mourner had made it for herself on the first night, when a grave-tender of the Foundation had come up out of the dark and found herself at the Mound with nothing in her mouth but the shape of a song. She would not sing a name that had not been read. She had been asked to do that once, by a Chancery clerk, and she had refused, and the refusal had cost a Hand’s whole season.
