Cards of Grief Read Online Free PDF Page A

up. Within the year I knew as much as they of the history of mourning, the structure of threnodies, and the composition of the dirge. I learned the Queen’s birth lines to twice the twenty-one names and the lines of her cousins as well. I held in my mouth and mind the first of the hundred prime tales and was already beginning on their branches. What I learned I did not forget. And when I had Mastery conferred on me, I stood in the Room of Instruction with the other apprentices and had the tale of the Seven Grievers given to me. All this, which usually takes half a lifetime, I learned in a year.
    And for a night I had a prince as a lover, though I never bore him a babe.
    But I see a question in your eyes, child. Do not be afraid to ask. Wait, let me ask it for you. Did I regret my years of service to the Queen when I learned that she had had my grandmother slain? Child, you have lived all your life with the knowledge of the strangers from the sky. You are one of the changed grievers. We did not question a Queen. She did what she did for the good of our land. I do what I do for the good of my art. My grandmother’s lines were long and full of Royal mourners; her dying was short and without pain. Would that we could all start our journey that way.
    It was proclaimed by the Queen, and approved by the priestesses, that a Master Griever of the Queen’s own choosing—though she be not a birth-rite griever—could mourn the Queen and hers. It was a first change in what would become a time full of change. Thus it was that I served the Queen and her sister’s son after. Who is mourned does not matter to the Master Griever; we mourn for men and women alike. But I see now that it is, in the end, the land that mourns. I fear it will become as barren as my Queen. For who can tell which man is father when all men sow the same? Yet a woman in her time of ripening is each as different as a skillfully wrought dirge.
    I know not if the land will die because of the King or the strangers. Tall and broad they are, easy to admire and touch. They show us wonders, their tongues invent tales, they are a people without tears. Do not trust them unless you see them cry. It is the one thing beyond their magics.
    Their magics are easy and magic, like art, should be tough, should make demands. They give and give until we are caught in the net of their giving. And what do they ask in return? It seems a simple enough demand: that we talk to them that they may capture our words with their machines. The Queen has ruled and the priestess agrees that this does not violate the prophesies. The machines do not script the words but capture the voice. Yet is it not said in the first prime tale that to hold in the mouth is to remember? A machine has no mouth. A machine has no heart. We are nothing if we forget our own tales.
    Things change too quickly for me, my child. But remember what you promised. You said you would set out my husk on the pyre and pylons we built together, hand on hand, outside this cave, so far away from the palace and the troubled streets of L’Lal’dome. I should not be too heavy for you to lift—now.
    Here, listen, I have made up a threnody of my own, the first Gray Wanderer I have composed in many years—and the last. I want you to start my mourning with it. It begins:
    Gray is my color and my name,
    Fame is the morning’s mourning…
    My voice falters. You sing it. I know, I know you have not the tidiest voice in the land. It is little like the voice of a bird that has sucked the juice of too many sun-warmed berries. But, Grenna, I want you to say this for me. Oh, I know such is not done, that a griever grieve for herself. But I have no child of my womb, no girl to call the lines.
    But what of Linnet?
    She is a child of the sky, none of ours. I , I am the last of the Lania, though once I had different hopes. And even though you are my chosen one, it is not the same, no matter what the Queen once proclaimed. I am ever drawn back to the