Cards of Grief Read Online Free

smile, not the slow vanishing slits of mouth and teeth that my brothers and their friends used.
    “I would have liked them,” he said in his low, ripe voice. He nodded at the memoria to my great-grandmother and great-great-aunts.
    It is the ritual opening, to be sure, the mildest approach to an unknown grieven one. But somehow I sensed it was sincerely meant. And though I answered with the words that have been spoken already a thousand thousand times by grievers, he knew my own sincerity in them.
    “They would have grown by your friendship.”
    I scraped the linen free of the mistake and finished the threnody while he watched. I blushed under his scrutiny. My face was always a slate on which my emotions were writ too large, and I have carefully schooled myself against such displays. I pulled the linen free of its stretcher. The linen curled up at the edges just a bit, which was what I had hoped. It meant a reader had to flatten it by hand and in that way actually participate in the reading.
    He took the time to read it, not once but several times. And then he read it aloud. His voice, already changed, had been trained since birth. He was to be a member of the Queen’s Consort and she had only the best. In his mouth the words I had written took on an even more palpable sense of grief. A fine singer can make a song, you know.
    Soon we were surrounded by the other table watchers. He knew how to project his voice, he was a prince after all, and the others caught phrases that beckoned them, drew them in.
    And that was how my mother and my great-aunts found us when they returned, with a long line of mourners standing under the millstone sign. All the other stalls were empty, even of watchers. The mourners were saying with him, as he repeated the threnody yet one more time, the chorus that is now so famous:
    Weep for the night that is coming,
    Weep for the day that is past.
    Yes, it is simple. Every child knows it now, in the time of the strangers. But I wrote it that day when the strangers were not even a dream, and I wove my great-grandmother’s name into the body of the poem that she would not be forgotten. Her lines were long indeed. I was glad to have done it that day, for she was dead when we returned home and already my brothers had set out her husk on the pyre and pylons for the birds of prey.
    The next seven days, as true grievers, we mourned upon the stage of the Hall for our grieven one’s passage to the world of everlasting Light. How my great-grandmother must have smiled at her lines of mourning. Such long, loyal lines. My mother said there had never been such lines in our Minor Hall except when the singer Verina died who had been born in the town next but one to ours and whose relatives numbered in the hundreds in the countryside. My grandmother disagreed, mentioning a painter whose name I had never heard of and whose lines, she claimed, had been longer. But then my mother and grandmother always found things to disagree about. They agreed, though, that the longest lines had been for the last Queen, though that had been well before my mother’s time and when my grandmother had been but a girl.
    I wrote three more Gray Wanderer threnodies and one thirty-two-verse dirge which the harper prince set to a modal tune. The Hall throbbed with it for days, though one can hear it only occasionally now. It takes too long in the singing, and the strangers brought with them a taste for short songs. But Great-grandmother has not been forgotten and I still have pride in that, for I made it so.
    After the seven days, it was incumbent upon my mother to find me a Master Griever from our clan, though, by tradition, there should have been a year between my first entrance into a Hall and any formal apprenticeship. But the elders had come to her as soon as the Seven was over. They even spoke in front of me, which was unheard-of at that time.
    “She must be trained now, while the grace of tongue is still with her,” said one. She was