Cards of Grief Read Online Free Page A

a hen-keeper by trade who had lost her own voice young and still mourned it.
    My mother agreed.
    By habit, my grandmother disagreed. “There is no one here worthy of our Linni,” she argued.
    “Do you not have some long connection on the coast?” asked another Elder. She was unfamiliar to me, though the white streak in her hair proclaimed her of Nadia’s line.
    “We do not have the means,” my mother began.
    “We will borrow if needs be,” my grandmother said. As she was now head of the Lania, I knew it would be so.
    They argued it out over and over as we walked home. I felt the injustice of my mother’s stand, though in my heart I did not want to impoverish them for my poetry’s sake. They ignored me and no one asked me what I wished. And what did I wish? For some magic to descend upon us all and make us wealthy or take me away somewhere, so that I could do nothing but make my poems in peace.
    That very day there came a knock on the door. Ah, I see you are ahead of me. Have I told this before? It was the singer, B’oremos, the prince from the Hall. He had left after the first day, gone—I had assumed—to finish his young man’s pilgrimage from Hall to Hall. I had hoped that he would stay awhile but I had only my words to hold him. In those early days, knowing the pull of the plump and lovely Lands girls on the princes, I did not value my own talents enough. I knew he would be there only a short while at best. I did not want to be the only girl in our village who had been slighted by a prince. Of course he had already paid me a great deal of attention, but that was part of his training, singing for different mourners, setting their threnodies to tunes. I had hoped he might stay over with us and instead he had left precipitously. But he had not gone on along his route, though, forgetting me for some saucy pigkeeper’s daughter. Instead he had doubled back and told the Queen herself what had happened in our Hall. It had taken three days to get an audience with her and a day for her to make up her mind. But at last she had said to him, “Bring me this Gray Wanderer, that I may see her for myself.” And that, of course, was how I was named.
    So I was brought before her, the Queen from whose own body should have sprung the next rulers. Only she was girl-barren. Her many princes plowed her, but there was no harvest. She had no girl children to grieve her, only boys. She did not know when I came to her that her bearing days were already over and that her sister’s son would rule after her.
    But we did not know all that would transpire then. The Queen asked to see me out of simple curiosity and because the news was brought by a beautiful young man.
    I dressed, as was appropriate to my age and clan, in a long gray homespun gown pricked through with red and black and green embroidery. I had done it myself, the trillis twined around the boughs and a sprinkling of mourning berries along the hem. My mother called it fine, my grandmother complained of the stitchery.
    My hair was plaited and pinned upon my head. My grandmother thought it silly to travel that way, my mother said it was best to have it off my neck. I thought them both crazed to argue about my looks. I had never been any great beauty, but a great gawking girl a head taller than the rest.
    They agreed on one thing, though.
    “Stand tall,” my mother said, pulling at the sides of my dress.
    “Pride in bearing can make the difference,” added my grandmother, fussing with my hair.
    I assumed they began quarreling again as soon as I left, and to tell the truth for many long years I missed the sound of their banter. It was never quarreling in anger, but a kind of conversation between the two of them, statement and response, as predictable and satisfying as an antiphonal poem.
    Because they had asked it of me, I held my head high, though I took the braids down as soon as we were out of sight. It was too heavy for the long trip piled up that way.
    What happened