The Sergeant's Man's Name

aka the name carried into the barrow

A name cut into a burial-plank abandoned deep in the Echo of Vallen, where a burial party tried and failed to move the drowned company to consecrated ground — the second of Mourner Ithal's two unspoken dead, naming himself before the barrow's echo took the rest.

The burial party got this far into the barrow and no further. A plank meant to carry a body out lies where they dropped it when the echo turned them back, and on it a man carved his own name while he waited to be moved — a wait that never ended. The hand is older than the water-boy's, steadier, a soldier's block letters. 'If they leave me in the singing dark, let it be under my name and not the sergeant's shadow. VESK MARROW, twelve years pike for a House that pressed me at a toll-gate and released me only into the ground. I carried the sergeant's orders and the sergeant's blame and I will not carry his anonymity too. I am VESK MARROW. The barrow can have the rest of me. It cannot have that.' The echo has worn every other mark on the plank to nothing. The name it left. Carry VESK MARROW up to Ithal, and the roll is whole again.

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