The boy stayed by the river, too numb with grieving to notice the cold, too blind with tears to know that it was too dark to see. He wept until there was nothing left of him but whimpers and twitches and a tiny, questioning sound that continued even after he finally fell asleep in the rough embrace of tree roots. He wanted to die, and indeed, weak and wet as a newborn in the night breeze, he might have had his wish before morning. But then the moon rose, and the singing began.

To this day in that village, old men and women whose greatest grandparents were warm in their cradles on that night will speak of that singing as though they themselves had wakened to the song. There was no one in the village who did not wake, no one who did not come wondering to the door—though few dared step beyond—but it is always said that each heard different music from a different quarter. The cobbler’s son was the first to wake, by all accounts, dreamily certain that the hides of two marsh-goats his father had hung and scraped the day before were singing bitterly beautiful lullabies in the tanning shed. He shook the old man, who leaped up swearing that he heard the voices of his dead wife and his brother cursing him by turns like soldiers under his own window. On a hillside above the town, a shepherd roused, not to the roar of a charging sheknath, but to mocking airs of rebellion among his flock; the baker woke, not to a sound at all, but with a sweet aroma, such as his earthen ovens had never known, in his nostrils. The blacksmith, who never slept, thought he heard the terrible Moon Hunters coming for him on their pig-snouted horses, crying his name in the voices of hungry babies; while the weaver who was the young man’s teacher dreamed a pattern she had never imagined before and walked, still sleeping, to her loom, where she wove until dawn, smiling with her eyes closed.