Wren Hallow

These are the songs of the coast villages and the hollow parishes, collected, or perhaps only remembered, by Wren Hallow. She knows the verses the old people stopped singing on purpose: the crowning songs, the keeping songs, the ones you must not hum near the water.

Where accounts differ, the variants are given. Nothing has been reconciled.

New songs arrive at the turning of the year, Maying, harvest, Hallows, midwinter, because that is when they are needed. If a song here feels like it already knows you: it was written long before you, and it has been waiting patiently.

Never bow. Never look around. And when the lamp is in the window, come you home.