Brattholt is a small holding far up the Rabbit's headwaters, where the heartland thins out and the Fragenstor Mielthøn closes over the river. It belongs to the Vøllund family, who have held the surrounding timber for as long as Tangier records run, and it is the one place in the kingdom where the dead are buried in the ground as a matter of conviction rather than necessity. Every other inland family that grounds its dead does so in shame, beaten by winter and a body that turned before the coast. The Vøllund do it openly, and would not stop if the river ran clear to the sea in midwinter.
Their reasoning is not the funeral fleet's. The Vøllund hold that the Forest of a Thousand Thoughts keeps its dead awake, and they want theirs kept near. A Vøllund is laid among the old trees behind the hall, and the family walks out to those graves to put questions to them, the way another household might consult an elder. They say they get answers. What troubles Nøsen is that the Tangier have spent generations insisting that a body in still ground is a body that comes back, and the Vøllund agree completely. They simply consider it the point.
They asked us once whether our grandfathers lay quieter than the Murder Creek dead. We told them the truth. We don't know. We only know ours still answer when we ask, and theirs answer everyone, all the time, whether anyone asks or not. — a Vøllund of Brattholt, to a tithe-officer from Nøsen