Daisy Duke's Arc

Chapter 24 of 26

The crystal grain grew her cornflowers overnight, but the debt sat heavy. Daisy owed the queen a cake that held a stolen song. She had never bound a sound before. She bound days, names, grudges, dreams. A song was none of those. She stood at her counter with flour on her sleeves and no idea where to start. Skeeter arrived tapping his cane on the floorboards. His crystal skull caught the oven light. "A song's just an ache with a tune," he said. "You've baked plenty of aches. What holds a tune when the singer forgets it?" "I don't know the tune," Daisy said. "The queen can't sing it. It's locked in a box on the surface." Skeeter shrugged. "Then don't bake the song. Bake the shape it left behind." Daisy frowned. Then the sugar moth lifted off the sill. It flew straight to the meltwater fall and hovered, wings trembling. It smelled something. Daisy followed it to the water and knelt. Nessa rose from the dark, crown breaking the surface first. Her onyx eyes fixed on Daisy. "You said you'd bake my song," she said flatly. "Do it now." "I need an anchor," Daisy said. "Something that stays. The song is gone, so I need what it left in you. What broke when it was taken?" Nessa was quiet. "The waters went still," she said. "I sang to keep them moving. Now nothing moves down there." "That's it," Daisy said. "The stillness. The wanting them to move again. That stays." Nessa lifted one tentacle from the water. In its grip lay a polished stone, dark, with blue and gold light shifting across its face. "This held the song's echo before the box took it," she said. "Bake it in. It remembers." Daisy carried the stone home. She set it in dream-cream and folded the batter around the wanting, the flat still water begging to churn. She did not anchor the cake to a day or a name. She anchored it to Nessa's refusal to let the sea rot, the same stubbornness she'd used on the crystal grain. The oven glowed. The cake rose. When it cooled, a low hum came off the crust. Not a melody. A pull, like a held breath waiting to release. The moth landed beside it and went still, calm. Daisy brought the cake to the fall. Nessa took it in her tentacles. The hum met the water and the surface shivered. Far below, something long asleep began to stir. "It's not the song," Nessa said. "It's the key to the song." She looked at Daisy. "This will crack the box open. But someone must carry it to the surface where the box is kept. That is not my water." Daisy's stomach dropped. She had bound the sound. She had paid the debt. But now the cake had to reach a collector she'd never met, in a place she'd never been.