Lira Nox's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Lira Nox read the notice three times before she believed it. The paper was pinned high on the chain-link board, half covered by a flyer for a bear sighting and a smaller card advertising sled repairs. A funeral procession would pass through town at moonrise. She needed to see it. She had been trying for a year to write a song that could pull the dead back across the line, and she had nothing to write with. Grief on a page was ink. Grief in a street was a sound. She pressed her palm flat to the notice. Ash came off her fingers and grayed the paper. Her hands had not come clean since she walked out of the underworld without her teacher. He had taught her the bone flute at her hip. His first lesson was to blow the ugliest note she could, so she would never flinch from a bad sound again. She had not played a note since the burnings. She picked the flute up each morning and set it down. A voice behind her said, "You can't stand here after dark." Lira turned. The woman wore a blue robe and a belt hung with small bells and a lantern. Her hair was pale as frost. "I'm the warden tonight," she said. "Tara Ashveil. The procession doesn't want watchers. Family only. Go home." "I have to hear it," Lira said. "One song. That's all I need from them." Tara looked at the ash on Lira's hands, then at the flute. Her mouth tightened. "You're the one who went down and came back light." She stepped closer. "Grief isn't a well you dip from. Go home, girl." She reached past Lira and tore the notice off the board. The pin skittered onto the packed snow. "Procession's rerouted. I changed it an hour ago. Word came a stranger was asking after it." Her eyes did not move from Lira's face. Lira walked back to the sod house at the edge of town with the paper crumpled in her fist. Snow sat heavy on the wooden beams above the door. Inside, she set the flute on the table and stared at it until the fire burned low. She had built her whole plan on tonight. She had told herself the mourners' cries would give her the first true note. Now the road would be empty, and the grief would pass her by in some other lane. She uncrumpled the notice. On the back, in small pencil, someone had written a name and a date three days out. Not a rerouting. A second procession. A private one. Tara had torn it down so Lira would not see it. Lira folded the paper into her sleeve. She had missed tonight. She had three days to find where the private road ran, and a warden who would stand in her way when she did.