Lira Nox's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Lira spread the notice on the table by the low fire. The pencil marks read a name and a date, nothing more. No road. No gate. She had three days. She stared at the letters until the shapes stopped meaning anything, then pulled her coat on and went out into the cold. She walked to the lodge at the edge of town where the drivers drank. Fur hung thick from the eaves. Inside, men bent over cups and did not look up. She asked, quiet, if anyone had driven a sled for a family burial that week. One man spat. Another said the wardens had closed three lanes to outside traffic. He would not say which lanes. He would not say for whom. She left with nothing but the name of the family still ringing in her head. Outside, a fox sat on the packed snow. White coat, one dark stripe down its back. It watched her the way a dog watches a door. When she stepped, it stepped. When she stopped, it stopped. She had seen foxes trail hunters for scraps. This one carried nothing in its mouth and wanted nothing from her hands. She followed it because she had no better plan. It led her past the last houses, past a stone fire ring where someone had burned wood recently and left the grate warm. Ash sat in the bowl. Fresh ash. A mourner's fire, small and private, set outside the town's common ground. She knelt and pressed her fingers to the stones. Warm. Someone had come this way within the hour. The fox trotted on. It brought her to a stone arch at the edge of the pines, its pillars cut with frost symbols worn shallow by weather. A narrow track ran under it and bent into the trees. Sled marks. Fresh. Two runners, close together, the print of a small procession. She had found the road. "Step back from the arch." Tara stood ten paces off, lantern high, bells silent at her belt. Her hair caught the lantern light. "I told you the procession was not for you." Lira did not step back. She held up the notice with the pencil name. "I know where it goes now," she said. "You can stand here all three days. You can't stand on every foot of this track." Tara's mouth tightened. She lowered the lantern. "Then I'll be waiting at the other end," she said, and walked into the dark under the arch. Lira watched the light shrink between the pillars. She had the road. She had two days left, a warden who would meet her at the grave, and no song yet to play when she got there. She turned back toward town with the fox still at her heel and the flute knocking cold against her hip.