Lira Nox's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Lira walked back to town with the flute cold at her hip and the white fox trotting beside her. She had the road. She had two days. What she did not have was a song, and worse, she did not know how a song would sound inside the cairn's stone walls. A note that lifted in open air might crash back on itself under a low roof. If she misjudged the space, her music would collapse at the grave and Tara would watch it happen. She stopped at the arch before she left the pines. The stone stood taller than three men, its pillars cut with worn frost marks. She set her palm on the cold rock. Not a cairn, but stone. Curved stone. She rapped her knuckles against it. The sound went nowhere. It died in her hand. She needed a test. Not the flute yet. She was not ready to lift the flute. She cupped her hands to her mouth and hummed one low note under the arch. The note came back doubled, thick, muddy. She hummed a higher one. The higher one rang clean. She tried a run of three notes fast. The middle note swallowed the last. A second fox slipped out from the trees. Red coat, torn ear, eyes bright as lamp glass. It sat next to the white one and watched her mouth. Lira felt foolish humming for foxes. She hummed anyway. She marked in her head which notes lived and which drowned. Low notes drowned. Slow notes lived. Fast runs turned to mud. She would need a song built of long notes, spaced wide, with room for each one to fade before the next. She walked to the lodge with that rule in her head. She needed paper. She needed a corner and a lamp. The front desk stood empty when she came in, its blue paint chipped down to bare wood. A woman with dark red hair stepped out from the back and set her hands flat on the desk. Lira asked for a room and a pencil. The woman looked at the ash on Lira's hands, then at the flute. "One night," the woman said. "Pencil's on the desk. Pay in the morning." She did not ask why. She slid a key across and turned away. Lira took the pencil and the key and climbed the stairs. She sat on the bed and wrote what she had learned. Long notes. Wide spaces. No runs. She wrote it three times so she would not forget. The flute stayed at her hip. She did not lift it. She did not need to lift it yet. She had a shape for the song now, cut to fit a stone room she had never seen. It was not a song. It was the frame of one, and it was more than she had carried down from the arch an hour before.