Lyra Fernbrook's Arc

Chapter 10 of 18

The flock hit the tower before Lyra had caught her breath. Beaks struck the shutters like hammers. The old wood cracked along the seams. Dorian dropped the bar across the trap and threw his shoulder against the west shutter as it bowed inward. A bronze feather punched through a gap and stuck quivering in the floor. Dusk was hours off. The barricade would not last. Lyra set the lyre down and pulled her satchel open. She had yarrow, thread, and a coil of braided cord left from the bells. None of it would hold planks. She looked around the platform. The green roof arched above them on carved beams. Vines had grown up through the floor and wrapped the inner posts. The tower was old elf work, built when the grove and the elves still spoke to each other. "The shutters go in twenty minutes," Dorian said. Blood ran from his shoulder down his arm. "Less if they learn the weak side." Lyra put her hand flat on the nearest vine. It was warm. She thought of the drake on her porch, the hound driven off, the tree spirits at her door. Every time she had asked the grove for anything, it had answered by hurting her. But the tower itself had been shaped by elves and grown by the grove together. It was a thing from before the break. She unwrapped the lyre and set her fingers on the strings. Not the two forbidden notes. Something older. A tune her grandmother had hummed while mending. She played it slow. She hummed under the notes the way she hummed over wounds. The vine under her palm tightened. Green shoots pushed out of the wood along the shutters. They crossed the cracks and pulled the boards back into place. A second vine wrapped the trap bolt and thickened around it. The drake climbed up through the stair from below, flowers shaking on its scales, and settled against the west shutter with its back braced to the wood. The tower was answering. Not the grove at large. This one built thing, waking to her hand. Outside, the birds shrieked and struck harder. A beak split a plank near the roof and a black head forced through. Dorian drove his knife up into its throat. The bird fell back. The vines closed the gap behind it. Lyra kept playing. Her arms shook. She did not stop until the shutters were laced shut with living wood and the drake's breath fogged the seams with pollen that hardened like resin. Dorian slid down the wall beside her, knife across his knees. "It heard you," he said. "Part of it did," Lyra said. She looked at the vines holding the tower shut, and at the bells above them waiting for dusk. The grove had not forgiven her. But something inside it, older than the wound, still remembered how to be asked.