Melody Llwellyn's Arc

Chapter 9 of 14

The judges bent over their table. Melody had one song left to sing. She opened her mouth to hum a note and felt it scrape. Her voice caught halfway and cracked. Three straight performances had worn it raw. She swallowed and tried again. The same rasp came out, thin and torn. She had proven her stop was real. Now the very thing she needed to win was failing her. The starfish scrambled close. "Your throat," he whispered. "It's shot." The parrot hopped up beside him, feathers dull with worry. "How long until they call you?" Melody croaked. A judge glanced at the sky. "Sundown," she said. That gave Melody a short while, and no plan. The cobalt salamander tugged at her foot with one small claw. His orange eyes fixed on her. He had sat quiet through every practice on her veranda, drawn still by her singing. Now he pulled hard, again and again, until she followed. He led her off the sand and up a slope of ferns. Behind a screen of leaves sat a small spring ringed in gray stones. Violets and orchids leaned over the water. The surface shimmered with a faint blue glow. "Drink," the parrot said. "He's been trading trinkets for stories about this place all week. He says the water mends what's broken." Melody looked at the salamander. He dipped a claw in the spring, then touched it to his own throat, showing her. Then he held out one flat green piece of sea glass, the same kind he always gave her before she sang. She took it and closed her fist around it. Melody knelt and cupped the water in her claws. It was cold and clean. She drank. The chill slid down her throat and settled there. She waited. Nothing changed at first. Then the raw scrape eased, like a knot loosening. She swallowed once more. The tightness let go. She tried a note. It came out low and whole. She climbed higher. The sound held, clear and steady, no crack in it. The parrot flapped up in a bright circle. The starfish threw both arms wide. The salamander blinked slowly, satisfied. Melody drank a last handful and stood. Her throat felt like her own again. She looked back down the slope toward the stage, where the huge-voiced competitor waited and the crowd shifted in the low sun. "I can sing," she said. Her voice did not waver. "But he heard me practice a hundred times up on that veranda. He knows the stop is coming now." The starfish's grin faded. The surprise that had carried her this far was gone. She had her voice back. She would need something the crowd had never heard before.