Rowan Switched's Arc

Chapter 11 of 25

Rowan walked home with the three notes still locked behind their teeth. Seven nights remained. The notes were safe from Thorn, but they were not yet clean. Rowan had heard them once at the pool, and had carried them since like water in cupped hands. To speak them wrong at the dark moon would void the deed. Rowan needed a place to practice where no one could steal the sound, and someone who knew how a voice worked. The cottage was watched. The graveyard was watched. Rowan thought of the back slope past the village and the small dark opening under the roots there, an old rabbit burrow gone deep. Sound would sit in a hole like that. Sound would not carry to the road. Rowan crawled in at dusk with a stub of candle and knelt in the dirt. Rowan tried the first note. It came out thin and slid sideways. The second cracked. The third would not come at all. Rowan tried again. The candle guttered. Rowan's throat closed on the middle sound the way a door sticks in wet weather. Six nights now, by the count. Rowan pressed both hands flat to the dirt and made themselves breathe. A woman in a long black robe was standing at the burrow's mouth when Rowan looked up. White hair. Pale eyes. She did not step in. She said her name was Selene Nightwhisper, and that her sister had left a record for Rowan once. She had come because the record was cracked and the debt was not. She said Rowan was breathing from the throat. Notes lived lower. She pressed a cold hand to Rowan's belly and told them to push from there. Rowan tried again with her hand in place. The first note came clean. The second held. The third bent and broke. Selene did not scold. She said Rowan needed a teacher who lived by the sound, not by the silence. She named a red-haired singer who slept rough between towns and would trade a lesson for a coin and a meal. She said the singer was camped two ridges over near the twin towers where the death-sisters kept their stone. She told Rowan to go before moonrise, and then Selene was not there. Rowan found the singer at a small fire under the twin spires, tuning a battered instrument. Luna Meridian did not ask questions. Rowan paid the coin. Luna listened to the three notes and said, "You're squeezing. Open the jaw. Drop the shoulders. Again." She made Rowan sing them thirty times. Then fifty. Near dawn Rowan sang the three notes clean, one after the other, with no crack and no slide. Luna nodded once and packed her instrument. "You've got it," she said. "Don't lose it." Rowan walked back down the ridge with the notes steady in their chest. Five nights remained. The sound was clean. But Luna had heard it plain, three times over, and Selene had heard it too, and Rowan knew now that a sound learned in the open was a sound the world could follow home.