Rowan Switched's Arc

Chapter 15 of 25

Rowan set the ground root jar on the sill and looked at the cottage. Three nights left. The walls were thin. The neighbors leaned on the fence at dusk with cups in their hands. If Rowan practiced the three notes here, someone would hear the completion phrase and carry it back to the crowned woman before the dark moon. The animal graveyard was the place to sing the deed itself, but not to rehearse. Rehearsal needed walls that would not leak sound. Rowan pulled on their coat and went back out the gate before the candle burned another finger down. Selene Nightshade drifted at Rowan's shoulder as they crossed the ridge. "You cannot practice in any house that has ears," she said. "You need a room that eats sound." Rowan thought of the mushroom hut past the old birch stand. A small dark place with a rounded cap roof, half-buried, empty since the last frost. Fairy work. Thick walls. No neighbors. Rowan turned that way. The hut sat where Rowan remembered. Rowan knocked. The door opened on a small fairy with torn dark wings and purple hair. She looked at Rowan without surprise. "Melody Resonance," she said. "I know who you are. I have been waiting for a voice to come to my door." On a low table behind her sat a silver box with two antennae and a glowing dial. Rowan had never seen such a thing. Melody said, "It swallows sound. Whatever you sing inside its field stays inside its field. Nothing leaves this hut." Rowan asked her price. Melody said she wanted to hear the notes once, clean, and then forget them. She said forgetting was easy for her kind if the singer asked. Rowan hesitated. Selene said, low, "She is not lying. But she is not free either. Someone sent her." Melody heard and shrugged. "Elspeth Moonwhisper sent me. She keeps a promise. I owe her a small one. This closes it." Rowan chewed a pinch of the ground root. The taste was bitter and cold. Melody turned the dial on the silver box. The air in the hut went flat and heavy. Rowan sang the first note. It came out clean. The walls did not answer. No echo reached the door. Rowan sang the second. Then the third. Melody nodded once at each. On the fourth pass Rowan sang all three together with the completion phrase folded in, and the ground root held the throat steady where it had cracked before. Across the room a red-haired woman leaned against the far wall with a strange stringed instrument on her back. Rowan had not seen her enter. She said nothing. She only listened, counted the notes on her fingers, and then walked out through a back door Rowan had not noticed. Melody's face did not change. "She is mine," Melody said. "She hears for me and forgets on command. She will forget by the time she reaches the trees." Rowan sang the notes ten more times inside the dead air of the hut until the ground root wore thin and the throat felt strong. Then Rowan stopped. Melody turned the dial back. Sound returned to the room. "Done," Melody said. "Go home. Sleep. You have your rehearsal, and the world did not hear it." Rowan stepped out into the cold with the notes locked in the body, ready for the dark moon in two nights, and a new small debt owed to a fairy they had only just met.