Willow's Arc

Chapter 1 of 5

Willow had crossed three valleys to find a song that would make strangers weep. She wanted one ballad so true that no listener could hold back tears. Tonight she sat at a campfire ringed with sturdy logs, her guitar across her knees, and she had nothing. The notes she played were pretty. Pretty was not enough. Across the flames sat a man who had wept into his supper all evening, and she knew his grief held the thing she needed. He was a traveler like her, but he carried his sorrow the way some people carry a wound. All night he had stared at the fire and said almost nothing. When Willow asked where he was headed, he only shook his head. When she asked who he had lost, his jaw tightened. "That story is not for a stranger," he said. "Least of all one who'd turn it into a song for coins." The words stung because they were half true. Willow set her guitar down in the dirt. She could push him, and lose him. She could play a cheerful tune, and learn nothing. Both felt like theft. Instead she stood and walked to the cozy round yurt behind them, where a stovepipe breathed smoke into the dark. On its door hung a small handwritten plaque. She had read it earlier. Sit down, let the music play. Close your eyes, drift far away. Someone had written those lines with love, for anyone who needed rest. She lifted the plaque off its nail and carried it back to the fire. "I won't ask again," Willow said. She held the plaque out to him. "But read this." He read it twice. His hands shook. "My daughter wrote songs like that," he said at last. "Little rhymes. She'd make me sit and listen every night." He pressed his thumb against a purple thistle tucked in his coat pocket, its spiny leaves bent from travel. "She picked this the morning before the fever took her. I've carried it since." Willow did not reach for her guitar. She sat down in the dirt beside him and listened. He talked for an hour. He told her the girl's name, her laugh, the song she never finished. He wept, and this time he let Willow see it. When he was done, the fire had burned low. He looked at her, emptied out. "Now you have your heart for the ballad," he said. "I hope it's worth what it cost me." Willow understood then that she had traded something too. The story was hers to carry now, and carrying it meant doing it justice. A pretty tune would betray him. She had the heart of her ballad at last. She had no idea how to write it without breaking the trust he'd just handed her.