Lira Nox read the notice three times before she believed it. The paper was pinned high on the chain-link board, half covered by a flyer for a bear sighting and a smaller card advertising sled repairs. A funeral procession would pass through town at moonrise. She needed to see it. She had been trying for a year to write a song that could pull the dead back across the line, and she had nothing to write with. Grief on a page was ink. Grief in a street was a sound. She pressed her palm flat to the notice. Ash came off her fingers and grayed the paper. Her hands had not come clean since she walked out of the underworld without her teacher. He had taught her the bone flute at her hip. His first lesson was to blow the ugliest note she could, so she would never flinch from a bad sound again. She had not played a note since the burnings. She picked the flute up each morning and set it down. A voice behind her said, "You can't stand here after dark." Lira turned. The woman wore a blue robe and a belt hung with small bells and a lantern. Her hair was pale as frost. "I'm the warden tonight," she said. "Tara Ashveil. The procession doesn't want watchers. Family only. Go home." "I have to hear it," Lira said. "One song. That's all I need from them." Tara looked at the ash on Lira's hands, then at the flute. Her mouth tightened. "You're the one who went down and came back light." She stepped closer. "Grief isn't a well you dip from. Go home, girl." She reached past Lira and tore the notice off the board. The pin skittered onto the packed snow. "Procession's rerouted. I changed it an hour ago. Word came a stranger was asking after it." Her eyes did not move from Lira's face. Lira walked back to the sod house at the edge of town with the paper crumpled in her fist. Snow sat heavy on the wooden beams above the door. Inside, she set the flute on the table and stared at it until the fire burned low. She had built her whole plan on tonight. She had told herself the mourners' cries would give her the first true note. Now the road would be empty, and the grief would pass her by in some other lane. She uncrumpled the notice. On the back, in small pencil, someone had written a name and a date three days out. Not a rerouting. A second procession. A private one. Tara had torn it down so Lira would not see it. Lira folded the paper into her sleeve. She had missed tonight. She had three days to find where the private road ran, and a warden who would stand in her way when she did.

Lira spread the notice on the table by the low fire. The pencil marks read a name and a date, nothing more. No road. No gate. She had three days. She stared at the letters until the shapes stopped meaning anything, then pulled her coat on and went out into the cold. She walked to the lodge at the edge of town where the drivers drank. Fur hung thick from the eaves. Inside, men bent over cups and did not look up. She asked, quiet, if anyone had driven a sled for a family burial that week. One man spat. Another said the wardens had closed three lanes to outside traffic. He would not say which lanes. He would not say for whom. She left with nothing but the name of the family still ringing in her head. Outside, a fox sat on the packed snow. White coat, one dark stripe down its back. It watched her the way a dog watches a door. When she stepped, it stepped. When she stopped, it stopped. She had seen foxes trail hunters for scraps. This one carried nothing in its mouth and wanted nothing from her hands. She followed it because she had no better plan. It led her past the last houses, past a stone fire ring where someone had burned wood recently and left the grate warm. Ash sat in the bowl. Fresh ash. A mourner's fire, small and private, set outside the town's common ground. She knelt and pressed her fingers to the stones. Warm. Someone had come this way within the hour. The fox trotted on. It brought her to a stone arch at the edge of the pines, its pillars cut with frost symbols worn shallow by weather. A narrow track ran under it and bent into the trees. Sled marks. Fresh. Two runners, close together, the print of a small procession. She had found the road. "Step back from the arch." Tara stood ten paces off, lantern high, bells silent at her belt. Her hair caught the lantern light. "I told you the procession was not for you." Lira did not step back. She held up the notice with the pencil name. "I know where it goes now," she said. "You can stand here all three days. You can't stand on every foot of this track." Tara's mouth tightened. She lowered the lantern. "Then I'll be waiting at the other end," she said, and walked into the dark under the arch. Lira watched the light shrink between the pillars. She had the road. She had two days left, a warden who would meet her at the grave, and no song yet to play when she got there. She turned back toward town with the fox still at her heel and the flute knocking cold against her hip.

Lira walked back to town with the flute cold at her hip and the white fox trotting beside her. She had the road. She had two days. What she did not have was a song, and worse, she did not know how a song would sound inside the cairn's stone walls. A note that lifted in open air might crash back on itself under a low roof. If she misjudged the space, her music would collapse at the grave and Tara would watch it happen. She stopped at the arch before she left the pines. The stone stood taller than three men, its pillars cut with worn frost marks. She set her palm on the cold rock. Not a cairn, but stone. Curved stone. She rapped her knuckles against it. The sound went nowhere. It died in her hand. She needed a test. Not the flute yet. She was not ready to lift the flute. She cupped her hands to her mouth and hummed one low note under the arch. The note came back doubled, thick, muddy. She hummed a higher one. The higher one rang clean. She tried a run of three notes fast. The middle note swallowed the last. A second fox slipped out from the trees. Red coat, torn ear, eyes bright as lamp glass. It sat next to the white one and watched her mouth. Lira felt foolish humming for foxes. She hummed anyway. She marked in her head which notes lived and which drowned. Low notes drowned. Slow notes lived. Fast runs turned to mud. She would need a song built of long notes, spaced wide, with room for each one to fade before the next. She walked to the lodge with that rule in her head. She needed paper. She needed a corner and a lamp. The front desk stood empty when she came in, its blue paint chipped down to bare wood. A woman with dark red hair stepped out from the back and set her hands flat on the desk. Lira asked for a room and a pencil. The woman looked at the ash on Lira's hands, then at the flute. "One night," the woman said. "Pencil's on the desk. Pay in the morning." She did not ask why. She slid a key across and turned away. Lira took the pencil and the key and climbed the stairs. She sat on the bed and wrote what she had learned. Long notes. Wide spaces. No runs. She wrote it three times so she would not forget. The flute stayed at her hip. She did not lift it. She did not need to lift it yet. She had a shape for the song now, cut to fit a stone room she had never seen. It was not a song. It was the frame of one, and it was more than she had carried down from the arch an hour before.