The First Silence
Ari had been born to the frost. The valley kept its seasons like a ledger of breath, each year measured by the bell that hung in the throat of the old tower at Greenglade’s rim. That bell had a name among the people — not a proper name, not the sort of thing you spoke in council — yet everyone knew its manner of speech. Its first ring in spring loosened the ice in the river, coaxed the bulbs to push green through soil, and taught the geese when to peel away in ragged V shapes toward warmer skies. It sang in a voice that felt less like metal than like a promise.
Ari had learned its songs the way children learn a mother’s cadence: by being near. Before she could walk properly she came to the tower with a crescent of soot on her cheeks and a small ration of barley tucked in a palm. Master Thane, who taught the timing of the strikes and the way a hand could stead a tongue without forcing it, kept an eye on her; the old man’s hands trembled now with weather and age, but his memory was a map of every sound the bell had ever made. He would cup Ari’s cheek and tell her how sound sat in the throat of things and how a tone could call weather like a fisherman calls fish. She believed him because sound was the instrument of her life: the squeal of the milk goat that answered the bell at the hour of milking, the low hum of winter-looms that the bell’s winter toll had always countered.
That morning, when the bell failed to speak, it felt like betrayal. Ari stood with Master Thane as the choir of the village gathered on the square beneath slate-roofed houses and frost-crinkled eaves. They had trimmed lanterns with the slow hands of habit and drawn woolscarves tight; they had hoped there was some delay, some hiccup of weather. Instead a white emptiness hung from boughs and roofs, and the bell, which should have sent current through the valley like a pulse, sat mute in its cradle.