The Stone Girl's Story - Hardcover

Chapter
One

Turtle had stopped moving last week.
     He’d warned Mayka and the others a year ago, when he first began to slow—but he moved so slowly anyway that she hadn’t believed him. Not really. She’d always thought they’d have one more afternoon. On the mountain, there was always another afternoon. Another sunset. Another sunrise. Until there wasn’t.
     She still visited him every day and talked to him as if he could hear her. He had moss growing on him over the faded markings on his shell, the way he liked it, but this morning, Mayka had had the idea he’d also like flowers. Yellow ones, like tiny suns. She decided to plant them in a circle around him, even though she knew he couldn’t see them.
     Kneeling next to him, she plunged her hands into the dirt, fingers first, using them like spades to dig a hole. She then picked up a flower, cupped its roots in her palms, and gently placed it in the hole. As she scooped dirt around the plant, she wondered what it would feel like to cry, like Father used to. When he was sad, tears would drip down his soft cheeks, curving through his wrinkles. She remembered she used to reach out and catch a tear on her finger. He’d tell her they tasted like the sea, which seemed miraculous to her.
     Mayka would never cry. Like Turtle, she was made of stone, carved by Father long ago, and she couldn’t cry, even when she very much wanted to.
     “You picked a pretty spot to stop,” she told Turtle, as she planted a second flower. He had chosen to stop on her favorite overlook, the one with the pine trees. I could stay here for hours, she thought. Even days. From here, she could see the sun spread across the valley, brightening the low-hanging morning mist until the mist shredded itself into strips of clouds. Far below, a river cut through the forests and fields. Reflecting the sky, it looked like a curling line of blue paint, with the forests as blots of dark green and the fields like smears of yellow and the quarries as patches of gray. It was so peaceful that she—
     The pine trees rustled.
     Immediately, Mayka held one hand up over her head.
     Thwack.
     A stone ball hit her palm. She closed her fingers around it.
     “Throw me hard, Mayka!” the ball squeaked.
     Well, it was peaceful, she thought. Sorry, Turtle. Standing, she wound her arm back and threw the stone as hard as she could. It sailed over the edge of the cliff.
     “Woo-hoo!” the ball cried as it unfurled its wings. Feathers extended, the ball-that-was-really-a-bird swooped up and then looped in a figure eight before flying back to the cliff. He landed on a branch near Mayka and cocked his head so he was looking at her sideways. “Did that make you feel better? Because it made me feel better.” When he wasn’t curled into a ball, Jacklo looked like a gray songbird, with three tail feathers that stretched a few inches beyond his feet, carved out of smoky quartz. He had a crest of stone feathers on his head. “Are you okay, Mayka? Everyone’s worried about you.”
     “I wanted to be alone, Jacklo,” Mayka reminded him. She’d been clear this morning: she’d wanted a few hours with Turtle, to say goodbye. She’d informed all her friends at once, in hopes they’d listen. “I told you that.”
     “But now we can be alone together!” He nestled into the crook of the branch.
     Mayka looked at him for a moment as she considered how to explain that wasn’t what she meant. He won’t understand, she thought. But she couldn’t be angry with him. It was just the way he showed he cared. “Yes, Jacklo, we can.”
     Kneeling again next to Turtle, she planted another flower. Around her, the wind rustled the pine needles, making a shushing sound. She wondered what these flowers smelled like and if the wind would carry their scent down the mountain.
     “Risa says I’m not good at being alone,” Jacklo chattered. “She thinks I can’t do it. She says I can’t ever sit in silence and just—”
     “Jacklo?”
     “Yes, Mayka?”
     “Silence means no talking.”
     “Oh. Right.” He ruffled his feathers, which sounded like pebbles tumbling down a slope, then fell quiet again.
     She wiped a bit of dirt from the ridges around Turtle’s eyes. He’d begun the trek here months ago, though it wasn’t far from home. He’d pondered each step before laboriously shuffling forward. She should have realized—
     “You know, sometimes when I listen to quiet, I hear all the noises in it, and it’s not quiet at all,” Jacklo said. “There’s the wind and the birds and the bugs and—”
     “Jacklo?”
     “Sorry.”
     She dug the last hole. Turtle had realized on his own that the marks Father had carved on his stone shell to awaken him were fading—rubbed away by wind, water, and time—and he’d calculated how far he had to walk in the weeks he had left. He’d made it to the exact place he wanted before he stopped. She only wished she’d understood sooner. Without a stonemason to recarve his marks, Turtle would sleep forever.
     “You know what, Mayka?”
     Lowering the last plant into the hole, she said, “Yes, Jacklo? What is it now?”
     In a tiny voice, he said, “I think I’m scared.”
     Mayka looked up at the bird. He was hunched over, with his shoulders up and his head ducked low. His wings were tight against his body. “You are? Why?”
     “I don’t want to become silent, like Turtle.”
     “Oh.” And like that, her annoyance melted away. This she understood. She’d been trying hard not to think about exactly this for the past week. Me too, she thought, but she didn’t say it out loud. Instead, she held up her hand. “Want me to throw you again?”
     His head shot up, and his wings unfurled. “Only if it will cheer you up too.”
     “It will,” she promised her friend. “We’ll cheer each other up.”
     Pushing himself off the branch, he rolled into a ball as he flew toward her. She caught him, pivoted, and threw him as hard as she could.
     He arched up toward the sun and then—with another “Woo-hoo!”—flew higher. Circling around, he flew back to her hand. She caught him and threw him again, over and over, until the sun was high overhead and it was midday.
     “I think . . . it worked, a little. Thank you, Jacklo.” She smiled at him and realized she hadn’t smiled in several days. Her cheeks felt stiff, as if they’d forgotten how to move without cracking. “Let’s go home.”
     He flew in a circle above her and then up toward the trees. Several flesh-and-feathers birds were startled from their branches and also took to the sky, and for a second, Mayka lost track of which one was her friend as he swarmed with them over the pines.
     Kneeling next to Turtle once more, she patted his head. “I’ll come visit you again soon.”
     He didn’t answer her. Deep in his long hibernation, he couldn’t answer. But she still stayed beside him a few seconds more, out of habit or hope, before she trudged back through the pines toward home.
     Needles crunched under her bare stone feet. She skipped over rocks in a stream that trickled between the trees, and then she walked out of the woods and into the sun. It warmed her as she climbed the slope, until she was as warm as the rocks on the mountainside.
     Ahead, on a bluff below the peak, was home.
     Still beautiful, she thought, despite all its years.
     The house walls were marble that gleamed different colors in the sun, depending on the time of day: yellow in the morning, white in the afternoon, and dusky rose-blue in the evening. Its roof was slate, each tile carved like a petal, and the chimney was a spiral of basalt. Rocks were artistically positioned around the house and covered in wildflowers, and the garden was in front.
     Their garden was full of plump heads of lettuce, rows of carrots, and overflowing vines of squash and pumpkins. Mayka and her stone friends didn’t need the vegetables, since they didn’t eat, but the chickens, goats, and rabbits liked them. After Father died, the owl, Nianna, and the cat, Kalgrey, had advised freeing the flesh-and-blood creatures and letting them fend for themselves with the wild animals on the mountain, but Mayka and the others had insisted on keeping them—Dersy because they reminded him of Father, Jacklo because he thought they were fun, and Mayka because they made her feel as if she was part of life on the mountain, rather than watching it all pass by. Also, the chickens made her laugh.
     Currently, they had four goats, sixteen chickens, and twelve rabbits. As she approached, Mayka saw the others were already feeding the goats their midday meal. Dersy, one of the two stone rabbits, was snipping lettuce leaves in the garden, using his ears as if they were shears, and then hopping with the greens over to the goat trough, while the stone cat, Kalgrey, carried delicately, with her sharp obsidian incisors, various scraps that had been rejected by the chickens—hard-to-chew broccoli stems and melon rinds—and added them to the meal.
     Outside the goats’ pen, the stone fish swam through a channel carved into the rocky ground and pressed their heads against a lever—this changed the direction of the stream so that it sloshed into a second channel and poured into the goats’ bucket. When the bucket was full, the fish pushed the lever in the opposite direction and cut off the flow.
     Leaving the lettuce, Dersy hopped to the garden gate as Mayka reached it. Rising up on his hind legs, he pushed the gate open with his nose. “Welcome home, Mayka. You’re late. I was beginning to worry.”
     She smiled for the second time in the same day. Dersy should have been carved like a mother hen, not a rabbit, she thought. He was always worrying about something or other: a chicken that had molted early, a carrot that had grown crooked—
     He clucked his tongue against his buckteeth. “You were careful by Turtle’s cliff, weren’t you? If you fall and break, we can’t fix you.”
     “Yes, Dersy, I was careful.”
     “Good. Now, come on, there are chores to do.” He hopped across the garden. “First, could you please check Harlisona? I know you think I’m overreacting, but I think her marks are getting worse, and she refuses to let me look at her in decent light. You might have better luck.”
     Mayka froze for an instant, her smile etched on her face—when Turtle had stopped moving, she’d told herself they didn’t need to worry. He’d been the oldest of all of them, carved by Father before he even came to the mountain. The rest of them wouldn’t slow for years and years. But it was getting harder and harder to believe that. Stay calm, she told herself. Don’t let him know you’re worried. It wouldn’t do any good for Dersy to think she was beginning to agree with all his doom-and-gloom talk. Coming through the gate, Mayka followed him. “I’ll take a look.”
     Lately it seemed like little things were always breaking. Their marble house was still beautiful, yes, but it had pockmarks from wind and hail, visible only if you looked closely at it, and a few of the roof tiles were broken. One of the troughs had cracked last month, and they’d patched it with mud that hardened in the sun. But worse were the marks of age on her friends. The lizard, Etho, had thin fissures between his scales. Nianna had chipped a feather, though luckily not a wing feather. And now Harlisona . . .
     Mayka crossed the garden to the rabbits’ warren. The two stone rabbits had dug themselves a hole beneath the hutch where the flesh-and-fur rabbits lived.
     Over the years, they’d just kept digging. The ordinary-looking hole led to a maze of rabbit tunnels that stretched for miles and miles within the mountain—up to the peak, around the summit, and all beneath the pine forest. It didn’t serve any particular purpose that Mayka could see, but it made the rabbits happy. Harlisona spent most of her time digging. Mayka had lost track of how many years she’d devoted to burrowing.
     Flesh rabbits didn’t need an elaborate warren. They were happy enough in their hutch. Mayka plucked a bit of clover from the ground and pushed it through the mesh wire of the rabbit cage, and then she knelt down to talk to her friends. Content, the rabbits in the hutch nibbled and munched.
     “Harli, it’s Mayka! Can you come out?”
     She listened, wondering if Harlisona was nearby or deep within the tunnels. If the latter, she might not come out for days. But a few seconds later, Mayka had her answer: she heard the scrabbling of stone against stone, and a second stone rabbit—Harlisona—poked her head out of the hole. She wrinkled her nose as if sniffing the air, even though she couldn’t smell any more than Mayka could, then hopped out.
     “Do you mind if I take a look at you?” Mayka asked. “Just to check your marks.” Maybe I’m overreacting. Surely we have decades and decades left. Dersy is a worrier, and Jacklo’s so trusting he’ll believe anything he’s told. She’d examine Harli, then reassure Dersy and Jacklo that there was nothing to be scared of.
     The rabbit nodded. She didn’t talk much. Or really, at all. Not in years. She’d lost the mark for speech soon after Father died—it had chipped off in an accident, and they hadn’t known how to fix it. Scooching closer, Harlisona let Mayka examine her back. Dirt clung to the grooves of the rabbit’s markings, and Mayka gently cleaned it out with her fingers. She felt along the marks. The ridges were less sharp, and a few of the symbols were harder to read than she remembered.
     Oh no. It is worse.
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