His sister, a stone bird named Risa, fluttered down beside him and smacked him with her wing. It clinked, the sound of stone hitting stone. “You bothered her this morning, didn’t you?”
“Ow! And no. Well, yes, but no. She didn’t want to be alone.”
“She specifically said she wanted to be alone!”
Jacklo preened his feathers with his beak until they lay flat again, like slate tiles on a roof, perfectly ordered. “She was alone with me.”
“That’s not what that word means,” Risa said, then her voice softened. “Mayka, you said you wanted to say goodbye, but you didn’t, did you? Did you give Turtle flowers? Oh, Mayka, you know he can’t see them anymore.” Hopping closer, she laid the tip of her wing gently, comfortingly on Mayka’s hand.
Looking away, Mayka didn’t know how to answer her. It had just . . . felt right to do. Just like visiting him every day felt right. He was still part of the family, even if he slept.
“She’s been telling him stories too,” Jacklo added. “I heard her yesterday. She tried to read his story but couldn’t, so she read him hers. Mayka, will you read us your story? Please, pretty please, with pinecones on top?”
Mayka studied her arm. Each mark on it was a piece of a story. Combined, they made her. If they rubbed away, like Turtle’s . . . She didn’t want to think about it. “How about I tell you one of Father’s favorite stories instead?” she asked Jacklo. A story would make everyone feel better. Including me, she thought. “Once upon a time . . .”
Jacklo danced on the rock. “She’s telling one! Everybody, come!”
“There was a little boy who was lonely. His mother and father worked hard in the city, and he was alone all day, every day. His house was too far from other houses for him to have any friends to play with, and he had no brothers or sisters. His only friend was a rock that sat in the middle of his family’s garden.”
The stone rabbits, Dersy and Harlisona, hopped over to the pond to listen.
“He talked to that rock every day. Told it about his dreams, his wishes, his thoughts, and when he ran out of all that, he started making up stories about the birds in the sky, the fish in the streams, and the adventures that he would go on if only he were old enough.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Mayka saw her other stone friends emerge from around the house: the cat Kalgrey, the owl Nianna, the lizard Etho, and the badger who, like Turtle, was just called Badger. They formed a circle around her.
“One day, his father slept late and had to rush down the mountain to the city to work, and he forgot his tools. The boy tried to follow him to bring him his tools, but the boy’s little legs were too slow, and so he returned home to the rock with the tools in his hands. His father worked as a builder in the city, constructing the bridges and roads that people used every day, and so his tools were hammers and chisels.”
Jacklo sighed happily. “I love this part.”
“Shhh,” Risa hushed him.
“You love this part too.”
Risa opened her beak, then shut it. “You’re right. I do. Please, keep going, Mayka. ‘The boy took the tools in his little hands . . .’”
Mayka smiled at the two birds and at the others who had come to listen. Even the fish were swimming closer to the surface of the pond. How many times had they gathered exactly like this to listen to her tell stories? She’d lost count—the days blurred into one another, like afternoon dissolving into dusk. She’d thought they’d do this forever. “The boy took the tools in his little hands, and with a tap-tap-tap, he began to carve his stories into the rock, all the while talking to the rock and telling it tales. He worked through the day, through his lunch without stopping, through his naptime without stopping, until dinner, when his mother and father came home. And then at night, he snuck out again to the rock and kept carving.”
Father had told her this story so many times, she could almost hear his voice. Telling it made her feel as if he were there, with his hammer and chisel, ready to fix their marks so they’d last forever and none of them would have to worry or be afraid.
“When dawn came the next morning, the boy’s father and mother went to the boy’s bed to wake him—and he wasn’t there. Frightened, they searched all over the house, and then they ran outside . . . and found him curled up against his rock. As they hurried over, the rock spoke to them. ‘Hush,’ it said. ‘He’s sleeping.’ And that is the tale of the first stonemason.”
Mayka looked at her friends: the birds, the animals, the fish, all her father’s creations. She felt a lurch inside of her that she couldn’t name. Sooner rather than later, we’ll all stop, she thought. Just like Turtle.
I can’t let that happen.
“I think . . .” she said slowly, the idea taking shape, “we need a new stonemason.” As she said the words, she felt them roll around in her mouth and in her head, and they felt right. The birds began to squawk, and the animals muttered and chittered to one another. Yes, that’s what we need, she decided. A stonemason, like Father! A stonemason could recarve their marks, maybe even awaken Turtle and the sleeping fish! And then everything would go back to the way it was supposed to be.
Fluttering his feathers, Jacklo chirped, “But, Mayka, we don’t know any! We don’t know anyone. How can we—”
Mayka stood up on the rock, beside the pond, and looked beyond the garden, toward the pine forest and the valley below. She balled her hands into fists and tried to sound brave. “I’m going to find one.”
Chapter
Two
Very brave words, Mayka congratulated herself. But Jacklo’s right. I don’t know any stonemasons. There weren’t any on the mountain. She’d been all over it, and only Mayka’s family and the woodland animals lived on the forested slopes. If I want to find one, I’ll have to leave.
“Ooh, ooh, an adventure!” Jacklo chirped.
Risa shushed him.
With a whimpering moan, Harli curled into a ball, tucking her head under her front paws. The other rabbit, Dersy, hopped in a tight circle at Mayka’s feet. “Yes! This is what I’ve been saying! We must act, before it’s too late! One of us must go down into the valley, find a stonemason, and ask him to come visit us.”
Go down into the valley. He said it so simply, but it was a thing none of them had ever done. A real adventure, out in the world beyond the mountain! Mayka felt as if the stone within her was churning. She had never planned to journey beyond. Everything she ever wanted was right here—but it won’t be if I don’t fix this, she thought. “I will do it. I’ll leave today.”
The stone owl, Nianna, swiveled her head to fix her polished black stone eyes on Mayka. “No one is going anywhere. Least of all on an adventure. Father wanted us to stay here and be safe, and that is what we will do.”
Yes, he had wanted that. Mayka remembered how he used to like to stroll around the house at dusk—he had a routine: check on the chickens, the goats, the rabbits; view the garden; lock the gates—before he’d come inside and light the candles on the table in the cottage. He knew every inch of their home. It’s our sanctuary, he liked to say. Nothing here will ever harm you. It used to make him so happy, to know they were all safe here.
But we aren’t safe here, she thought. Time has found us.
“There will be stonemasons in the valley,” Mayka said. “All I have to do is find other stone creatures and ask them to guide me to whoever carved them.”
“Guide us,” Jacklo said.
“Guide me,” Mayka corrected. “There’s no need for more than one of us to go.”
Spreading her wings, Nianna glided from her perch onto a rock beside the pond. “My darling girl, our darling girl, you are so very young and so very brave. Father carved you well, and we are all proud of you. But this plan—it’s madness. We don’t belong in the valley. We are made to stay here, safe, together.”
Father had come from the valley. He hadn’t talked about it often, but Mayka knew that much. He’d been born in the city of Skye, a clu
ster of lights that she saw far below and far away at night. They looked like clumps of stars, and she remembered she’d once asked him why so many stars had fallen in the same place. He’d laughed and told her she was seeing lanterns clustered together, like bees in a hive. But when she asked him to tell her more, he told her a story instead.
“Do you remember the story of the two brothers?” Mayka asked.
Nianna clicked her beak open and shut. “Whoooo? The fools?”
“They were acrobats,” Jacklo said stoutly, “not fools!” Gallant Jacklo, Mayka thought. He’d defend anyone who was attacked, including two mythical brothers.
“Fooooools,” the owl said.
Mayka thought back to the story. She hadn’t told it in a while, but she never forgot a tale. “Once there were two brothers who lived in the sky—”
The cat, Kalgrey, snorted.
“That is how it begins,” Risa said. “Let her tell it.”
Kalgrey lifted one paw and licked between her toes. “Of course. If she wants to tell that version. If she wants to tell the truth, she’ll begin with the baby. It was her crying that led the brothers out of the sky.”
“Yes, yes, but that comes later, Kalgrey,” Dersy said. He thumped his hind paw on the ground, a nervous twitch that made the flesh-and-fur rabbits freeze in their hutch. When no hawk dove from the sky, they relaxed and returned to chomping their lunch. “Go ahead, Mayka.”
Mayka settled back down on the rock. “The two brothers argued all the time, and every time they fought, the valley would shake with thunder and lightning. It was so bad that the people would send men and women up into the mountains to talk to the sky brothers and beg them to stop and leave the valley in peace . . . but the sky brothers were so busy yelling at each other that they never heard the humans pleading. Now, it came to pass one day that they had both yelled so much that they had to take a breath at the same time . . . and in that breath of silence, they heard a sound.”
“The baby’s cry,” Kalgrey said, with a thwack of her tail on the rock. Mayka wondered what the cat thought of her idea to find a stonemason. She always disapproved of everything—it was her nature. But does she dislike my idea or Nianna’s rejection of it?
“Be nice,” Risa said to the cat. “Mayka’s telling a story, and the rest of us want to listen.”
“I’m never nice,” Kalgrey said. “I’m a cat. Read my story if you doubt me.” Stretching herself, she arched her back, displaying a series of marks: This is Kalgrey the cat. Sharp of tongue and claws, nimble of paws and mind. She climbed to the top of the chimney and scolded the sun and then slept when it hid, frightened, behind a cloud.
“Look here,” Mayka said, pointing to another mark on the cat’s back. “You curl up every night by the door to watch over us, and you keep the rats out of the chicken feed,” she read.
The cat sniffed. “That’s duty, not niceness.”
Jacklo fluttered his wings. “Can’t Mayka finish her story?”
“Not if it ends with her leaving,” Kalgrey said, but then she curled around Mayka, which was as close as Kalgrey ever got to an apology.
Mayka rubbed Kalgrey behind the ears and continued her story. “The sky brothers heard the baby cry, and they came down into the valley, somersaulting and flipping from cloud to cloud, and when each brother saw the other brother hurrying to the baby, it only made him flip higher and somersault faster until by the time the two of them reached the earth, they’d generated so much wind that they’d blown everything around the baby away: the houses, the people, the trees, even the river. The baby lay on a blanket alone in the center of an empty open field.”
“How come the baby didn’t blow away?” Jacklo asked. “That never made sense to me. If the wind was strong enough to redirect a river, shouldn’t the baby be airborne too?”
“Stories don’t have to make sense,” Risa told him.
“It’s nice when they do.”
“But they don’t have to. So listen.”
“One brother, who had sunset-red hair, reached the baby first and said, ‘Why are you crying? You don’t have a brother who vexes you every day. You are all alone. You should be happy.’ And he scooped up the baby and began to dance with her all around the empty field.” Mayka liked to picture him dancing like wind, his feet barely touching the grass. She smiled as she told this part of the story. “When he stopped dancing, the baby cried again. And the second brother, who had twilight-blue hair, said to the baby, ‘Why are you crying? You aren’t all alone. You have earth beneath you, the sky above you, and me to make you laugh.’ And he began to perform tricks, transforming himself into different shapes: a tree, an elephant, a rabbit, a dragon, for his body was like a cloud and easy to change. The baby cooed and clapped. ‘See, she likes me better,’ the blue-haired brother said.
“‘I made her laugh first,’ the red-haired brother said.
“‘But I made her laugh harder.’
“And they argued and argued, and as they fought, they rose higher into the air, and the sky stormed around them. Left behind on the ground, the baby began to cry once more. So the brothers hurried back, and each began endless tricks, flips, and somersaults until the babe was laughing again. This continued until the sun set in the sky, and soon the baby, hungry and cold, began to cry in earnest, and neither brother could console her.”
Nianna snapped her beak open and shut. “Fools I called them, and fools they were. This was a child made of flesh and blood, not clouds and sunlight.”
“What happened to the baby?” Dersy asked.
“For the sake of the baby, the brothers stopped arguing,” Mayka said. “The storms ceased, and the people came back to the valley. They fed the baby, clothed her, and built homes for themselves and her. Eventually, those homes became a town, then a city, which was named Skye after the brothers. And the two sky brothers stayed earthbound, performing tricks and flips for the children of the city, making them laugh instead of cry.”
As she finished the story, Mayka felt even more certain she was making the right decision. She could tell the tale had worked on the others too. Everyone had calmed down. The fish were swimming in slower circles, and Kalgrey had closed her eyes as if asleep. Badger had waddled back into the bushes, and Etho lay still on a sunlit rock. Even Nianna seemed less ruffled.
“The people in the valley will help us,” Mayka said quietly. “Like they helped the baby.”
Nianna sighed. “Very well. But we must not all go. Our father wouldn’t have wanted that. One is sufficient for this task. Therefore, only one will go. Only Mayka, if she’s willing.”
“I will go, ask for a stonemason, and return with him,” Mayka promised. “He’ll recarve us, and then everything will go on as it has before. You’ll see.”
It should have been simple to pack.
No food. (She didn’t eat.) No blankets. (She didn’t sleep.) Her clothes were stone, carved as part of her, and her bare stone feet had never worn shoes. Mayka circled through the cottage and wondered what she did need to bring.
Sunlight filtered through the windows in long shafts, illuminating specks of dust. It made the kitchen sparkle as if coated in gold flecks. Nothing in here, she thought—she hadn’t touched the forks and knives since Father died. His plates and bowls had become birdbaths out in the garden, and his pots served as extra water bowls for the goats.
The bathroom had been converted into an extra chicken coop years ago, the stone tub filled with grain for the winter months. And as for the two tiny bedrooms . . . she had filled hers with rocks she’d collected over the years. A nice piece of quartz with streaks that looked like clouds. A chunk of basalt. Flakes of mica. One rock with an imprint of an ancient fern and another a piece of amber with a fly suspended in it.
She’d left Father’s bed untouched.
Her most precious possessions were in the heart of the cottage. Above the mantel was a row of clay figures, the models that Father had made before he carved her friends from stone. There was one for
each of them, except for her—he’d said she was his masterpiece, born from his heart, and he’d needed no model for her. She loved looking at the figurines. Even in clay, he’d captured Dersy’s worry in the way his ears perked, Harli’s shyness in the curve of her shoulders, and Jacklo’s endless energy in the shape of his outstretched wings. Mayka touched each one, skimming her fingers over the clay. Hairline cracks ran through all of them, so she didn’t dare move them. They’ll have to stay here, she thought. As much as she wanted to take a token of her friends with her, she couldn’t risk breaking them.
Equally precious, her father’s tools hung on the wall by the hearth, in a place of honor. She fetched a cloth from beside the sink and cleaned the tools, polishing them until they shone again: his hammers, his chisels, his rasps. One by one, she returned them to the wall, exactly the way Father had left them when he’d told her he’d carved his last.
In the end, she packed nothing, because everything she touched seemed to belong exactly as it was.
I belong here too, she thought. Exactly as I am.
But she knew she wouldn’t stay exactly as she was, not without help.
“I’ll miss you,” she told the house.
It didn’t answer, though Mayka still felt as if it heard her. The house was stone too, built from marble blocks that Father had carved out of the mountainside and hauled here, long before he’d made her. He’d told her once how it had taken so many days that it was months before he had even one wall and years before he had all four. He’d lived under a canvas tarp, like a traveler, and worked on his home every day. On the inside of the house, onto each stone block, he’d carved pictures: flowers, trees, birds, and animals, and she had painted them with colors he’d made from crushed berries and plants. The paint was faded now. I should repaint them.
Looking around the cottage, she saw many things that should be done: the quilt on Father’s bed should be washed, the jar of honey that drew bees to the garden had to be refilled, the flowers she’d picked to brighten the table had shed a circle of petals around the vase . . .