CHAPTER 13

The Stone Fairie

Little Fur had fallen into a tumbling river. At first her shock was so great that she did not think to fight. It was as if she had fallen into a chilly dream. But then her heart began to bang and her breath to burn in her throat, and she thrashed her hands and kicked her feet until she reached the surface. She had time to gulp in a great breath of air, but then the current dragged her under again.

She floundered desperately against the force of the water, working her way toward the bank. It was exhausting because if she rested an instant, she was at once pulled back to the center. The battle became harder the longer it went on, and as a deadly tiredness stole through her, Little Fur found herself wondering if it would be so bad to let herself go down into the liquid darkness.

A vision of the Old Ones, stately and green in their hidden hollow, came into her mind. A great longing to see them welled up in Little Fur, giving her the strength to go on fighting, but a moment came when she had no more strength left. She gave in to the flow, only to find that she had made it to the edge. Indeed, her feet were dragging on the ground and, fortunately, the bank nearest to her was curved enough so that the main force of the river passed by.

It took an immense effort of will for Little Fur to haul herself halfway up the bank. She was utterly spent. She did not faint or sleep, but for a time it seemed that her mind had been left behind in the dark, violent water, being smothered and swept along.

When she returned to her senses, the eye of the sun was glaring down at her from overhead and her legs were numb. Little Fur rolled onto her back, dragging her feet clear of the river. The bank sloped gently where she had come ashore, but it mounded steeply upward before her, hiding what lay beyond. She rubbed life back into her legs and then reached for her water bottle, only to find that it was gone. Her pouch was safe, though the seeds in it would need drying out and some would be ruined. She groped anxiously for the stone which she wore around her neck on a plaited reed and was relieved to find that it, at least, was safe. It was all that remained of her mother, as the cloak had been all that remained of her father. Then she chided herself for thinking of things when she might so easily have lost her life.

It was not until she got up that it came to her that for the first time ever, her feet had left the earth, when she slid into the river. But she could feel the flow of earth magic still. Was it possible that it flowed through running water? After all, fish lived in water, and green reeds and water plants. It was a mystery that she would have pondered more deeply, except that she heard singing.

A powerful curiosity filled Little Fur as she clawed her way up the mound, but when she lifted her head above the edge, she saw a human. She shrank back and froze, until she realized that she couldn’t smell a human.

Gathering her courage, she lifted her head again. The human was still standing exactly as it had been, and she saw what she should have seen at once! It was a shape formed out of stone, like the one she had seen in the beaked house. There were other stone shapes around it. In fact, there were stone shapes as far as she could see in all directions, some human and some made into the shapes of animals. Still others were simple stone tablets.

She was so engrossed in them that she almost failed to notice a pack of real humans moving along a grass path toward her. She slipped quickly into the shadow between two square stones, half expecting to hear one of them cry out. She was so close that she could smell their grief.

The humans straggled to a halt and stood close together, their backs hunched against the wind. Little Fur could not see what they were doing but she could smell that the earth lay open in their midst. One of the humans began to speak and some of the others listening wept aloud. Little Fur could smell memories rising and swirling about the group.

Then, to her infinite wonder, all of the humans began to sing.

The sweetness and beauty of their song took her breath away, but more than that, she was astonished to smell that as they sang, their grief was gentled and lightened. It was as if their singing was healing them!

She crept away, moving from stone shape to stone shape, though she had the feeling the humans would not notice her even if they looked right at her. Their grief was like the current in the river, pulling them inside themselves. She had never smelled sorrow like that before. When she was far from the group of humans, she gazed up at the stone shapes, seeing how many of the human ones had been made to look kindly and compassionate. Was it possible the stones had been shaped this way to console humans suffering from the blackness of their grief?

She noticed two big trees growing amidst the stone shapes and was suddenly eager for the familiar touch of bark. Maybe there would be a bird or some small creature nesting in them, one that could tell her the way to the human burying place. Then she caught the mouthwatering fragrance of cloudberries. A bush grew in the shade between the two trees, and Little Fur threw herself down beside it and crammed her mouth full of the pale, juicy berries, quenching thirst and hunger at the same time. Then she lay back with a sigh of contentment.

A small, leathery brown face with pointed ears was gazing down at her. Moss-colored eyes widened as they met her startled gaze, and the face twisted with alarm and vanished.

“Hey! Come back and talk to me,” Little Fur called softly, sitting up. She had seen enough of the small creature to recognize that it was a tree pixie. She laid her hand on the bark of the tree behind her, wanting it to reassure its pixie, but its leaves began to rustle.

There was a frightened yelp and the pixie’s face reappeared. “How did you do thad?”

“Come down so we can talk properly,” Little Fur invited.

“You mean come down so thad you can eat me, Troll,” the pixie accused.

Little Fur stifled a laugh. “Can’t you smell that I mean you no harm?”

The pixie glared at her. “I hab a code.”

“I can come up and shake hands if you’d like.”

“Don’t you dare. My tree will drop a branch od your head ad squash you!”

This time Little Fur did laugh. The tree rustled again and the pixie stared at her in disbelief. “My tree says you are going to save all trees frob the human tree burners. Is it true?”

Little Fur said nothing and after a moment, the pixie ran down the trunk like a spider, nose pointed earthward, long twiglike fingers clinging to the bark. “I am Garoldi,” he said. “Cad I offer you something more to eat? I hab little nut cakes ad honeydew to drink.”

“That would be very kind,” Little Fur said politely.

The pixie scurried away, returning a moment later with a cloth bundle. As they ate, he asked her again if she really meant to stop the tree burners.

“I am going to try,” Little Fur said softly, spreading out the contents of her pouch to dry. Seeing he wanted more, she told him of her journey to the beaked house. His eyes grew wide when she described her capture and rescue from the greep, yet when she told him of the metal serpent that had come after her, Garoldi laughed, saying it was only a vessel that carried humans from place to place. A train, he called it.

This seemed so fantastic that Little Fur could not believe it. She asked the pixie if he had ever heard of a place where humans buried other humans. He shook his head, but to her surprise he said that there was a large wood beyond the field of stone shapes. Perhaps that was where humans buried other humans. She couldn’t see it now because it began where the ground dipped down, but he would show her.

Little Fur wondered if this could be the wood that the Sett Owl had described. She might have come to it from another direction. Garoldi insisted on packing a little picnic of cakes and cloudberries, and before they went he gave her a gourd bottle to replace the one she had lost. Little Fur refilled her pouch, then used a few herbs she had kept aside to make a tisane for Garoldi’s cold. The shadows were growing long by the time they set off.

As they made their way through the stone shapes, Garoldi assured her that humans never came after dark.

Little Fur asked the pixie why humans came to the field of stone shapes at all.

“They plant their treasures here in big boxes,” he answered knowledgeably. “They put them in the ground and cover them with earth. Then they weep.”

This was as mysterious as everything to do with humans. “What about the stone shapes?”

He shrugged. “Perhaps they leave them to frighten other humans away. Come this way and you will see my favorite stone shape.”

He led her from the grass to a wide, neat path of earth that would have made her nervous if Garoldi had not seemed so sure that no humans would come there now. It was not until they were almost under it that Little Fur saw the enormous stone fairie with huge wings folded behind it. As with all of the stone shapes, the smell of human on this one was ancient but unmistakable. Garoldi was gazing up at it in wistful awe. It took a moment for Little Fur to notice that the stone fairie held a stone baby in its arms. The baby was human-sized, but the fairie had been made hundreds of times larger than a true fairie. Its face was beautiful and wise, but its eyes were sorrowful.

As they turned away, Little Fur wondered very much who had made the stone fairie and how they had known what a fairie looked like.

They came quite suddenly to a fence made from metal strands running between posts of old gray wood. Beyond, as Garoldi had described, a grassy incline ran down to a dense line of trees.

“Be careful, Little Fur,” Garoldi said.

Little Fur nodded and ducked under the wire. She had almost reached the wood when an impulse made her look back. The sun had just closed its eye and the pixie was still standing on the other side of the barrier at the top of the slope, a tiny, solitary figure with the stone shapes of humans looming behind him, limned in scarlet.