A Single Stone Read Free

here too.
    But it was land at least. This place was bigger and the waters had drawn back, leaving it high and dry, livable. Their home was gone but here was somewhere to begin again.
    Lia cannot imagine the mountain behaving in such a way. It is not, she thinks, in its nature. The stone walls around her feel solid, an immovable mass, unbreachable by any force she can conjure in her imaginings.
    She sets one hand upon the rock. It is cold and warm all at once. It is solid. It is always.
    You mustn’t go there
, people say.
It is treacherous.
    And yet, it feels nothing like that. It feels like opening the door on a winter night, stepping across the threshold to a waiting hearth.
    It feels like coming home.

TWO
    First there was light. The darkness eddied around Jena, then receded.
    There was sky up ahead, the faintest smudge of blue. A wisp of white drifted past. Cloud. Autumn breeze. The promise of outside.
    She crawled towards it. Because they had a harvest and this was what came next.
Make the harvest. Find the light.
    It was close now, the tunnel sloping upwards as it approached the opening in the mountain’s flank through which they had entered shortly after dawn. Where stone ended and sky began, there was a narrow lip, a ledge that sat between the two like a shelf. There was headroom here, and more. Jena loosened the knot at her belt and then patted herself down, sweeping small stones and dirt from her hair and clothes. Perhaps it was silly but it felt like something, a gesture – to do what you could, to leave what belonged here to the mountain. A trade, of sorts, for what they had been given.
    When she had finished, she squeezed her eyes tightly shut. This too was a habit she had acquired over the years – closing her eyes as she emerged so she would be out suddenly rather than gradually. So it felt less like a choice and more like something already done, to which she must simply adapt. She felt her way forwards and brought her legs around, swinging them over the rim of the ledge.
    When she opened her eyes, the sheer walls towered above and all around. She was at a slight overhang; a few feet below the lip of the rock, the mountain sloped down into the clotting dark of the forest.
    Even as Jena had led the others up here this morning, she had known they would have to be careful going back down. The slope was steep and the surface was an unsteady scree of rounded stones, any one of which could easily turn an ankle. She moved forwards a little further. Her legs swung freely at first, dangling out into space. Then she hooked her knees over the ledge and shuffled to the side, making room for the girl behind.
    “Oh! You can see everything.”
    Min.
The name came to Jena as if something had clicked into place inside her head.
A first daughter
, Mother Berta had said. A first daughter, but a sixth child. Jena winced, thinking of the hunger, the cold. The weight of a whole family on those fragile shoulders.
    Min edged into the opening, craning to see. It had barely been light when they came in and in any case a girl on her first harvest would have had more important things on her mind than the view.
    She squinted in the light, swivelling left, then right. “It’s so different from up here.”
    Jena followed Min’s gaze across the treetops. The whole world was laid out before them. On the far side, the village nestled in a sheltered corner, bordered by rock wall in the north, the fields to the east, and the spreading forest in the south and west. And all of that by the towering ridges of the mountain, the strong stony fingers that encircled the valley, cupping the land in the palm of its hands.
    It must have been around midday for there was a wide shaft of sun upon the valley. With the season drawing to a close, there was hardly any heat in it, but the light alone was almost warming. The mountain’s soaring peaks meant the valley had only a few hours of full sunlight each day; each beam felt precious, worth