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.”