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?”