“How do you sing like that?” she asked one afternoon, sitting up from her green-and-gold cavern. “Where do you learn these songs?”

“Eh… it is just an odd habit.” Mop shrugged. “They’re not songs… not yet. Right now, I’m only nattering, I suppose. Talking to myself, listening to the way the words sound, feeling for what’s too heavy. Unnatural.” Glancing at Rae, he raised a finger at a small flock of birds winging its way across the sky. “Do you hear the skylarks?”

Rae lifted her gaze. The birds were spiraling over the field, their chirrup-ing song bubbling along the paths they looped through the air. She nodded. “They always sing as they fly.”

“They sing without thinking, don’t they?” Mop continued, still watching them. “And when you hear their song, it sounds like the day, doesn’t it? It sounds like the sky and the fields and the blue light”—he swept his hand over the meadow—“and the grazing sheep and the warmth rising out of the green… it just sounds like all of it, doesn’t it?”

Rae nodded again.

“I’d like my songs to do that,” Mop said. “But words are… not so airy. I have to shape them the way a bear licks her cubs into shape, trying them over and over, pushing at their heavy forms and mouthing them until they begin to sound as easeful as the skylarks’ song.” He smiled at Rae. “But the sheep like it, I think. They seem to graze better, not be so skittery if I’m babbling at them. They don’t mind how it sounds.”

“Is that why you sing? To settle the sheep?”

Mop chuckled. “Perhaps. It’s a good reason to, but”—pausing, he leaned on his staff, his whiskers folding in thought—“I think I sing to wonder. To share that wonder. How could I rise every day and not be amazed by”—his eyes crinkled at Rae, knowing how she’d spent her morning—“the water bugs skating over clouds mirrored in the stream? Or the cocoon curled in the green shadow of the oak leaf? Or even the grass bending like a crown, green and gold, about my daughter’s tender resting head? Every day—such miracles to see! And were language not so heavy… ah! What I could capture!” He lifted his feathery brows. “But that, my daughter, is the price of words. With them, we can marvel at all of nature, even draw close to it, but they will always keep us just a little outside of it.”

Rae, smiling at the mention of the cocoon and water bugs but not sure she entirely understood, considered this. “Ness says once you were known for your songs. She says if you go to the village, the people still remember your voice and say that when you were a babe, bees must have coated your lips with honey to give you such rich words. She says she knew your voice before she knew you.”

Mop laughed. “Oh, I don’t know about that.”

“And she said you didn’t sing at all… for years, until I came. Until”—she pointed up at the hills, recalling what Mop and Ness always told her—“the mountains and wind and birds gave me to you. Is that true?”