Birdie's Book Read online

  “Boulder number one,” I said out loud, staring at my first challenge. I placed one foot on the rock, and it immediately slid off like butter on a hot bun. Standing back on both feet, I considered another method. I decided the best way was to carefully wedge my boots into the crevices between the boulders and avoid the flat icy surfaces. I stuck my left foot between two boulders. Once it felt solid, I leaned against the rock, lifted my right foot to another crevice, and wedged it in hard. I lifted my left foot to a higher spot. Nice! It was working. I was moving up. I realized I’d started whistling a little tune. Wedge, lift, and move up. Wedge, lift …

  I scaled the rocks, one careful foothold at a time, using my hands for stability. Every once in a while, the fingers of my gloves stuck in the sun-glazed ice, and I breathed on them to melt them free. I caught my boot in a tight crevice once or twice and twisted my foot, but nothing too terrible. I was feeling like an adventurer. As I got closer, I realized why there was no splashing sound from the waterfall: It was frozen solid. Ice hung like great long fangs.

  I kept climbing until I came to a hollowed rock alcove, right at the base of the falls. To my surprise, two flat boulders there had been fashioned into a stone seat, backrest and all. I sat down, tuckered out and actually sweaty from the climb. Since I’d never touched a frozen waterfall, I took off my gloves, reached up, and ran my hands along the toothy icicles, as slippery-smooth as glass.

  If it weren’t for the evergreens, my view from there would have been awesome: the whole expanse of Mo’s garden. But I was satisfied with the spot I’d discovered: secret bench, snowy trees, and frozen waterfall.

  I reached inside the pocket of Mo’s coat and pulled out the envelope from The Book of Dreams. I waited a moment, holding my breath. Finally I opened it and delicately unfolded the fragile page inside. It was a drawing of a tree with names on its branches: a family tree. Under the tree were the words The Arbor Lineage.

  My eyes shot directly to my own name: Birdie Cramer Bright. How did my name get on this old family tree? Or was this drawing some kind of fairy magic that would lead me to … I wished I knew more!

  On one branch I found Dora, my great-great-grandmother born in 1916. Jean Cramer was next, but her name was stricken through in red ink. She must have been Mo’s mother, and I remember hearing that she died when Mo was very young. More names followed, all with birth years beside them. There was Maureen, who was Granny Mo, of course, b. 1939. Emma P. Cramer was listed next. My breath caught in my throat when I saw that my mother’s name had been crossed out, just like Jean’s, but in silvery pencil. What did that mean?

  I folded the paper back into the envelope and tucked it safely in my coat pocket. Then I closed my eyes. Leaning back on the stone seat, I put my hands in my pockets. My left hand grasped the broken Singing Stone.

  The stone’s rhythm and tune rose and vibrated into my heart.

  I opened my eyes as a wild wind swept away the clouds and the sun-filled sky turned bright, bright blue. Suddenly the snow on the evergreens and the ice on the boulders began to melt so fast that water trickled beneath my feet and down toward the trees below. I sank back onto the stone bench in surprise. A light breeze grazed my face and hair and hands, carrying not even a hint of a chill.

  It was as if spring was spontaneously shooting into fast-forward all around me. The frozen willows and maples below began to explode with buds, which sprang into fresh leaves, which were electric green. Trees and bushes burst into life so fast, I could hear them growing, inch by inch.

  Tiny flowers sprouted up between the cracks in the boulders, and the sweet smell of roses and lilies of the valley wafted through the air. Life gushed and leapt all around me. The Singing Stone’s tune was in the wind, the trees, the flowers, and the water rushing behind me.

  Water was rushing behind me? I spun around on the rock seat, which was still there, thankfully, solid underneath me. The waterfall had melted and was cascading in sheets of turquoise water down from the rocky hill.

  In between, birds warbled, bees and dragonflies buzzed. Then I heard a splash. It was different from the crashing of the waterfall, a plop, as if a fish had jumped nearby. Next I heard a giggle, then a mournful noise like bells and whale calls mixed into one sound.

  I followed the sound. Just around a tumble of red rocks was a blue pool with layered falls, each dropping gracefully into sunlit rippling waves. Beneath the waves were long, flowing wisps of red, violet, and green. I thought the wisps were algae until the colorful strands came out of the water, and I saw that it was the hair of three beautiful women. Well, they weren’t exactly women, since instead of legs they had tails that shimmered in the sunlight. They gazed at me, and I gasped with wonder—mermaids!

  Each wore crowns of flowers, gems, and shells in her hair, and their skin ranged from pale white to riverbank brown. The brownest swam closer to the shore. Her purple hair was as long as her body.

  I shook my head, trying to wake up. My eyes must have looked like a little kid’s eyes on Christmas morning, full of awe and amazement. I had to be dreaming, even though it was beyond me how I could have fallen asleep in the cold. Yet I knew for sure I was dreaming when I saw I was no longer bundled up in my scarf and Mo’s coat. I was wearing the same jeans, but I had on my favorite soft T-shirt. I would have frozen to death in Mo’s winter garden in that outfit!

  The woman—or rather, the mermaid—nearest to me blinked her chocolate brown eyes. They changed to violet, matching her mass of hair. She held out her hand, as if I was supposed to touch it or kiss it. I reached out to shake hands. Her skin was cool and wet. When I touched her, I was amazed to watch her hair lighten to glowing green. She let out a kind of watery sigh, then spoke in some trilling, musical language.

  I wanted to understand her. It sounded like she was saying something important. It was as if I’d stepped into a fairy-tale book with beautiful watercolor illustrations, and I desperately wanted to be a part of it.

  “Excuse me?” I said. “I don’t understand.” I was hoping that since I was dreaming, the words would come out in her trilling music, but they were in English, in my own voice.

  The other two mermaids swam closer. One had waist-length red hair, green eyes, and skin the color of moonlight. She had a three-part tail that must have made her a fast swimmer. The other had full lips and aquamarine eyes framed with lashes that quivered with sparkling drops of water like diamonds. The violet mermaid batted her eyes several times at me, giggling all the while, and then fanned out her hair in a wide arc in the water, turning it a bright tangerine color. It appeared to be a gesture of welcome.

  “Where I come from we have legends about them,” came a voice from behind me.

  I spun around but saw no one.

  The voice spoke again: “They coax children to ride on their backs and then they dive down deep and drown them.” It was a girl’s strong voice.

  I took a few steps toward the red rocks and looked around the flowering plants. There was a girl a little taller than me, practicing a dance of some kind with a foot-long orange-colored stick. She stared into my eyes as she waved and whooshed the stick through the air, making it whistle like a swift wind.

  I instantly thought: Leontopodium alpinum, a lion’s foot, or edelweiss, which is a white flower that grows through the snow, high on mountains like the Alps—beautiful and as strong as steel.

  The girl was wearing jeans and a loose T-shirt. Her blond hair was braided and coiled around her head. She stopped swinging the stick and strode toward me. Then she smiled and put out her hand. “Hello, I’m Kerka,” she announced with a smile that made me like her.

  I shook her hand. She had a firm grip! “I’m Birdie,” I said.

  “I think I am here to help you in Aventurine,” she said.

  “What? Where?” I asked.

  “Here. Where you are right now. Aventurine.”

  Suddenly it clicked. Aventurine was the name on Mo’s violin, the place where Dora found the acorn that became the Singing Stone.
The Singing Stone! I dug into my pocket and was relieved to feel the half-stone. Then I felt around in all my pockets for the envelope, but it was gone.

  “I’m in … we’re in … a dream, right?” I asked. “Or a dream world.”

  “A land for only the strongest dreamers,” said Kerka. “Dreamers with destinies.”

  I turned to look at the mermaids, who were as dreamy as it gets. “Do you know what they were saying?” I asked Kerka.

  “No. They don’t speak Fairen—the fairy language—as you and I do in Aventurine. My mother told me that even the fairies have to study the language of the river maidens to learn it. That’s what they’re called, you know, not mermaids. Mermaids only live in salt water, and river maidens live in, well, rivers,” she explained, digging the tip of her dancing stick into the mossy ground at her feet.

  “Ah, river maidens,” I repeated, thinking that at least the magic dreaming took care of the language barrier that might be between Kerka and me in the real world.

  “And don’t let them hear you call them mermaids,” she whispered to me. “They’ll be terribly insulted. At least that’s what my mother said.”

  I nodded. “And I don’t suppose we should be insulting magical creatures,” I said. “Even in a dream.”

  “You got that right,” said Kerka. Her eyes were as blue as the sky. She put her hand on the side of her mouth and whispered to me, “They’re rather vain, in case you didn’t notice.”

  I’d noticed. Now the three river maidens were preening and gazing at their reflections in the water. They all talked, as if sharing private jokes.

  “So how can I help you?” Kerka asked me.

  “I … well.” I glanced around at the shimmering maiden tails and the rushing waterfall, the blue sky and swaying evergreens. Everything looked so peaceful, it was hard to imagine that I was here on some quest and might need help. “I don’t really know,” I said. “Do you?”

  Kerka leaned her chin on her orange stick, stumped. “My mother told my sisters and me a little about Aventurine, but this is my first time here,” she said. “My mother is dead now.”

  “Oh, I’m really sorry,” I said, a little startled at the blunt way she said it.

  But that clearly wasn’t her point, because she continued immediately. “A few nights ago, I fell asleep with my Kalis stick under my pillow,” she said, patting the orange stick. “I came here—to Aventurine, but somewhere different in Aventurine. A voice told me that I had to keep sleeping with my Kalis stick under my pillow, and that I would come here again to help a girl named Birdie heal a stone.”

  “Yes!” I said in surprise. I pulled the stone from my pocket. “I’m Birdie and this is the Singing Stone! But it’s broken, missing a half. Do you know what I should do?”

  Kerka shook her head. “No, but the voice said that I had to help you, so can you tell me a little more about the Singing Stone?”

  I sat down at the edge of the pond. Kerka sat beside me. “Well, on the Singing Stone is a picture of a maze with a tree.” I held up the half and showed Kerka the picture. She nodded and I went on. “And my granny Mo’s garden also has a maze with an incredibly huge tree. Mo calls it the Glimmer Tree. There’s a big soft spot on the Glimmer Tree—part of the trunk is rotting and it’s getting worse. And then there’s my family tree with two names crossed off. Mo said something about fixing the Singing Stone, finding the other half.” I remembered one more thing: “And the fairies left a book for me!”

  “Then my guess is that the fairies know what you need to do,” said Kerka. She stood and started pacing. “My mother told us that Aventurine is filled with fairies, so we just have to go find some!”

  The river maidens started splashing a lot, so Kerka and I looked over at them. They were leaping in and out of the water like dolphins, hair flying and all five tails shimmering.

  “Okay,” I said. “So how do we find the fairies?”

  “I don’t know everything,” said Kerka quietly. She suddenly brightened and held up a finger. “The voice said something about looking in my backpack when I met you.” (How could she have forgotten that?, I wondered, but decided that I really didn’t know her well enough to ask her.)

  Kerka set her backpack on the ground and rummaged through it. Eventually she pulled out a large rolled-up piece of paper, tied with a red string. She untied the string and then unrolled the paper.

  We knelt and spread it out on the ground, each holding an edge as we examined the paper. The paper itself was parchmenty, that kind of yellowed color that old paper gets. On it was a colored-pencil drawing of a girl sitting at a table. The girl was about the same age as Kerka and me, with dark golden skin and curly black hair. It appeared that she was looking at a map. No, she was making the map!

  “How’s that supposed to help?” said Kerka.

  The maidens hummed a little tune. We looked over at them again. They were slumped on the pool’s edge, their heads cupped in their hands in what looked like disappointment.

  Just as I was about to say something, the drawing faded.

  “What do we do now?” I wondered, trying not to be too discouraged.

  “Wait, look,” Kerka said. And we watched as another drawing slowly surfaced, just as if it were coming up from a pool of brown water.

  The words “Zally’s Map” began to appear, letter by letter, across the top of the paper. I shook my head. This magic stuff was mind-boggling!

  “Do you think that girl was Zally?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” said Kerka. “Probably. But more importantly, this is definitely a map, and maps are always helpful.” She leaned in closer, then pulled back quickly as a silent shower of red-gold sparks suddenly flew from the center of the map.

  “Yikes!” yelled Kerka as I jumped back, too.

  The sparks gathered together over the map and formed words:

  Sister dreamers,

  This is the only map of Aventurine. I hope it helps you on your

  quest. Aventurine’s geography can change for each dream or

  dreamer, so this map is not the kind of map you are used to.

  Zally

  As soon as we had read it, the spark words disbanded and fell back into the map as silently as they had come. Kerka and I carefully leaned back in to look at the map. It was clearer now.

  “Look!” Kerka pointed out a tiny drawing of three river maidens in a pool beside the waterfall. “That’s where we are now.”

  Silent sparks flew up from the map once more, and we leapt backward again. This time the sparks were different hues of pink. Instead of making words, they gathered over the map to form a magnificent pink flower, almost as clear as a photograph.

  “It’s an Agminium,” I told Kerka. “It’s an extinct species that lived in Califa … uh … California a thousand years ago.”

  The pink sparks exploded over the map like a small silent firework and disappeared.

  Kerka frowned. “Very nice and pretty, but what does it mean? How will it get us to the fairies?”

  Suddenly I was aware of a lot of splashing. The three maidens were clearly still trying to get our attention. They kept diving underwater, and each time they surfaced, all three had changed the colors of their hair (again!). I waved my hand at them, and they gathered at the edge of the pool.

  “They’re trying to tell us they know something,” I said to Kerka as I walked over to the river maidens.

  Kerka had her nose back in the map. “It looks like we have to swim down into the pond and through a river tunnel to get to that pink flower,” she said. “That must be what the map meant by making the flower like that.”

  By now, the river maidens were reaching for my hands. They wanted me to jump in the water with them! I held back and looked questioningly at Kerka. “What do you think?” I asked.

  Kerka shrugged and came over to the water holding the map. Then she bent to show it to the river maidens, pointing to an image of the Agminium flower that had just appeared on the map. The maidens nodded, sha
king the shells on their crowns.

  “Shall we follow them?” asked Kerka.

  “What about those stories of river maidens who coax children into the water and then drown them?” I reminded her.

  Kerka grinned sheepishly. “Just Finnish legends meant to scare little kids and keep them out of the water. Sorry,” she said.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I kinda wondered about that.” I laughed, watching as Kerka rolled up the map, tied it, and stowed it back in her pack. I was beginning to like her for real.

  I went to roll up my jeans to prepare to lower myself gently into the pond, but before I could do it, the three maidens reached out and touched my arms. Suddenly I found myself in the water. I kicked out, expecting to feel my boots heavy on my feet. Instead, I moved easily.

  I looked down to find that my clothes had turned into something like a bright green wet suit (although it was a material I’d never seen before), complete with flippers. “Come on, Kerka!” I called, splashing. “The water’s great! It’s warm and kind of bubbly! And your clothes will change into a wet suit!”

  “I can’t,” Kerka replied. She was standing on the edge of the bank now, wiping her hands on her jeans and biting her lip.

  I swam up to the bank. “What do you mean?” Was she deserting me? Already?

  “I can’t swim,” she said. She looked miserable.

  “I’m sure you can learn,” I said. “You wouldn’t be here to help me if you couldn’t come with me! Just put your toes in to start! Come on! I want to see what your clothes will turn into!”

  Kerka just shook her head.

  The maidens and I splashed around, showing her how safe the water was. I pulled myself out of the water to talk to Kerka. I was wearing my T-shirt and jeans again, dry as a bone, as I came out of the water. To experiment, I lowered back into the water. Instantly I was all slick green wet suit and flippers. I got out again—jeans and T-shirt! Cool!