Birdie's Book - Andrea Burden [15]
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.