M. Rose - The Secret Language of Stones

“I’d been climbing trees all my life. Secure in my ability, I shimmied to one of the topmost branches, then inched my way out to the end of the limb and peered down.

“My mother sat cross-legged on the floor, her eyes closed, surrounded by what appeared to be burning embers. In her hands, two of the orange glowing stones. It was those stones making the terrible fizzing, hissing, whistling sound that had awakened me.

“Petrified, I watched as she just sat, unflinching, unblinking, encircled by the fire, holding the fire. One of the orange flames licked at her sleeve. Why wasn’t she moving? Was she unconscious? Did I need to wake my father? Did I have time to get him before her clothes burst into flames? The hissing sound intensified, hurting my ears.

“So rapt by the scene, I didn’t realize I’d climbed out too far and was stressing the end of the tree limb until it broke off. I fell, crashing through the tree, branches scratching me. I crashed onto the studio roof, my body missing a pane of glass by millimeters.

“I’d landed on my arm, which was screaming with pain. My left shoulder hurt too. Certain I’d broken a bone, I looked around, trying to figure how to get off the roof. Then I saw my mother staring up at me from below, from inside, a horrified expression on her face. Despite my pain, I noticed there were no burning embers anywhere beside her. Only large egg-shaped agate stones in a circle on the floor.

“Hours later, I woke up in my own bed. Nothing hurt. I flexed my hands. Rotated my shoulders. There was not a thing wrong with me. At the end of the bed, I found my robe, which I was sure I’d ripped in the tree, but it was neither stained nor torn.

“Dazed, I made my way down to the glass-enclosed breakfast room. In the distance, the sea sparkled like blue-green sapphires.

“ ‘Good morning, mon ange ,’ my mother said.

“My father looked up from his newspaper and smiled, angling his cheek so I could kiss him.

“Remnants of my brother and two sisters’ breakfasts were at their places. The twins were seven, Jadine was five. All of them had too much energy to sit at the table for long and were probably already down at the beach.

“ ‘Did you sleep well?’ my father asked. I glanced over at my mother, but she didn’t look up from her newspaper.

“ ‘Maman?’

“She picked up her head. ‘Yes?’

“ ‘What happened last night? What were you doing?’

“I still remember her little insouciant shrug when she said she’d been painting until two in the morning.

“ ‘I saw you. You weren’t painting, you were sitting on the floor with burning stones in your hands. I was in the tree and then I fell, but nothing hurts.’

“ ‘What a terrible dream that sounds like, Opaline,’ my father said.

“ ‘You need to start drinking chamomile infusions before bed,’ my mother added. ‘There’s no reason to suffer so in sleep. Dreaming should take you to places of wonder and delight-not terror.’

“ ‘It wasn’t a dream. You were holding burning stones in your hands. I saw you.’

“My mother held her hands open to me. Her palms were pale, unscarred, the pink color of the inside of a shell.

“ ‘Dreams can be like that,’ she said. ‘More real than the life we live awake. And nightmares can be confusing. Sometimes when you wake up, you can think it’s real for hours and hours.’

“By the time I finished my café au lait and croissant, I’d almost been convinced everything I’d seen had been a dream.

“ ‘After all,’ my mother pointed out, ‘if you’d fallen, you would have scratches, you would be in pain. And you’re not, are you?’

“It wasn’t until I went back to my room to dress and fix my hair that I found a tiny twig caught in my brush. Only when I confronted my mother with it, telling her I knew what I witnessed was neither a dream nor a nightmare, did she finally admit the truth to me, that we were descendants of a sixteenth-century courtesan accused of being a witch. And the same bloodline ran in me and I too had abilities. But mine were unlike hers, she said. I could hear stones.

“ ‘And when you are old enough,’ she said, ‘I will teach you their magick.’ ”

Anna took my hand and held it. “But she never did, because I wrote you and told you we needed jewelers and you ran away to come here,” she said. “I interrupted an important step in your development.”

“No.” I shook my head. “They were sending me to college in America, remember? You didn’t interrupt my training. My mother never taught me because I wouldn’t let her. Because I wasn’t sure I wanted to be different like her. And I convinced myself I wasn’t. Not even during that last summer I lived at home, working at the jewelry shop, spending time with Timur, when my abilities took on a whole new level of intensity. I wasn’t prepared to deal with what was happening to me. And didn’t know what to do, other than eventually backing away from his affections.”

Suddenly I worried I’d said too much. But Anna’s eyes held mine as she gave me a small, sad smile and then nodded, encouraging me to continue.

“That’s when I began to wonder if there was someone who might help me understand what was wrong with me. And when your letter came those months later, I knew you were the one who could.”

“And now that you can’t escape the magick, you want to learn how to stop it?” she asked.

“No, that’s what my great-grandmother wants me to do. I’m not ready to stop it. Can I learn to control it? I need to. Can you help me do that?”

She took my hand. “Opaline, every practitioner has a choice to make: enter into the darkness or stay on the side of light. Some of your ancestors made the choice to be swallowed by the dark. Your mother has always kept the light as her goal, but her methods sometimes take her over the line. You need to realize you’re different from all of them. You don’t just have your mother in you. You have your father in you too. And he’s clear and clean and pure. You were born into the light. You’d have to choose to go dark. I promise.”

Like a screaming child caught in a nightmare, the sirens rent the late afternoon and startled me. I dropped the rag I’d been using to buff the gold bindings on Madame Alouette’s talisman. I should have been accustomed to the interruptions. They happened at least every other week. Sometimes for days in a row. But I wasn’t used to it. The sirens were a nasty personification of the war itself: ugly, disruptive, brutish, and impossible to ignore. We all despised the danger signals, especially when they came after days of calm. False calm. For we were never able to keep thoughts of impending doom far from our minds. One day there was no heat. Another no milk. Hardly ever white flour. Every morning the papers brought news of shortages. And new troop activity. And the ever-growing casualty numbers. The endless warnings of German spies infiltrating our city accompanied every story about another enemy soldier caught in or around Paris. We were never safe, and we never could forget that for long.

As the alarm continued, I carefully followed Monsieur Orloff’s routine. The door to the shop was always kept locked, but I was supposed to double-check it nonetheless. Next, with now-shaking hands, I pulled down the shades in the front window so our wares weren’t visible. When all was secure, I took the first flight of steps to the basement. Then down one more flight to the chalky and chilly subterranean level of the shop to the two rooms carved out of rock: Monsieur Orloff’s vault and the makeshift shelter. There, under the Palais, in the dark, with only candles and matches to shed any light, I settled in.