Chapter 55 The Girl Who Does Not Speak

Chapter 55 The Girl Who Does Not Speak
POV: Caelan

I worked out on the second day that Pip was not unable to speak. It was a small difference but an important one. Unable meant the words were gone. Choosing meant they were still there, just being held back for reasons that made sense to the person holding them. I knew the difference because I had spent three weeks when I was three years old not speaking and Mama had not made me explain it. She had just sat near me and done ordinary things until the words came back on their own.

The words had come back. They always did, when the world got quiet enough. Pip's world had not been quiet enough yet. I could feel that when I sat near her. Not with my wolf, not the way I felt aura. Just the ordinary feeling of being near someone who was carrying too much weight and had decided that adding words to the weight would make it heavier rather than lighter.

I understood that completely. I did not tell any adults what I had worked out. Not because I was hiding it. Because some things fixed themselves faster without adults trying to help them. Adults meant well but they asked questions and questions required answers and answers were exactly what Pip was not ready to give.

So I just sat near her.

The first time was the morning after she had fallen asleep against my arm in the courtyard. I found her sitting against the eastern wall with her knees pulled up and her mother nearby talking to one of the Blackveil wolves. I sat down about two feet away from her and did not say anything and did not look at her directly.

I had a smooth stone in my pocket that I had found near the gate that morning. Dark grey with a white line running through the middle in a clean arc, like someone had drawn it with a ruler. I took it out and turned it over in my fingers and looked at it.

Pip watched me from the corner of her eye. I could see her doing it. She was trying to look like she was not watching but she was not very practised at hiding it yet because she was three and three-year-olds were not as invisible as they thought they were.

I set the stone on the ground between us. Not pushed toward her. Just placed in the space between, in the neutral ground where neither of us owned it.

She looked at it for a long time. Then she reached out and picked it up. She turned it over the same way I had been turning it over. Looking at the white line. Running her small thumb along it to check if it was raised or flat. It was flat, perfectly flat, just a difference in colour in the rock itself, which was the interesting thing about it.

She examined it for a while. Then she set it back in the neutral ground between us.

I picked it up and put it back in my pocket. She watched me do it.

We sat there for another twenty minutes. I did not talk. She did not talk. Her mother glanced over twice and I could feel the careful quality of how she was watching, the particular stillness of a parent trying not to interrupt something fragile by noticing it too obviously.

When I got up to leave I put the stone back in the neutral ground and left it there.

The next morning I came back. Pip was already in the same spot, which told me something. She had the stone. She was holding it in both hands and looking at it. When she heard me coming she put it in her lap quickly, which told me something else. She had been carrying it since yesterday and did not want me to see that she had been carrying it.

I sat down. I did not mention the stone.

I had a bolt with me this time. A good one, with an unusual hexagonal thread pattern on the head that I had never seen before, which meant it came from something old or something built differently from most things. I had found it in the garage when Axel's crew was sorting parts. Donnie had said I could keep it.

I set it in the neutral ground.

Pip looked at it for a long moment. Then she put the stone down beside it and looked at both of them together. Comparing. Working out the relationship between them the way she worked everything out, slowly and thoroughly and without any hurry.

I watched her think and did not interrupt the thinking. We sat for almost an hour. At some point she moved the stone and the bolt into a small arrangement, stone on the left bolt on the right, like she was organising a collection. I did not say anything about it. When I left I did not take the bolt back. I left both of them with her.

On the third day I brought a feather.

Not just any feather. A long one, from a large bird, yellow gold along most of its length with a darker stripe near the base. I had found it near the northern wall early that morning and I had known immediately it was the right thing to bring because it was the most interesting colour I had found in days.

Pip was in her spot. The stone and the bolt were arranged neatly beside her. She watched me sit down with the same careful sideways attention she always used.

I set the feather in the neutral ground. She picked it up immediately. Faster than she had picked up either of the other things. She held it up in the morning light and turned it slowly, watching the way the colour changed depending on the angle, the specific gold-yellow of it shifting slightly as it moved.

She held it up higher, right up into a shaft of direct sunlight coming over the compound wall. The yellow deepened. Brightened. Became something more fully itself in the direct light.

She stared at it. Then she said: "Yellow."

One word. Small and clear and entirely certain. The voice of a child who had been saving words carefully and had found one worth spending.

I looked at the feather in the light.

"Yes," I said. "Yellow."

She lowered the feather and looked at it in her hands. Then she looked at me. Her large quiet eyes were the same as they always were but something in them had shifted slightly, the way a door shifted when someone on the other side finally committed to opening it all the way.

"Very yellow," she said.

"Very yellow," I agreed.

She looked at the feather again. "The stone is grey," she said.

"Grey with a white line," I said.

She picked up the stone and held it beside the feather, comparing them. "Different," she said.

"Very different," I said.

She set them both down carefully, side by side, and looked at the arrangement. The bolt, the stone, the feather. Her small collection in the morning light.

"The bolt is silver," she said.

"Silver and a little bit rusty on one side," I said.

She examined the bolt. Found the rust. Looked at it seriously. "Rusty," she said, like she was filing it correctly.

"Rusty," I confirmed. We sat there in the morning and she talked about the three things in front of her. Not a lot. Small observations, the kind a person made when they were testing whether their voice still worked the way they remembered. Checking each word as it came out, making sure it arrived correctly.

It did. Every time.

I did not make anything of it. I did not react with too much enthusiasm or tell her how good it was to hear her talking or any of the things adults said when they were relieved that something had happened. I just answered each thing she said as if talking had always been something she did and always would be.

Because as far as I was concerned it was.

I heard the door behind us open. Light footsteps. The particular step I knew best in the world.

Mama stopped a few feet away. I did not turn around but I knew she was there and I knew she could hear Pip explaining carefully to me that the white line in the stone was not drawn on but was actually part of the stone itself from when it was made, which I had not told her but which she had apparently worked out on her own.

Mama did not say anything. She just stood there and listened.

I listened too. To Pip's small certain voice in the morning quiet, explaining the stone. It was a very good explanation.