Chapter 1: The Climb

In a high valley where the wind never stopped talking, there lived a shepherd boy named Davin.

That year, the rains did not come. The grass withered, the streams shrank to threads, and his flock grew thin. The elders gathered by the fire and spoke of old sacrifices and bitter bargains. Davin, who was young and stubborn, decided to do something simpler. He would ask.

"Ask whom?" said his mother.

"The mountain."

She stared at him, but he was already pulling on his boots.

The climb took three days. He slept in a crevice with a sheepskin over his head. He ate the last of his barley bread on the second night, and on the third morning he crawled onto the summit on hands and knees, exhausted and frostbitten, and shouted into the thin air: "Please! My village is dying! Will you send us rain?"

The mountain did not answer.

Davin waited an hour. Then another. The wind swirled. The clouds drifted by far below. He began to cry, quietly, ashamed of having hoped.

Then a voice said, very close, "You climb well, for someone so small."

He spun around. A girl stood on the rocks behind him. She was about his age, with hair like dark rain and eyes the color of slate. She wore nothing against the cold, yet she did not shiver.

"I am the mountain's daughter," she said. "My father does not speak, but he hears. I am his voice."

"Then will he send rain?"

She tilted her head. "He sends it every year. But your people cut the trees on his slopes. Without them, the clouds slide past. Your fields are thirsty because you have chased the rain away."

Davin swallowed. "Then what must we do?"

"Plant," she said. "Not today. Not tomorrow. Plant, and keep planting, and let your grandchildren sit in the shade."

He descended in a day, fueled by a stubborn sort of hope. He told the elders. They scoffed, then argued, then finally, grudgingly, agreed.

Twenty years later, the valley was green with young pines. And on the day the first heavy rain fell, an old shepherd named Davin stood on a ridge with a sapling in his hand, and heard the mountain laugh.