The Mountain That Lent Me Its Name

How it begins

The clerk asked for her full name.

Sora opened her mouth to give the two ordinary words she had used for thirty-six years. What emerged shook dust from the courtroom ceiling.

The clerk's pen snapped.

Behind her, the quarry owner's lawyer stood so quickly that his chair fell over.

Sora had not expected the mountain's name to be so loud.

“Could you repeat that?” asked the magistrate.

“No,” said the lawyer.

Teren Ash, who had offered to help with her petition, took off his spectacles. “Sora. What have you done?”

She kept her hands on the rail. The stone beneath them felt warm.

“Borrowed something.”

The mountain had been surprisingly willing. She had climbed to the old spring after the quarry company fenced off her mother's grave. She had asked for help, expecting the kind that mountains usually provided: a good view, a place to be angry, perhaps a stone to throw.

Instead, the spring had spoken.

At the time, borrowing a name had sounded considerably easier than hiring a lawyer.

The magistrate consulted a book chained to the bench. “A claimant bearing a geographic name must be heard under the First Land Statute.”

The quarry lawyer began collecting his papers.

Teren did not look pleased. He looked frightened.

“Sora,” he said again, more softly.

She turned toward him. For a moment she could not remember why that sound belonged to her.

Outside the window, a cloud gathered around the mountain's broken summit. The quarry had been taking it away in numbered blocks for sixteen years.

The magistrate asked whether she intended to claim the entire district.

Sora looked down at her hands. Fine gray lines ran across her palms, following the veins of stone beneath the valley.

“I came about one grave,” she said.

The courtroom floor answered with a low, impatient tremor.

Apparently the mountain had come about something larger.