The Stonemason

He wore tights that were either naturally brown or were covered in grime. The tunic and apron he wore over it were equally dusty, and Izzy was sure that if he wasn’t a ghost, he’d be stinking up the art room something horrid. Nevertheless, he beamed down at her as if he hadn’t sprung from her horrible soapstone cat, scaring her so bad that she’d fallen out of her chair. The soapstone cat itself had stretched and then curled up to sleep. Honestly, right now it was the least of her concerns.

She would almost think that she was having some sort of episode if the rest of the rest of the class wasn’t also gaping up at the medieval-looking spirit. The room held a thick silence for a second, as if the world needed a moment to breathe. Izzy supposed that was fair. The apparition certainly didn’t seem like he was supposed to be part of it– not in this century anyway.

The ghost took a step forward, phasing through the table towards her. His smile faltered as Izzy scrambled away on the floor. Unfortunately, when he opened his mouth, the only thing that came out was a jumble of words in a language Izzy couldn’t recognize.

His voice broke the spell over the class enough for Mrs. Thompson to dart to Izzy’s side.

“Isaac Begay!”

“It’s pronounced Buh-gay,” Izzy muttered, which she knew wasn’t the point.

“Explain this right now!”

Despite the situation at hand, Izzy almost rolled her eyes. As if she’d disrupted the class on purpose. As if this was a personal slight to Mrs. Thompson herself. As if it was a fart she could have muffled and not, you know, a ghost.

To her left, someone snickered, setting off a ripple of muffled tittering across the classroom. Fleetingly, Izzy wondered what nickname they’d come up with for her after this.

She could snap back, she knew. She could tell her that she clearly didn’t mean for this to happen, that she was being targeted for circumstances she couldn’t possibly control, that this kind of behavior was exactly what her father’d been talking about in the long, embarrassing meeting they’d had with all of her teachers where her principal had outed her in an attempt to force them to be more understanding. It’d just made the situation worse, like how Mrs. Thompson was doing now. She had every right to snap back.

Instead, Izzy reached out and scooped the little soapstone cat into her hand. “Sorry,” she murmured, despite her lack of control, and brought the cat with her into the hallway, hoping that the ghost would follow.

Luckily– or unluckily– he did, traipsing behind her in the hallway, still speaking loudly. Izzy hurried down the hallway, although where she was going she wasn’t sure. The school was pretty large, but there still wasn’t an exorcism wing. The weight room? It would be secluded, but she couldn’t be sure it was empty at this hour. She could always just go home. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d left before the end of the day. She put the squirming stone cat in her pocket.

The door on her left suddenly swung open, and Mademoiselle Borst stormed out, immediately glaring at Izzy.

“What is this racket?”

Izzy tried not to look at the rows of French 101 students peering out at them. “Well–”

Before Izzy could explain– or figure out how to explain– the ghost swiveled to face the Mademoiselle and spit out something angry and incomprehensible to Izzy.

Not so to Mademoiselle, though, it seemed, who frowned at the ghost and responded with something in French that made the ghost frown in response. After a moment, he tentatively responded to her, in less frantic tones.

“Wait, he’s speaking French?”

Mademoiselle pursed her lips. “Sort of. Not exactly. It’s Old French, really old. Isabel, who is this?”

“I don’t know. Can you ask him?”

She winced. “I can try.”

She and the ghost exchanged a few stilted, awkward words. Izzy shuffled her feet. Her grandmother had wanted her to learn French, but she’d opted to take Mandarin her freshman year instead.

Finally, Mademoiselle turned back to Izzy. “His name is Pierre l’Aisnet… I think. He says he’s come to help your talent?”

“My talent?” In her pocket, Izzy’s hand closed around the cat.

Mademoiselle glanced back into her classroom and huffed. “I really need to get back to my students.”

Izzy didn’t point out that she never asked Mademoiselle to come out here in the first place.

Still huffing, Mademoiselle reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone, scribbling something down on a piece of paper. “Here.” She thrust the paper out to Izzy.

“What is it?”

“It’s a phone number. Ask for Darren. My buddy from graduate school, his thesis was on ‘The Voyage of St. Brendan,’ so he's your best bet for this. If anyone can understand this loon, it'd be him. At the very least he can tell you if this is a langue d'oïl. ”

It seemed a little unfair to call the ghost a loon when he was really just foreign, but Mademoiselle didn't stick around to debate the nomenclature. She stormed back into her classroom, slamming the door loud enough that both Izzy and Pierre jumped.

Izzy looked up at him, and he looked back down at her before asking some question. Izzy sighed. It would be a long afternoon.

One walk home, awkward conversation with her dad who, to his credit, had handled the ghost thing in stride even if he did mutter under his breath about “that mother of hers,” and long phone call with Dr. Darren Pennington involving two separate pencils and a sketchy dictionary website later, Isabel Begay and Pierre l'Aisnet had come to a vague understanding of each other.

Pierre l'Aisnet had been a stonecutter.

He'd used latent stone magic to create the walls that had protected his liege lord during a siege, but had died in the process.

Turns out Izzy was a very distant descendents, from a long line of heritage stonecutters on her mom's side. The art had been lost over time.

Pierre's role in death was to appear to the eldest son of any member of his lineage on the day of his first stonecutting– usually younger than Izzy's 16– and help train him to use the magic in their bloodline to create living monuments and defenses for their lordships.

It was at that last point that they were getting stuck. Apparently, the stonecutting trade had been lost in their family before the term constitutional democracy meant anything.

That, and Izzy wasn't exactly the eldest son Pierre was picturing. Izzy had been putting off addressing that.

Pierre, to his credit, was more than willing to try and puzzle out words and phrases with Izzy. Thank God he could read. She'd hastily found a rudimentary communication board on her iPad, adding additional words and French translations that seemed most important for their communication, and by eight, it did seem like Pierre was getting a grasp on the decline of feudalism. He seemed a little disappointed that Izzy wasn't planning on being a stonemason to protect the governor, but water off a duck. It would neither be the first nor the last time she'd disappointed her relatives. He praised her little cat, as lopsided as it was, and promised to show her techniques to make her builds more impressive. He was proud, she thought he said, or maybe something about iron. Izzy hoped it was the former, and between lessons on what and where North America was, she gently shaped the little cat’s ears and eyes until it could successfully hear her and follow her orders. Pierre beamed.

Only towards the end of the night, when Izzy felt mentally and magically spent, did Pierre broach the subject of the eldest son thing. Or, at least, that's what Izzy guessed ‘Izzy’ ‘boy’ ‘no’ ‘?’ meant.

She squinted at the board as if she were in thought, stalling her response. The board didn't exactly have a picture explaining how gender roles had shifted and how she'd self-identified as a woman for a few years now and given that she’d just tried to explain the basics of how the world had changed in the past 700 years, give or take, this nuance felt daunting, if not impossible. Her dad had said that her grandparents were of a different era– Pierre was almost of a different millennia.

Still, though, if he was going to be sticking around until she was a master stonemason, she should at least try. Izzy looked down at their makeshift communication board. There weren’t a lot of verbs, and certainly none in the imperfect. She settled with ‘Izzy’ ‘past’ ‘boy’, ‘Izzy’ ‘girl’ ‘now’. When Pierre still furrowed his ghostly brow, she put her hand over her heart and bit her lip. If this went poorly, she wasn’t sure where to find an exorcist at this hour. As if sensing its creator’s distress, the soapstone cat pressed its cold, dry nose into Izzy’s wrist.

Pierre thought for a second, and then started thinking out loud, faster and more complicated than Izzy could hope to follow. She caught her name– or rather, his interpretation of it, Isabeau– at least once, but everything else was too rapid, too short.

“Ah, ah!” he said, finally, pointing at her. “Roman de Silence!”

While that meant nothing to Izzy, it seemed to mean everything to Pierre, so she nodded.

Pleased with himself, Pierre patted at approximately where Izzy’s shoulder was, and despite the fact that they’d just met today and they didn’t speak the same language and he was a ghost, Izzy got a little choked up. He’d gotten it immediately. He was proud of her anyway. Maybe it could be Izzy, Dad, and Pierre from now on. Maybe it would work out.

Pierre looked fondly at the soapstone cat, who twitched its newly carved ears and stretched under Izzy’s desk lamp, and pointed at the board where it read ‘night’ and ‘nuyt’. He was right. It was getting late. With another intangible shoulder pat, Pierre closed his eyes and faded until he was just a vague flicker in the corner of Izzy’s room. Izzy yawned and pet the little cat with her finger.

Things were going to be different. Complicated. But probably, possibly, maybe, it’d be okay.