Brief Summary of School Reading List Books - Ievgen Sykalo 2026

The Book of Boy by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

They called me Boy.

That’s all. No other name. No warm title like "son" or "lad" or even "you there." Just Boy. It was what I answered to as I trailed goats through sun-cracked fields, bent under the weight of their milk pails, or listened to the monks' distant chanting echo over the hills of France. To them I was nothing more than a hunchback stable hand, a child better kept out of sight. I was small, nimble, and strange — not least because I could talk to animals. Oh yes, the goats and birds and dogs would whisper things to me when no one else would. And in a world where people feared deformity as the mark of sin, their voices were my only sanctuary.

I’d have lived my days milking and mending, silent and shunned, if not for the stranger.

Secundus.

He came cloaked in shadow, a pilgrim with fierce eyes and a voice like gravel dragged over bone. He arrived at our village with a staff taller than himself, and secrets deeper than the abbey well. The moment he set eyes on me, he spoke like he owned me — like he knew what I was before even I did. He told me I would come with him to Rome.

Rome!

The Holy City, sanctuary of saints and sinners alike. I had never been beyond the walls of our village, yet suddenly I was to walk across the world with this bitter, brooding man and his bag of bones — relics, he called them — once belonging to Saint Peter himself.

I didn’t want to go. But when you are Boy, and your master has a knife and a purpose, your wishes hardly matter.

So we went. Two shadows cast long upon the road.

At first, Secundus treated me like one of the relics he carried: useful, silent, and perhaps a little cursed. He told me we were seeking seven sacred relics of Saint Peter — a tooth, a rib, a toe, and more. With each relic, he said, we would grow richer. But I came to learn there was something more, something darker driving him. He was not on a holy pilgrimage. He was on a mission to cheat death.

That’s right. Secundus had died. And yet here he was, walking, talking, bargaining with thieves and friars. He had struck a bargain with something foul and otherworldly, and unless he gathered all the parts of Saint Peter, he would be dragged down to Hell.

That revelation struck me like thunder. I was traveling with a dead man.

But even the dead need the living — and I had gifts that Secundus, for all his might, did not. I could slip through gates, talk to animals, charm those he threatened. My hump — which I had always seen as a curse — allowed me to hide and sneak where others could not. And more than that, something inside me began to stir. A warmth, a sense of destiny. Something beyond what even Secundus could imagine.

We traveled through valleys and over rivers, through towns soaked in sin and silence. The first relic we found in a convent, guarded by a fierce abbess who feared what we sought. Secundus, all brute and blasphemy, would have stolen it with blood. But I... I whispered to the dog who guarded the gate, and he let me pass. I climbed, crept, retrieved the tooth — not for Secundus, but because I was beginning to feel its pull, as though the relics were speaking to me.

Was it Saint Peter calling to me?

Or something older?

The world was changing around me. The birds cried warnings I could not yet understand. The sun glinted strangely off my skin, and the relics glowed warm when I held them, as though they recognized something in me. I began to wonder if I was truly just Boy — or something else entirely.

In a bustling town we met a pickpocket girl who tried to rob us, but I saw something in her — something like myself. She was lost, hidden behind dirt and bravado, but quick and clever. Her name was Dolce. I wanted her to come with us. Secundus refused, of course. He trusted no one but the dead. Still, she lingered on the edge of our journey, appearing when least expected, vanishing like smoke.

The second relic was guarded by a knight-turned-priest with hollow eyes. He had locked the rib of Saint Peter within a reliquary of iron and faith, believing it to protect his cursed church. But faith is not always stronger than hunger — and Secundus was starving for redemption. We took it, but not without cost. I was beginning to feel the weight of this quest — not just the bones, but the burden of secrecy, of sin, of destiny.

Each relic changed something in me.

Not physically — though I dared to hope my twisted back might be healed — but deeper. My dreams grew wild. In the quiet hours, I thought I heard whispers from the bones themselves. Not in words, but in memories. I could feel Peter’s pain, his betrayal, his longing.

And still, Secundus would not let me turn back. He was bound, body and soul, and I was his tether to the world of the living.

In the third city we were nearly caught. The Bishop knew Secundus for what he was. A revenant. An unnatural man. I wanted to run. I wanted to confess everything and be rid of the shadows. But something held me back. Maybe it was the relics — or maybe it was the fear that I, too, was no longer just Boy.

In the quiet moments, when the wind stirred the trees and the birds ceased their songs, I began to wonder: Who am I? What am I?

Secundus knew more than he let on. He would stare at me sometimes, not with pity, but with awe — or was it fear? He spoke of angels once. Of beings who walked the earth in flesh, but carried light inside them. Beings with power.

I asked him if I might be one of them.

He laughed. Not with joy, but with bitterness. He told me not to dream. That I was a freak, nothing more. But he was lying. I could feel it in my bones — no, in Peter’s bones.

One night, under a sky blistered with stars, I looked into the river and saw my reflection.

But it was not my face staring back.

It was something ancient, something luminous. A creature with wings not yet grown, with a strength hidden beneath years of shame. I knew then: I was not just on a journey to Rome.

I was on a journey to find myself.

To reclaim something lost before I was even born.

To remember who — or what — I truly was.

So it was that I followed Secundus not just across the land, but deeper into the labyrinth of my own becoming. The relics we gathered whispered to me when he wasn't listening — or perhaps he couldn't hear them. They knew me. Or remembered me. They did not call me Boy. They called me something older, something buried beneath layers of skin and shame and silence. But I wasn’t ready to hear it yet — not truly.

The next relic lay hidden in a town where plague had not yet passed, but its shadow still clung to the walls. The people there were suspicious, gaunt with grief, clutching their meager prayers to their chests. Secundus approached like a wolf circling lambs, full of sharp teeth and smooth lies. But the relic — a thumbbone this time — had been sealed in the chapel tower and guarded by a monk who saw through all falsehoods.

I tried to reach it on my own.

Climbed the crumbling stone, barefoot and bleeding, the wind tugging at my rags like it wanted me to fall. At the top, I found the relic — encased in crystal, glowing faintly, as if breathing. And for a moment, just a moment, I felt no weight on my back. My hump — the shame I carried like a brand — lifted. I stood tall. Straight. My heart galloped.

But when I touched the relic, the pain returned — not mine, but Peter’s. Memories, not of glory, but of fear. He had run. He had hidden. Denied the one he loved most. The shame of it burned through my fingertips.

I clutched the relic anyway. Because it was a part of him. And somehow, it was becoming a part of me.

When I returned to Secundus, he barely looked at me. He only counted the bones, as if they were coins. But I had begun to measure our journey differently. Not by what we took — but by what I learned.

With four relics gathered, the road grew darker.

Literally. The skies seemed dimmer now, like the sun was watching from behind a veil. Secundus grew more desperate, more cruel. The deal he’d made — with Death itself, perhaps, or something even more terrible — was gnawing at him. His eyes hollowed. His skin lost its warmth. And still he pressed forward, as if speed could outpace damnation.

We came upon a town in festival, where a relic was paraded through the streets — a toe bone of Saint Peter, bobbing in a glass box above the crowd. I watched the people laugh, dance, kneel in reverence. Their joy unsettled Secundus. He called it ignorance. But I watched their faces and thought — they believe. Not in relics. In hope.

I wanted to feel what they felt.

I wanted to belong.

I danced with the children, my hump bouncing like a joke, and for a moment I was not mocked. I was part of the pattern, part of the joy. Until Secundus stole the relic, and we were chased by a mob, their joy turned to fury. We escaped by diving into a river, the relic pressed to my chest like a heartbeat.

That night, shivering beside the fire, I confronted him.

“Why?” I asked. “Why must it be Peter’s bones?”

He didn’t answer right away. He stared at the flames as if they could burn away the truth.

Then he told me.

Because Peter was the gatekeeper.

The one who held the keys to Heaven.

And if Secundus could gather all of him — piece by piece — perhaps Peter would forgive him. Perhaps he would unlock the gate, and let even a damned man pass through.

That was the moment I understood.

This wasn’t a quest for relics. It was a plea for mercy.

But how do you bargain with a saint?

How do you ask forgiveness when your life is stitched from theft and fear?

The answer came not in words, but in faces. The face of Dolce, who found us again on the road, ragged and hungry, yet still with that ember of fire in her eyes. She mocked Secundus, called him "corpse man" and "bone thief," but she walked with us anyway. I think she saw something in me that I was only beginning to see myself.

We reached the mountain monastery by midsummer. There, hidden in a cavern beneath the altar, was the sixth relic: a piece of Saint Peter’s skull. We were not alone. Other seekers had come before us — some pious, some greedy, all now bones themselves.

Secundus fought them. With blade and brute strength. But I… I reached for the relic not with force, but with sorrow. And when my fingers closed around it, I saw a vision — not of Peter, but of me. Wings curled tight against my back. Eyes full of light. A voice — his? — whispering: "You are not what they told you you were."

And still, I did not know what it meant.

Only one relic remained.

The key.

Not a finger or tooth this time — a literal key, once held by Peter, the symbol of his power. It lay in Rome, of course, guarded by the most devout and the most dangerous. To take it would be a sin. To leave it would be a death sentence for Secundus.

As we approached the city, my limbs ached not from walking, but from becoming. I was changing. I could feel it in the hush of animals as I passed, in the way light bent toward me, in the way my back — that cursed hump — seemed less like a deformity and more like something waiting to unfurl.

Secundus did not notice.

He was unraveling, thread by thread. His skin hung looser. His voice rasped like dry leaves. He would not make it long. We had to act quickly.

We entered Rome beneath moonlight, through the tunnels of the catacombs. The final relic lay within the basilica, high atop an altar gilded with gold. As we climbed, I looked at the city — ancient and crumbling and sacred. I looked at Secundus — barely alive. I looked at my hands — glowing faintly in the dark.

And I knew:

This was not his journey anymore.

It was mine.

It was mine now. The journey, the burden, the choice.

Secundus staggered behind me through the cathedral shadows, half-man, half-ghost, his eyes fixed not on Heaven but on escape. The final relic — the Key — glimmered in its reliquary like a shard of dawn. And I, Boy, creature of stables and shadows, reached for it as if my hand had always known its shape.

But Rome is never silent. The cathedral guards were quick to descend, voices raised, swords drawn, shouting of desecration and theft. I froze. Secundus did not. He drew his dagger, eyes wild — not with hate, but terror. He would have killed them, these holy men, for the chance to buy another hour of borrowed time.

I could not let him.

“Stop,” I said — and it wasn’t a plea. It was a command.

He did stop. Because something in me had changed. The voice that came from my throat was no longer small, cracked, unsure. It was not Boy’s voice.

It was the voice of someone who remembered the stars before they fell.

We fled, again. But this time, it wasn’t a chase. It was a reckoning. I carried all the relics now, heavy in my satchel, but heavier in my heart. Each one a memory, a lesson, a mirror. Peter had not been perfect. He had been scared, selfish, loyal, broken. Human. The Key I had stolen did not unlock gates of gold — it unlocked truth.

And now, I knew mine.

When we reached the hills beyond Rome, Secundus collapsed beneath an olive tree. He was pale as parchment, his breath thin as prayer. “We have all the bones,” he rasped. “Now… now let him open the gate.”

But nothing happened. No light. No voices from Heaven. No Saint descending on a cloud. Only wind. Only silence.

And I realized: the bones were never the answer. They were never enough.

Not without the final piece.

The soul.

And Secundus had none left to offer.

He wept. He raged. He cursed the saints, the sky, himself. Then, at last, he turned to me.

“Why are you not afraid?” he asked. “What are you?”

I did not answer in words.

Instead, I stood. And stretched my back — the hump, the shame, the thing I’d hidden and hated — and it split. Not with pain, but with light. The skin opened like the petals of a lily, and from within unfurled wings.

Feathered. Trembling. Bright.

Not human. Not entirely.

Secundus gasped. Not in horror. In awe. “You…” he whispered. “You’re one of them.”

I didn’t know the name for what I was. Not angel. Not boy. Something between. Something forgotten, now remembered. I had been hidden among sheep and dung and laughter, not as punishment — but as preparation.

I knelt beside him.

“You asked for Peter’s forgiveness,” I said. “But you never forgave yourself.”

He closed his eyes.

And died.

But not with terror this time.

With peace.

I buried him beneath that olive tree, wrapped in my own tunic, and placed Peter’s relics around him like stars. Not to bribe the afterlife — but to honor his journey. His sins, his hopes, his love. The man who had stolen me from the past and unknowingly returned me to myself.

When I rose, the wind stirred the grass. The sky cracked open with light, not lightning — understanding. The bones shimmered once, and were gone. Gone, not stolen. Taken back.

Returned.

As they should have been.

I walked alone after that. Or perhaps not alone. The animals still watched me. The trees bowed slightly in passing. I walked not with a hunch, but with wings folded behind me, quiet and hidden until needed.

I found Dolce again, as I always knew I would. She threw a rock at my head, missed, and then hugged me tight enough to bruise. “You look taller,” she said.

“I’m standing straight,” I answered.

She grinned. “About time.”

We walked on together.

And that, I think, is where the true story begins. Not with relics. Not with theft. Not with bones.

But with becoming.

With a boy who was never just a boy, carrying the weight of saints and sinners both, and learning that holiness has nothing to do with halos — and everything to do with choice.

I chose.

To remember. To forgive. To live.

To walk the world, not with shame on my back — but with wings.

So we walked. Me and Dolce. Two scraps of life stitched together by story and accident and the stubborn refusal to break.

The land was the same as before — dusty, humming with flies and heat and the distant clang of church bells. But I had changed, and in changing, the world changed with me. I saw it not with fear but with wonder. The clouds like ships. The road like a ribbon winding toward something unnamed. The people — loud, lost, kind, cruel — each of them a miracle in motion.

Dolce asked questions, of course. She always did. “Where did you go? What happened to the bones? Did Secundus really… die?”

I answered her as best I could. I told her the truth, not the tidy version. That Secundus had been more than a thief. That the relics were not treasure but trial. That they had burned and vanished and left behind only silence and light.

And I told her what I was.

She didn’t laugh. Didn’t gape or kneel or call me holy. She just narrowed her eyes and said, “Well, wings don’t make you better than me.”

“They don’t,” I agreed.

“You still owe me cheese.”

I grinned. “Two cheeses.”

That was Dolce. If I was sky, she was stone — grounding me, balancing me, reminding me that wonder was no excuse to forget the world under our feet.

We became pilgrims, of a sort. Though not the usual kind.

We had no relics to seek, no shrine to crawl toward on bloodied knees. Our journey was different. We walked from town to town, village to village, not to beg — but to give. To listen. To see.

We met a girl who spoke to bees and a man who dreamed in Latin and painted it in chalk on his barn. A baker who sang to his bread. A widow who had buried her last son and still found room in her heart to feed two dusty travelers with nothing to offer but their ears and a story or two.

We worked when we could — mending fences, chasing pigs, helping birth a breech foal in the middle of a thunderstorm. I learned to laugh with my whole chest. Dolce learned to read. We both learned that even the smallest act — a smile, a slice of bread, a song at dusk — was holy, in its own quiet way.

And everywhere we went, people asked the same thing: Are you from Heaven?

I never answered yes.

Because I wasn’t. I was from mud and spit and loneliness and questions. From shame and stables. From kindness unexpected and cruelty endured. I was from the earth.

And that was enough.

One night, in a forest clearing lit by stars, I asked Dolce, “What do you want to find?”

She thought for a long time.

“My mother,” she said at last. “Not really her. Just… a place where she would have smiled.”

I understood that. My bones ached for something like it — not Peter’s bones, but the boy who might have been born from light and was instead born from dirt. A home not made of stone but of knowing.

“I think we’ll find it,” I said.

“How can you be sure?”

“Because we’re walking toward it.”

I still had the wings, of course. Though I wore them folded tight, hidden beneath a coarse wool cloak. I didn’t fly. That wasn’t what they were for.

They were for balance. For knowing where I stood in the world, and where I might go next.

One day, though, in a mountain pass lined with thorn and mist, we came upon a child who had fallen from a ledge, dangling by a root, screaming into the void. And without thinking, I leapt. My cloak tore. My feet left the ground. The wings unfurled.

I flew.

I caught her.

And when I returned to the path, child sobbing in my arms, blood in my mouth and sweat in my eyes — no one called me demon. No one screamed or bowed or threw stones.

They wept. They thanked me.

They said, “You came from Heaven.”

And I said, “No. I came from the road.”

That was the beginning of something new. Word spread. Not of a saint. Not of a miracle.

But of a boy. A pilgrim. A strange figure who walked like a shepherd, wept like a child, and listened like a saint. Some claimed I healed the sick — I didn’t. Some said I raised the dead — I couldn’t. But I told stories. I offered ears. I gave comfort.

And in return, people gave us everything we needed. Not gold. Not relics.

Belonging.

One day, years later, we came to a village that had been struck by plague. Most were gone. Those who remained were gray-eyed and hollow-cheeked. There was no food. No music. No laughter.

We stayed.

We nursed the sick. We buried the dead. We planted herbs and taught them songs to keep their courage from collapsing. When spring came and blossoms returned to the trees, they carved a sign over their chapel door:

Boy and Girl passed this way.

Not a saint. Not a relic. Just two souls who had chosen the road, again and again.

I never went back to Rome.

Never stood in the cathedral again.

But in my dreams, I saw it sometimes. Not the stones. The sky above it — vast and bright and waiting. And sometimes, in that dream, I flew. But more often, I walked. Feet in dust. Eyes ahead.

Pilgrim’s feet. Boy’s feet.

My feet.

And that was the true relic. Not Peter’s bones.

Mine.

At last, it was clear. The relics, the saints, the bones—they were never about magic or power. They were about stories—stories of people, flawed and shining all at once, trying to find their way in a world that is as cruel as it is beautiful.

I, Boy, had carried their stories in my heart and my satchel. I had carried the weight of shame and the light of wings. And in the end, I learned that holiness wasn’t about perfection—it was about being—being present, being kind, being brave enough to walk forward when all the sky feels heavy and the earth trembles beneath your feet.

I learned that even a boy born with a hump and a secret can carry the sky on his back and the hope of the world in his wings.

Because sometimes the greatest miracles are not the ones carved in stone or whispered in prayer.

They are the ones you carry quietly in your soul, the ones you give to others with an open hand, the ones that lift you off the ground when you thought you were only made to crawl.

So I walk still. Not as a saint, not as a hero.

But as Boy.

A boy who once thought he was nothing—and found he was everything.

The road goes ever on and on.

The End