The Springborn

Prologue

T here once was a little girl who lived in a coal miners’ town with her mother and father. Their company-owned house was dusty, wooden, and plain, as were all the houses on all the streets; no one dared to paint a door bold blue or to plant window boxes of bright flowers. The girl’s parents, like everyone in the town, toiled hard and ate simply. They slept deeply and rose early to repeat the day’s routine. Nearly all of the town’s children worked in the damp dark of the mines, but this girl was kept home and taught to read, to cook, and to sew. Her mother had spent too many years longing for a child to send hers to be smothered by coal.

Sometimes, the girl roamed the woods that encircled the town. There, she marveled at the rich colors and filled her lungs with the pine-scented air. She befriended squirrels and named trees. With her back pressed to the trunk of her favorite hemlock, she read the book of fairy tales she’d received on her eighth Christmas. The tales enthralled her: brothers who became swans, fish that granted wishes, house-nibbling Hansel and his brave sister Gretel.

But on the morning the girl turned eleven, she awoke to find that a pair of silvery gray antlers had grown from her head as she’d slept. She tossed the fairy tale book into the fire, no longer amused by hedgehog sons and wolves masquerading as grandmothers. If such things could be real, they were terrible. Yet the stories remained in her head, unwelcome ghosts, shadows without sympathy, unable to offer the smallest hint as to how to shed the antlers forever.

Never again could she carelessly wander the town without risking her life, for what would the superstitious coal mining folk do if they discovered her secret? Her mother said she’d likely be burned as a witch. The girl believed her. It didn’t matter that it was the late eighteen-hundreds, or that she’d always been a sweet and obedient child. The coal towns chose their own forms of law and consequences.

The antlered child had no choice but to hide.

And so she did.

Six years have passed since then, slowly. So slowly that they’ve felt like centuries.

I know, because I am that girl.