The Springborn

CALDER

I slip into Robbie’s room, shut the door, and rest my back against its boards. He looks up from his packing and scowls.

“What’s that look?” Robbie asks. “Darnation. How you manage to appear miserable and happy at the same time—it’s quite a trick.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Yet you came into my room with that face on you.” He sets a pile of folded shirts into his trunk.

“Fine. I’ll talk. Firstly, I think Sabella is warming up to me. Secondly, I might have done something terrible.” I cover my eyes with my hand. The motion makes the envelope in my pocket crackle as if in accusation.

Robbie slams the lid of the trunk. “Tell me you didn’t propose. Saints above, Calder!”

“No! No. I mean, I would in a heartbeat if I thought she would say yes.” I pull the letter out and hold it aloft by a corner like it’s a rotting fish carcass. “It’s this.”

“That is a letter. So?”

“It isn’t my letter. It’s to Sabella. From her mother.”

“How, pray tell, did you come to possess this letter?” Robbie perches on the edge of his bed and stares daggers at me.

“A delivery man brought it earlier. He’d been searching for Sabella along the roads and byways between here and Miners Ridge for a while. I told him I would give her the letter, but I can’t.”

“You have to,” he says in his stern schoolteacher voice.

“I cannot, Rob.” I bang my head back against the door. The thud hurts in a good way, because I deserve a hurting. “I read the blasted thing.”

Robbie throws his hands up in exasperation. “You are… I have no words.”

“I know, I know. But if I give it to her, she’ll leave. If she leaves, she won’t come back. She will be lost to me, and I will just be…lost.”

“Calder.”

Yonaz’s voice echoes through the inn. “Time to leave, my children!”

“Calder,” Robbie says again. “You have to give her the letter now. Before we leave and she’s even farther from home. It’s her choice to go with us or go back. You know that.”

“You’re right,” I say. I stuff the letter back into my pocket. “I’ll help you with the trunk first.”

We lug the trunk down the stairs and out to the wagon. I argue with myself with each step I take. I should give Sabella the letter, I should not. But in the end, I yield to my fear and weakness and decide to leave the envelope in the depths of my pocket.

Surely it can wait another day.