The Springborn

SABELLA

JULY 4, 1886

MORNING

S parrow’s breaths come too lightly as she naps on a small couch in the herb garden, barely causing her chest to rise and fall. Robbie and Calder brought the couch out early this morning so Sparrow could enjoy the plants and the sunshine—and they carried her out as well.

The dove Cleona preens her ever-present mourning gown of somber gray feathers as she perches near Sparrow’s feet. As I sit on a bench not far from them, I wear mourning, too: a black gown and an invisible cloak of sadness. I turn Calder away with a shake of my head when he offers to sit with me, but Robbie ignores my rejection.

He sits beside me on the bench and tucks a stray strand of my hair behind my ear. The tender gesture only deepens my misery. “Is it your mother you’re missing? Because it is a waste to mourn the living,” he says. “And not what Sparrow wants of you.”

“I grieve for both of them. I cannot seem to help myself, Robbie.”

“I have something here that might distract you a little.” He sets a book on his lap. Has he been holding this all along? The only thing I am certain of is that I am drifting on the edge of reality, where focusing and remembering are difficult things to do.

I stare at the book. It is cloth-bound, dark blue, and an inch thick. “Hazel found Delphine’s journals inside a desk. Four in all. She kept a record of every one of us—where we were found, the parents she gave us to, our specific gifts. This one mentions you near the beginning and Sparrow near the end.”

How can I answer this? Do I want to know these things? Will knowing make things better? Robbie must sense my ambivalence, for he says, “I think it might help you to hear about Sparrow’s first days. May I read it to you?”

“Yes,” I reply.

Robbie opens the book to a bent-cornered page. He reads, “‘February 12. Today I found a girl child abandoned behind the mercantile in Miners Ridge, bloody and naked, squealing with distress. The mother ran from where she hid in the shadows, a girl barely old enough to bear a child. And then I took the babe to be washed and blessed by the fairy waters.’”

The words bring tears to my eyes. I never gave a thought to Sparrow’s first mother and what she might have suffered. Did her parents lock her away in shame when they found she was with child, or did she manage to hoard her secret until she gave birth, alone and afraid, in a dirty alleyway? Was the young mother someone I knew as a child?

“Sparrow probably would have died if Delphine had not found her,” Robbie says. “The world would have been a poorer place for it.”

I nod and run my gaze over my sleeping daughter. “I do wonder who she might have become if someone else had found her and Delphine had not washed her in the spring.”

Robbie shuts the book. “That we’ll never know.” He wriggles his bird toes in the dust and adds, “I will say this, not in Delphine’s defense, but because it is true. These experiences—with wings and antlers and bird feet and such—they have made us stronger than we would have been without them. We are better people because of our struggles. You cannot deny it.”

“Of course you are right, Robbie. I know I can live with my antlers. What I cannot live without is Sparrow.” My hands lay open and empty in my lap. I stare at them and wish they could do something to help my child live.

“I could say that you can and will live when she is gone, but that would not help,” Robbie says. “Just know that I love you as my sister, and I will do everything in my power to see you through.” He kisses my cheek with a quick, birdlike peck. “Here’s Calder. I’ll go.”

Calder’s feet make hardly a sound as he approaches. There’s a little crease between his brows, a small, endearing token of his concern for Sparrow and me.

Robbie and Calder pass each other on the path between the garden and the house. Cleona swoops after Robbie on quiet wings.

Sparrow mutters and stirs but remains asleep on her couch as Calder sits beside me on the bench. “It is a pretty morning,” Calder says.

“I suppose you heard what Robbie read to me.”

“Watching over you is a hard habit to break,” he says. He picks up my hand and entwines his fingers with mine. “The full moon is tomorrow night. Are you sure you want to go to the spring?”

“If Sparrow is going, I am going.”

“You still think the waters might heal her?”

“We have to try, Calder.”

“There will most certainly be consequences, Sabella. They might not be good.”

“It is a risk I must take.” I refuse to entertain thoughts of failure or harm.

“All right, then. We’ll take the rest of today to prepare. We can take the wagon partway, but it’s a hard climb up the mountainside after that. Wear something practical. Oh, and I think we should ask Robbie to go along, in case I need help carrying Sparrow.”

“Thank you,” I say. “This means everything to me, you know.”

He kisses my cheek. “I would fly you both there if my wings could bear the weight of it,” he says. These words are a better declaration of love than any other I have heard. I rest my head against his shoulder, close my eyes, and breathe in the scents of sun-warmed herbs and his freshly laundered shirt.

Hope, that thing which had fallen into a deathlike sleep within my soul, stirs and stretches.