Read Night Birds, The for Free Online Page A

healers. He never brought the book along, for his subjects would sink into sullen silence if they suspected he meant to write their secrets down, and in so doing destroy their magic.
     
    Sometimes, he brought his kinder, especially his silent, black-haired daughter, Hazel. The presence of this quiet child seemed to quell the hill people’s mistrust of strangers. Eleven years old, the girl had not spoken a single word since her mother, Jakob’s first wife, Emma, had died of consumption four years earlier.
     

    Both father and daughter understood that these journeys had much to do with Emma’s death. To stand in a healer’s cabin, where roots were draped from rafters, and inhale the redolence of earth and boiling sassafras, returned them both to the time when Emma was still alive. She had been such a country healer, but none of her potions, her bloodwort teas and salves of mullein leaves, could save her from the consumption that stole her voice and then her breath. Emma used up the last of her remaining strength to give birth to Daniel, Hazel’s youngest brother, and then died a week later on a frigid day in January.
     
    As dense as iron, the earth resisted Jakob’s pickaxes and shovels. The ground would not be soft enough to bury Emma until March. He hauled ice up from the river, a great slab like a bed made of crystal, and laid her down in the stable with the horses. The girl went with her father and oldest brother Caleb each evening to kneel in the hay and pray for her mother’s soul. The girl prayed with her eyes open. She watched the rising ghosts of their mingled breath. In her mind she tried to reconcile this blue-skinned vision of her mother—a figure in an indigo silk dress with her hands folded neatly over her chest, two silver coins for eyes, and a hollow purpling cavity where her cheeks sank in—with the one she had known in this life, a woman with chestnut hair who loved to sing.
     
    Hazel had prayed that God would give her mother back her voice, and when it didn’t work, she stopped speaking herself. Her father went a little mad that winter; they all did. Jakob kept that stall like a shrine and the girl could hear him go inside it and talk to her mother, and in the silences between his voice, guess the words Emma was answering. Only the thin, needling sound of newborn Daniel crying kept him sane.
     
    Even on that bed of ice the corpse still had a slight odor of rot that made the horses nervous. Jakob rinsed the body with rosewater which froze to her skin, blue and pale in the poor light of the barn. The girl would dream of her mother at night, dream of her rising from the ice bed, breaking the thin lacing of frozen rosewater like a coffin of glass falling away, and grabbing hold of one of the terrified horses to ride through the snowbound hills and beyond. Every winter for the rest of her life she dreamed this dream when it turned cold.
     
    And then in March, when the ground softened, the neighbors came with their shovels, and Jakob had to be physically restrained while they put Emma to rest under the ground and planted an ash tree over her grave.
     

    Father and daughter rode together over hunched hills and through damp hollows. As they came through the woods he sang to the brood mare and described the shape of the world for the girl. He told her the world had been broken at the beginning of time and that we were all marked by Adam’s fall. Plants and stones waited for the end of the Age, nursing poison and thorn, balm and flower. Such secret knowledge was like pollen on her tongue. The world was sown both with the seeds of God’s love and thorns of man’s age-old rebellion. And she thought she could keep her family safe if she knew enough, and could mark out a secure path through such a world. She thought her father possessed some kind of magic and when it turned out that he was only human, limited in knowledge and capable of failing his children and leaving them, as surely as Emma had, it