The Short Life of Sparrows (19 page)

Rowe just laughs, tucking his tongue in his cheek as if it keeps him from throwing something. He nods, turning his knife over again in his hands. “You know what, Calli? You have some serious abandonment issues. You need to get over the whole absent father stuff already.”

“Shut up Rowe,” I say. “Why wouldn’t I? You all come and go whenever you feel like it, disappearing more than you stick around. Nice lives you have. All of the fun— none of the responsibility of answering to anyone.”

“I’m getting kind of tired of you looking down your innocent little nose,” Rowe snaps. “So your father isn’t here to guard you or tuck you in every night. Neither is mine. But I don’t blame all of my problems on him. I’m hot tempered. I get into it with other Nightbloods if they say the wrong thing to me. And I’ve never minded taking off my clothes for a pretty woman. But my father has shit to do with any of those things. I do them because I choose to. Because I’m my own problem. You need to grow up and quit blaming everything on the coven—or me—or your father. It’s a good thing that your looks don’t match that attitude of yours. You’d have driven everybody away. And you know nothing of how Nightbloods live.”

I kick him in the side of the shin. For the part about my ghost of a father. And for the testy bit about taking his clothes off for pretty women. It isn’t attractive at all. Isaiah jerks his head, encouraging me to leave it alone and come inside. But nobody is going to call me innocent and pat me on my head, especially not Rowe.

“Are you finished?” I lean over him, with a sassy glare to kill my instinct to grin. “Because until I see otherwise, your use of words is the only impressive thing about you. All of you. Good for Murdoch, acting like the big, strong protector of us poor little Seers. Excuse me if I won’t be in the fainting crowd of grateful women tomorrow.”

Rowe turns to Isaiah, rotating the knife handle carelessly in between his fingers. “Is she this difficult to you too, or is her saltiness just something special for me?”

“She gets especially irritated by you,” Isaiah says, shrugging.

Suddenly I want to kick Isaiah out of Lil’s entryway and bolt the door behind the both of them. Isaiah sees the amusement is missing from my face, because he reverses the conversation quickly. “You have to admit she has her reasons. Lil wouldn’t have any need of me if there was someone to help her with the property.”

Rowe stands up, spitting over the new porch rail. He looks at me and then at Isaiah. “That’s been Lil’s choice. If she wasn’t so insanely stubborn about it, she wouldn’t need you to fix anything. Lucas is just itching to be a hero and cover these shingles in some tacky purple. And you’d both probably piss yourselves if I showed you how Nightbloods live.”

“Again with the talking,” I chime.

Rowe walks up to me, looking down into my eyes with a cautious restraint. I blink, like a fawn who realizes too late that an arrow is flying toward it. His face is so near to the expression he wears in my dreams, and it’s as if he’s very well aware of this. “Oh, I’m going to show you how good Nightbloods have it. But if anybody finds out—especially Murdoch, he’ll have my tongue for telling you. You have to keep your big mouths closed about it. Come on Isaiah. If I’m breaking one rule by showing her, I might as well break another and bring you too. I’m done with either of you judging things you know nothing about. Follow me. Now. Before anybody sees us.”

I don’t expect this.
Follow him
?
Where
? It feels like a dirty trick, because I’d have noticed if the Nightbloods were this close to our village. Rowe slinks through the trees, and we have to hike as the ground takes an instant steeper incline. “We’re going up there? Up the mountain? Everyone says the terrain is too dangerous. Last year a Seer tried going this way up Blackridge and she came back with terrible blisters on her arms. She said there are stinging bushes everywhere.” I crane my head, because I’ve never dared to wander in this direction or this far into the woods.
I’ve heard some fairly unnerving stories from others who’ve ventured this way, and I admit that I’ve never had the desire to be out here alone
.

Violently red mist creeps and descends from higher up, and the weather has taken an abnormally cold turn. He says nothing to either of us as we walk. I’m much shorter than the two of them, and I’m becoming winded as I inevitably trail several feet behind. In the dark without lanterns, we might as well be in a far off place. These woods creak and blow with the wind, and there’s nothing reassuring about the knee-high shadow that sprints past us.

“What kind of animal was that?” Tucking my hair back, I hurry to reach Rowe’s side when my question goes unanswered. He’s the only one of us who has the protection of a knife, and I worry that he won’t say what kind of creature is roaming about at this hour. We make a sudden right, and the ground levels again. There’s a small clearing, and a stone path winds to our left, up to a wall made of sharp extruding rocks. If I rotate away from the wall, I can see the land below and hills beyond our village. Sickened, I walk a little closer through the declining grass, seeing that all of the Seers’ houses are directly below where he’s taken us. “Why do we not know you’re up here? You’re all camping out above us? What is this, a sick game of hide-and-seek? This is ridiculous.”

Isaiah examines the view ahead of us, as Rowe balls his fist. “Because it’s spelled.”

Isaiah and I whirl in circles, realizing we can no longer see either Rowe or the wall leading inward. There are only trees with crooked branches and a shrill wind that dips through them as I look to where the wall had been.  I approach the area where the rock wall was, putting my hand out to find it. My knuckles slam into something hard. Wincing, I pull my arm back. A crackling sound, like that of tearing paper, rips through the air. Rowe and the stone fence rematerialize. “Watch out for the fence.”

“Thanks,” I say, pretending my hand isn’t smarting.

“If you came up the mountain without being led here,” Rowe continues, “you’d start to get a grisly headache. Or twist your ankle in a hole. Some sudden misfortune would convince you to turn around. It’s our way of keeping everybody out.”

Isaiah keeps to the back of me, looking both ways as if he’s been charged with guarding a small child. “I still don’t get it,” I say. “Why would you all stay this close but keep Seers away? What’s the point in keeping us out? The Coven Mistresses would be insulted by this.”

“They know about it.” Rowe taps the wall with his boot. “Most of the elderly know. But Murdoch doesn’t want the young to see it. And he doesn’t want anyone interrupting us when we’ve got work to do.”

“Does Lil know?”

“Yeah.”

Isaiah keeps a blank expression, studying the treetops. My teeth chatter from the mountain breeze, and Rowe tosses his coat at me. “Here.”

“It’s bitter up here.” I wrap the coat around me. “You wouldn’t even know it is summer. I’m failing to see what is so great about living up in the trees. Are we that terrible to be around?”

Rowe points at the inky skyline. “You can see for miles beyond the coven from the ledges. We can keep watch from this spot. Other than the danger of intruders, you’re tough women. You don’t need any of us telling you your business. And no small boy or girl should have to see how we’ve given ourselves to the dark.”

Isaiah crinkles his forehead. “The dark? You make it sound like a person or a living thing. That’s vague and ominous sounding.”

I bite my lip to stifle my giggle, because Isaiah and I are both too old to put any stock in ghostly tales. Jolting on purpose, I widen my eyes at them both. “Oh, I think the dark touched me.” I purposely break a twig under my shoe for effect. Isaiah bursts out laughing.

“It’s not so funny if you’ve seen things,” Rowe sneers, his sneaky smile gleaming in the dim glow of the moonlight. “The scarlet mists that claw at us from the Underworld, leaving deep scratches down our backs and legs from trying to set evil right. Haven’t you ever wondered why red fog trails behind us when we’re all together? It’s because there are unseen creatures just waiting on us to be invited into this realm. There are devilish screams we hear in our heads as we huddle to curse somebody. I’ve watched Nightbloods writhing in pain in the dirt as we finish a difficult spell that needs to be done. No kid should see that. Like I said, you’d both piss yourselves if you saw the faceless beings that breathe down our necks as we cast.”

He rolls up his sleeves, a sinister tangle of black veins run against his skin, proof of his tinkering with destiny. “And you wonder why we come drunk to every party,” he says, unrolling his sleeves back into place. “Why we’d give ourselves to our enjoyment during any celebration? It’s not as if any other time during the year we get to laze around doing what we want. We’re secluded in this boring hole of a place, exacting hell on earth. You have your nightmares. And when our women cry over the horrors of what Ordinaries do to one another, we’re up here, casting as we have to. Our blood turns dark and ices. We hand over bits of our souls to the Underworld in exchange for curses, until there’s no sweetness left in us to share with somebody. But we do it, because somebody has to. We’re the justice for the things you see in your sleep. Bet you didn’t know that we do summonings at dawn every day—to see the things you’ve seen at night. You’re not the only one present in your dreams.”

My face heats, and it doesn’t help that Rowe pauses as he says this. Isaiah shivers, tightening his coat. Rowe heads through the gate as Isaiah and I are left to absorb what he’s said.

“Are you coming in to see the rest of it or what?” he asks. “We’ve got to be back down the mountain before anyone realizes we’re missing.”

Tiny, misshapen shacks curve around in a wide circle, leaving the center open. A fire pit waits in the middle, surrounded by shabby stools for sitting. Clothes pinned to a piece of line flap in the wind, making the empty campsite feel as if it has been deserted for years instead of hours.

“Your huts are so small,” I trail off. “None of them are big enough for more than one—”

“We only use them for sleep,” Rowe interrupts. “The rest of the time, we’re in that circle. Summoning. Casting. Deciding which of our Seers has seen something that we need to act upon—if it’s something that will take more than one of us to secure a curse.”

Rowe’s lips stiffen, and he rubs at his chin as he plants himself on one of the stools. “Since we can’t fix your grief, we find a way to take care of those who’ve caused it. The man,” he says, gripping my hand so I will look at him, “the one you saw taking advantage of the little girl? Let’s just say I can’t do anything to take away anyone’s agency. He can and
will
still do that terrible thing you saw. But I can make every minute after a taste of the hell that awaits him. He’ll never truly get away from what he does. He’ll stumble over a pitchfork and it’ll take a year for his leg to heal up properly. His gut will trouble him from all of his worrying that someone will discover his nasty secret. He won’t be able to eat anything with flavor without feeling his stomach cramp up—without getting the shits. He’s going to do a lot of thinking while he sits in his outhouse. That was my gift to him—for what he did to that child, and for making you have to bear it, as if he’d done so to you.”

“What are the notches on the outside of the wood?” Isaiah asks, inspecting the carvings along the doorways as he runs his palm over them.

Rowe pulls paper from his shirt pocket, winding it up. Standing again, he wanders over to one of the huts. He jerks a torch from one of the door posts, lighting his cigarette. I puzzle over it, recognizing he’s actually nervous. He doesn’t look at us as he takes a long drag from it. “The Elders give us each different Seers to keep watch over. It’s easier if every one of us keeps track of a few. And Murdoch is a stickler for rules and order. We all mark our sleeping quarters with something to represent the Seers we’re assigned. Murdoch says it’s so that when we rest at the end of the day, we’ll remember that our Seers never get to sleep in peace.”

“Which one’s yours?” I ask it before I can appreciate that it was a stupid, mortifying thing to say out loud.
Great Calli, give him all of the wrong ideas
.

“That one.” He stomps on the last of his cigarette, walking back for the gate. “Come on. We need to get out of here.”

I walk the long way around, suddenly curious of what’s written on the doorpost of the Nightblood who constantly aggravates me. In the orange blush of the torch, I see scratched out notches that mean nothing to me. There are only haphazardly drawn, thin lines on the doorpost—except for one carving. The detail in the wings alone is painstaking work. The sparrow has her head curled down into her breast, as if the fluff keeps her beak warm. A reddish paint glosses her feathers, her beaded eyes touched in green. He’s drawn one of the birds from that day—and he’s colored the feathers to match my hair. As I run to catch up to them, I keep a step behind so I don’t have to meet Rowe’s face
.
  I need to know
. I have to know why I see him after every nightmare. “How are Nightbloods able to show up in our dreams? Don’t any of you care about our privacy?”

“We don’t change dreams. And we don’t show up in them. It’s against the rules,” he says. “We can only see what you’ve seen after you’ve seen it. We don’t breeze into any of them.”

“So why do you insist on pushing your way into mine?”

Rowe whirls around, looking down at me. “If I risked the wrath of Murdoch and the other Elders by putting myself into your dream, I wouldn’t choose afternoons in a field of flowers—or wading in rivers. Maybe I’d start with that, but it wouldn’t end with just that. And we both know it.”

“But I’m not doing it—”

“Yes, you are,” he says. “And having you want me in your sleep but despise me every time I come around confuses the hell out of me.”

I stop in my tracks, wondering why I’ve seen Rowe so often in the quiet of dawn. Why is he constantly plaguing me if neither of us are casting these moments? I almost wish he’d said he comes barging into my dreams because he feels like it—because he’s the degenerate I’d believed him to be. It’d be a lot less strange than realizing Rowe has nothing to do with it. He’s sitting up on a mountain—knowing I’ve been dreaming of him. Before we can reach the front gateway, Rowe grabs my arms. “Get down.”