“Oh,” said Sherrea, very close now. “Oh, hell.” I felt her arms close around me, lightly for a moment, then very tight.

I was crying. Once I realized it, it got worse, until I couldn’t stop it, until I wondered if a person could die of it. I was catching up for all the things I hadn’t cried for: for Cassidy; for Dana; for my own pain; for the archives with their sweet glowing window on the past; for the lost, desperate look on Frances’s face when she thought she was at the end of her life; for Theo, cut off from his father and his home. I cried because Josh still missed his wife, and because Sher was crying. I cried because all the things I’d never felt before had come and settled in, and since the surface there was new and delicate, they were all painful.

“Sparrow,” Sher said damply. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

She was right, actually. I turned my face into the cloth on her shoulder and went on crying.

Card 9: Hopes

The Star

Crowley: The Daughter of the Firmament, the Dweller between the Waters. Hope, unexpected help, clearness of vision, realization of possibilities.

Waite: Immortality. Truth unveiled. The Great Mother communicating to those below in the measure that they can receive her understanding.

9.0: The new day begins in darkness

It was not unlike being invalided all over again. The effect wasn’t widespread; the number of people who knew about my emotional collapse was limited. But for several days Sherrea, Theo, Frances, and Josh all behaved as if I was likely to either erupt or evaporate without cause. I expect I needed it.

I needed forbearance from myself, too. It hadn’t been a perfect catharsis; my instincts were still in place, and I had to struggle against a passionate desire to slip back into silence. And my memory was still good. Now that I had a nice, scraped place on my soul to scour them across, the cruder things I’d said or done to protect my privacy came back to me.

The worst was that same night, in the kitchen. Mags was replacing the gasket in the faucet, and I was sharing the lamp oil, reading A Tale of Two Cities at the kitchen table.

“Why are you called Sparrow?” Mags asked suddenly. “Did you name yourself? Is it symbolic? Is it a reference to something?”

I could tell her about waking up on the side of a levee in a tangle of brush, sweating already in the morning sun, and seeing a buff-gray breast and a round black eye bobbing on a twig above me. The word had appeared in my head. That was when I recognized language, that I had it; and that I had no past, that I recalled, to have learned it in. It was my first moment of self-knowledge. How was I supposed to know that Sparrow guarded fire for the Devil?

Cassidy had told me that.

“No,” I said suddenly, “it’s just a name.”