Fate can bring what you least expect, and it brought them a daughter they called Hannah Reina Dias Owens, named after Hannah Owens and Samuel’s mother. In this way two women were returned from the ashes and remembered each day when their names were spoken. The baby was born in January, a winter baby, with black hair and dark gray eyes. She could call birds to her with a single cry and unfurl the bud of a flower so that it bloomed in the palm of her hand, but she couldn’t fall asleep unless her father told her a story. It was time anyway, Samuel announced one morning, he would stop going to sea. Like his father before him he had come to love being on land and spent most days in the garden, where he grew vegetables and kept bees that were known for honey that was so sweet strong men cried when they tasted it. Samuel was out there every day, even in winter, spreading hay over the garden, starting hardy seedlings in the sun, wearing his black coat, the baby in a basket beside him. He was always talking, even as he worked, for he had a thousand stories to tell, and the baby listened so intently she forgot to cry.

On the last snowy day in March, when spring was greening beneath the ice, Maria left Samuel asleep in their bed. She tucked Hannah into her coat and walked over the grass that was brittle with frost. Crows clustered above them and ice shone on the birch trees. As she walked in the cold morning, her breath cutting through the bright air, Maria thought she heard Cadin’s call. She could remember that day in Devotion Field, in the Essex County of her birth. The fields of snow, the bright blue sky, the forest that was so deep, the woman who taught her the Nameless Art, the quick black eye of the crow. It was then that she saw what was before them, what she had always seen in the mirror, a black heart in the snow.

A nest had been tossed from a branch when the wind swept through. Maria knelt to point out the small fledgling to the baby. The black bird ignored Maria, but he looked at the baby with his glittering eye, unafraid. You cannot choose a familiar, it must choose you. When Hannah held out her hand, the crow came to her and settled beside her, tucked into Maria’s coat. Maria felt the beat of his heart inside him slowing to match the baby’s heartbeat.