Blue feather and lettering on upper back

One autumn her largest wing tore loose in a squall and dropped into the reeds. She dragged it home across three miles of mud, and it hung from her rafters all winter like a dead heron. Her neighbour, old Quill Abernathy, who mended kettles and could never keep a secret, came round with a tin of tallow and asked what she meant to do with it. Hesper said nothing. She was watching the blue of the frame where the sun came through the shutter, the colour the sea used to be before it went grey.

Come spring she rebuilt it. Every barb she drew by hand, one fine stroke at a time, and along the spine she painted a line in ink that would not wash off. Quill asked what the line said. Hesper told him: take these broken wings and learn to fly. He laughed until he had to sit down on the step. Then she climbed the cliff with the wing strapped to her back, and the first warm wind came up off the water.

She did not fly far. She rose above the reeds, turned once, and where her shadow crossed the mud, a flock of pale butterflies lifted out of the grass, the last of the ones that rode the old seed-ships and had not been seen since the sky was new. They followed her out over the bay. Quill, watching from the cliff with his tin of tallow, swore the feather pointed at them the whole way.