Feather tattoo across fingers and back of hand

The crow came back to the mast on the north ring again this morning, the one with the cracked antenna, and I stood under it long enough for my boots to freeze to the grating. It dropped a feather at my feet. Black at the tip, then a grey that goes almost silver where the light catches it, with quills so dark and clean they look inked with a fine pen. You always said nothing grows out here that wasn't planned. Well, this wasn't planned, and the crow does not file a manifest.

I know what Ostrander will say. Biological matter is quarantined, a feather is biological matter, and I will lose a month's ration for carrying it through the airlock. So I haven't carried it through the airlock. I've kept it inside my coat lining, against my ribs, where the heater hums. Some nights I take it out and turn it so the vane catches the lamp. The shading is softer than anything the printers make. Each ridge is a little different from the next, as if someone worked them one at a time by hand, and maybe someone did, a long time ago, before anyone thought to make the work faster.

You asked in your last message whether I still remember the wind over the old fields at Carrow, the way it flattened the grass into silver ripples that ran toward the hedge. I do. I remember Father catching the barn owl's dropped pinion and tucking it into the brim of your hat, and you pretending you hadn't noticed how pleased you were.

The courier drone leaves at dawn, so I am folding this letter around the feather and sealing it in the pale envelope from the medical bay. The drone will read the seal, not the contents. You have always been the one who knows what to do with a thing that wants to fly. Keep it somewhere the light can reach it, and when the crow comes to your mast, tell it that I sent you.