Fantasy novel/series—female protagonist wielding a sword and magic frees her bird companion's cursed bloodline, resulting in a tragic scene on a ship

Question

So I'm trying to find a fantasy novel or series I read when younger(in between the age of 15-20,so it was 2009-2014 since someone had a problem with how i phrased that), but most of the details have been forgotten. Here is what I remember:

The novel or series had a female protagonist whose name escapes me. I believe she wielded a sword and some magic. She had a male sparrow or just a small bird companion that she could converse with. The bird's entire bloodline had been cursed and transformed into the same species of bird many years prior.

There was one scene in the book that really stuck with me. The protagonist lifts the curse on the bird's bloodline while they're at a harbor or on a ship. Suddenly, after being birds for many years, they transformed back into humans. Since birds have a much shorter breeding and gestation cycle than people, many of the young birds that turned into humans were second to third generation. They had no idea how to use their limbs and just plummeted from the masts and ropes of the ship to their deaths.

That's really all I can remember. Sorry for only having the graphic part saved away in my memory.

Edit* it is not the bird and the sword sadly, though it was a good answer and got my hopes up until I looked up the main characters name, I cannot remember it but it feels like it's on the tip of my tongue and I've used it in several games I've played in the past so if I read it I'll remember.

Answer 1

As noted by Peter in the comments, The Bird and the Sword by Amy Harmon is at least a partial match.

Swallow, Daughter, pull them in, those words that sit upon your lips. Lock them deep inside your soul, hide them ‘til they’ve time to grow. Close your mouth upon the power, curse not, cure not, ‘til the hour. You won’t speak and you won’t tell, you won’t call on heav’n or hell. You will learn and you will thrive. Silence, Daughter. Stay alive.

The day my mother was killed, she told my father I wouldn’t speak again, and she told him if I died, he would die too. Then she predicted the king would trade his soul and lose his son to the sky.

My father has a claim to the throne, and he is waiting in the shadows for all of my mother’s words to come to pass. He wants desperately to be king, and I just want to be free.

But freedom will require escape, and I’m a prisoner of my mother’s curse and my father’s greed. I can’t speak or make a sound, and I can’t wield a sword or beguile a king. In a land purged of enchantment, love might be the only magic left, and who could ever love . . . a bird?

Lark has powerful magic, to be able to change things with her speech, but was also bound by her mother to never speak (she eventually finds a way around it). She is abducted by Taris, the king, who can change into animals, but is finding that, more and more often, he is turning into a bird and is more comfortable that way. One of the enemies they face are the Volgar, bird people. There is no scene where she turns them into humans at a harbor, but there are a couple of times when she commands them to stop flying with predictable bloody results.

Among the Volgar birdmen were those who seemed unaffected by my spells, those who dove and flew and carried men away, impervious to the susceptibility of their brothers. But the greater number tumbled from the sky when I wielded my words. Those who survived the fall turned on each other as I’d instructed them to do. Our vulnerability became superiority, even as Jeru’s warriors fought off the surprise attack.

This review provides more details, including that Taris keeps transforming into an eagle (not a sparrow):

But King Tiras has a secret: he is gifted but his gift is quite weird. He's a changer but not really, with time passing by he finds easier to be a beast, an eagle than to be a man and that really complicates things once the two start to fall in love with each other.