They say it is good luck if a Winged One lives in your tower.

My father’s house had three. Towers, that is, not Winged Ones. I lived in the second tallest, beneath the sloping eaves at the top. The very tallest, and the grandest, was the Observation Tower, the door to which was always locked. Sometimes, my father invited the more academic of his dinner guests up for a glass of brandy and a look through one of his telescopes while Renella played harpsichord and sang in the music room with the remaining guests below. She never displayed the slightest inclination to climb the spiral staircase to the upper reaches of the Observation Tower. My father never asked.

The shortest tower was used mostly for storage, as mine had been before I moved there. Dilapidated furniture and moldering strychnine-laced cheese covered most of the floor, spotted with guano from the bats that had claimed the ceiling. They flew in and out through a window whose shutters had blown off. I used to watch them from my nursery window, a great flapping stream of darkness against the burning sky as the sun set over the sea.

This was how I first saw Sheshef.

Sheshef was not the first Winged One I had seen. On a clear day, distant winged figures could always be seen floating in lazy spirals over the obsidian mines. My father told me they liked the hot air that rose from the exposed black rock, baked to scorching by noon, snatching at the large dragonflies that blundered into the inexorably rising air and devouring all but the prickly legs. When the nights were moonless and the stars burned cold and steady, the immense wings whispered overhead and human shadows landed barefoot on the narrow stone windowsills of the highest room in the Observation Tower, letting themselves in through the windows my father always left unlocked.

Sheshef was neither riding thermals nor fluttering to the Observation Tower’s windows. She was perched on the very edge of the shortest tower’s roof, toes gripping the mossy slate as she cleaned her nails with her teeth. Nobody seemed to have noticed her, other than myself.

I was alone in the nursery, silently pitting my painted wooden tiger against the washcloth as I waited for the bats. I didn’t see Sheshef glide in. I looked up from my play only when I heard the crunch of an old roof tile grinding against its neighbor as Sheshef settled on her haunches, wings furled against her back.

I didn’t move. I hardly breathed, afraid she would see the rise and fall of my chest and take fright. I stayed kneeling on the pillow before the nursery window, tiger and washcloth forgotten before me in mid-battle. Evidently, she was waiting for the same thing I had been, for as soon as the bats emerged—first one, then dozens all at once—she began grabbing at them. More and more poured out of the empty tower room, clicking and twittering. Over and over she snatched at the creatures, but it wasn’t until the last rays of the sun had disappeared that she finally caught one. It hardly had a moment to struggle before she broke its neck with a twist of her hands.

It was only after she had squatted back on her heels to eat her dinner, scooping her fingers into the bat’s gut and snapping open the ribcage, that I realized how young she was. She looked to be eight or nine, no older than myself. Her toes curled into the moss in pleasure as she lapped the bat hollow and moved on to one of the legs. She stood when she was finished, catching the blood smeared on her nose and dribbling down her chin with her fingers and licking them. It looked black against her pale skin in the moonlight.

She entertained herself for a moment using it as ink on the canvass of her naked flesh, drawing a spiral around her navel and finger-streaks across her ribs. I watched, still not daring to move, although I was almost bursting with the desire to call to her. I cannot imagine what I could have said. I did not even know her name yet. But the opportunity never came; just as Sheshef washed the last of the living paint from her body with rainwater caught in the tower’s gutter, Renella walked in and screamed.

All in all, Renella was not a bad woman. If she was dull and unimaginative, it was no more so than any of the gentlemen’s wives or daughters I’d met at the innumerable dinner gatherings hosted at the house. She was properly but not overenthusiastically pious, and had a good head for things like finance and what kind of fork to use for crab mincée—everything, essentially, my father did not. It was she who quietly brought prosperity and social esteem back to the family name while my father continued as ever, tinkering with his telescopes and star maps and only appearing for meals when a servant had been sent three times to knock on the Observation Tower door and shout through the keyhole that the guests would be arriving any minute.

I cannot think of a single person, other than my father, who would not have screamed at the sight of Sheshef, naked as all her kind and standing on bloody tiles over a thirty-foot drop. Even through the thick glass of my nursery window, Sheshef heard Renella’s shriek. The rest of the house did as well, and they came thundering into the nursery with whatever they had at hand as a weapon; the cook was swinging a ladle, the butler a half-eaten baguette, and one of the maids was brandishing a large silver candelabra that smelled of polish. 

I saw this all reflected in the glass, for I did not tear my gaze away from Sheshef. At Renella’s scream, she whirled to face the nursery window, flinging her arms out for balance and her wings out for flight. Although her face was mostly in shadow, Sheshef’s eyes gleamed, gray as the sea and whiteless as a hawk’s.

I pressed both hands to the glass just as Sheshef took flight. Muscles I did not have in my own back strained in hers to beat wings broader than she was tall against the cooling evening air. I do not know if she looked back as she flew over the peaks of the house to the seaside mountain cliffs, for just then I was grabbed around the waist by Renella and hauled to my bed.

Normally a quiet, even painfully shy child, I troubled the entire household over the next few days by upholding a ceaseless litany of questions. Where did the Winged Ones come from? Why did they have wings and we didn’t? How come they had feathers and hair at the same time? Were they born like normal babies or did they hatch from eggs like birds? If they hatched from eggs, why did they have bellybuttons? Why didn’t they ever wear clothing? How big were their nests? Could I go see one of their nests? Could I build a nest and live in it?

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This last question rattled Renella so badly she immediately sent a letter to Father Perego, the new pastore from the village, inviting him to come “tutor the young Master deRye in all manner of thyngs suitable for a growing lord.” She also sent a note to my father informing him of her actions, to be slipped under the Observation Tower’s door by a servant. She then sent for a glass of brandy.

I was thrilled. I wasn’t old enough for the village school, so thus far my education had consisted of reading from Renella, figuring from the butler, and fencing from the local drunk, who sobered up enough to don a doublet left over from his glory days in the Queen’s First and halfheartedly wave an epée at me whenever it happened to cross my father’s mind that I should learn this most noble of arts.

When Father Perego finally arrived, his feet nearly dragging on the dusty ground as he spurred his squat little donkey up the road, I felt my heart would leap from my chest with excitement. I had waited by the window every evening since the first I’d seen Sheshef, wondering if I could press a note against the glass—if she could read it, if I did—but the bats flew out every evening and in every dawn alone. The Winged One would not be answering any questions of mine. Here, at last, was the only other person who could. If Renella had summoned Father Perego because of my questioning, my reasoning went, surely it was because he was particularly good at answering.

Father Perego was as squat as his donkey, and ate nearly as much. He sat at my father’s left hand and answered the polite questioning of Renella, seated across the table from him on my father’s right hand, with slurping yes’s through his soup and no’s whose accompanying headshakes sprayed wine over his plate.

My father didn’t notice this lack of table manners. He was staring out into space, head filled with the stars’ cosmic dance to music only he and they could hear. Renella did, and her lips compressed with the effort of saying nothing. I noticed but didn’t care; I was busy trying not to wriggle with impatience.

My first lesson started the next morning. Father Perego sat at a bench in the kitchen gardens, sipping fresh milk and spooning the last of his runny eggs into his mouth.

“So, young Master deRye,” he began, mopping the grease on his lips with a spotted napkin, “I hear you’re a curious one.”

I could think of nothing to say, so I merely clasped my hands in front of me.

“It’s all right, my son,” he said. He leaned back against the sun-warmed stone and rested his hands on his paunch. “Natural for a boy your age to be curious about any number of things. Curious about your father’s telescopes?”

“A little, Father Perego.”

“Ever had a look through ‘em?”

“No, Father Perego.”

“Keeps ‘em locked away, does he?”

“Yes, Father Perego, most of the time.”

Father Perego nodded to himself as though my answer pleased him, although I could not imagine why. He raised a hand to his jowls and belched discreetly. “Curious about girls?” he asked, suddenly sly. Then, as an afterthought, added, “Or other boys?”

I hesitated. Did the Winged One count as a girl? “Not especially, Father Perego.”

Father Perego squinted at me. “Lady deRye wrote me you’d been asking… questions.”

“Yes, Father Perego.”

“Well then, what sort of questions have you been asking?”

“About the Winged Ones, Father Perego.”

“Oh.” Father Perego’s face held a mixture of relief and confusion. “What about them?”

I scuffed my shoe in the dirt, thinking over my answer. “All about them,” I said at last. “I mean… why are they… like that? With wings and hawk eyes and no clothes?”

“That,” said Father Perego comfortably, “is how God created them.”

I stared at him mutely. He stared back, blinking at me through kind, watery eyes, apparently unaware of how useless his answer had been.

In the following days, it became clear to me that Father Perego’s answers were emptier than all the household’s professions of ignorance combined. The pastore didn’t know he didn’t know. He was well enough versed in the human histories, and delighted me with his tales of battles fought in heathen seas for beautiful women, the wanderings of lost tribes through infinite deserts, the cruelties of ancient kings as their empires rose from the bloodshed of their people. I lay on the nursery floor with my wooden soldiers arrayed around me, marching them through the deserts of the stone floor harvesting dust-bunny mana from beneath the bed or sailing the blanket seas on a pillow warship in illustration of the tales Father Perego told from the corner chair with a plate of grapes and cold mutton.

But there were strange gaps and inconsistencies in his formidable store of knowledge. He knew as little of kangorous and lightning as he did of the Winged Ones, or the Feather Folk, as he sometimes called them. He thought mice spawned from rags sprinkled with grain and that if you sailed more than seven leagues out to sea you’d tumble from the edge of the earth. I laughed at this last pronouncement, thinking he had made it in jest, but he immediately grew very grave and asked me what I found so funny.

“A flat earth,” I laughed. “I like that idea, Father Perego, I think I shall make a drawing of it with my oils. The seawater would fall over the edge until the whole earth was dry and all the fish would lie gasping on the bottom! Oh, what a stink!” I laughed again.

“I am not making a jest, Master deRye,” Father Perego said, turning red.

“Of course you are,” I replied, smiling and pushing my soldiers over the world-edge of the bed and watching them clatter to the floor. “The world is round.”

Father Perego turned even redder. “That’s heresy.”

“It can’t be,” I said dismissively. “It’s true. Otherwise, ships leaving port for the open seas would just get smaller and smaller, but you could always see them through a spyglass. But instead they disappear behind the horizon, around the curve of the earth. When ships come in, you see the very top of the masts first, and then the rest of the ship. Wouldn’t be any point in having a crow’s nest for lookout up there, otherwise.”

Something in Father Perego’s face, which was now going rather purplish, warned me not to mention it was my father who had explained this to me.

I think it must have been this conversation that ultimately drove Father Perego back to the village two days later, where his more compliant flock awaited him. Every time I mentioned the Winged Ones after that he breathed heavily, almost wheezing, and looked at me out of the corner of his eye.

I’d gotten that look before. It was the same look Renella had every time she insisted I have an extra glass of milk to fortify bones she seemed to think were always at the point of breaking, the look the maids and butler tried to hide when I’d been swimming naked in the pond under the hot sun all day and burned my back. In retrospect, I find it hard to believe I didn’t realize there was something odd about this until much later. I assumed it was all part of growing up a lord’s only son, and I had no experience to tell me otherwise.

Until I turned eleven and went to school.