“Why do they say it is good luck if a Winged One lives in your tower?”

My father looked up from the eyepiece of the telescope with an expression of pure astonishment on his face. “Who says that?”

“Um…” I tried to remember where I’d heard it. More than one person, more than one time. “I dunno… the Pastore?”

Father was now so surprised, he leaned back from the telescope entirely and turned to face me. “He does?”

“I think he said it to Renella during last almsday,” I muttered, losing all conviction even as the words came out. “Master Fiore said it once, too.”

Father unhooked his glasses and began to polish them forcefully. He must be thinking very hard. “How would such an adage come into being?” he murmured, eyes far away. He was talking to himself. “Who else has Winged Ones in their towers? Nobody else around here even has towers.”

“The church has a steeple,” I pointed out. “That’s sort of a tower.”

“Does it have a Winged One in it?”

I thought of the belfry, open on all four sides. “Maybe?”

“No,” Father replied, in the acrid tone he used when I had failed to identify a rhetorical question and remain appropriately silent. “It does not.”

“They could nest in a corner away from the travel path of the bell,” I said stubbornly.

“Not unless they were deaf, or willing to become so in very short order.” Father put his glasses back on. “Which means the adage either originated somewhere else, and traveled here—recently—or it has been generated specifically with respect to this villa.” He drummed his fingers on his knee and looked mystified.

“Perhaps it is because we eat bats.”

Father and I both turned to the staircase. Sheshef was crouched on the topmost step, peering down between the iron bars of the bannister. Her wings were no longer bundled in a bath sheet; they were bound instead in white satin sashes, one above her shoulders, one below. Father had been forced to intervene on a maid’s behalf when she was blamed for their disappearance. He made some excuse about needing them for lens-polishing. Everyone believed it.

“Please elaborate,” Father said.

“Bats can carry the water-fear sickness,” Sheshef said. Her eyes paled momentarily as her nictitating membranes blinked. “If they bite a human, the human gets the water-fear sickness too. But Hashaa do not get the water-fear sickness, even if we are bitten. And we eat bats. They are afraid of us. If we live in a tower, the bats will not live there, and the humans will not get the sickness.”

“That is an extremely compelling conjecture,” Father said warmly. Sheshef did not smile—I had never seen her smile—but I could see the feathers of her mantle fluff with momentary pride. “And how are you feeling today, my dear?”

“Better.” Sheshef crept down another step, then another. If she went one more step down, it would be a record; she had never come down further with Father in the room. I felt bad at how often it compelled him to leave the tower from a sense of obligation. Everyone had noticed; Renella had made an encouraging comment about it at dinner—I choked on my wine at that, and sent it spluttering up my nose—and the gardener had complained that the Lord was trampling the radishes with his preoccupied pacing.

Sheshef had been living in the tower for five weeks now, like some sort of inverted fairytale; every time we asked if she wanted to be free of her prison, and returned to her true family, she refused. I could tell it was increasingly a source of distress for my father—not only to have his telescope and tinkering time so limited, but to be harboring a runaway. Given that he had somehow managed to keep me in the dark regarding the full story of my parentage for over a decade, his powers of discretion were monumental, and I’m sure he gave nothing away on the nights the Winged Ones came to the tower—but the particulars of a dead mother are far easier to obfuscate than the immediate reality of a live daughter.

For her father was, indeed, among those who came to the tower.

If my father was aware of that fact, he never gave the slightest indication that he knew. It likely made no difference. Sheshef had to hide just the same, on the nights the Winged Ones came softly to the windowsills and bowed over the telescopes, making their inscrutable obeisances to the heavens.

Hide is perhaps too strong a word. She never went up; her people never came down. She had the same floors at her disposal those nights as she did any other. But she made a point of staying on the first floor, or the second, and held very still. She did not utter a word; she merely tracked me with her dark eyes as I moved to and fro, greasing worm gears and deburring tangs and collecting metal shavings into a sack to be sent back to the forge. Often she slept, curled in what appeared to me to be a profoundly uncomfortable little huddle, wedged in whatever corner or under-bench crevice allowed her bound wings to rest without strain. I worried about her ribs.

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But during the day—oh, how she loved my mother’s creations.

The noise she made when first she laid eyes on them, somewhere between the chuckle of a hen and the coo of a dove, resulted in my father abruptly having to go to the window and stare outside without a word. Here stood there with his back to us for a good ten minutes while Sheshef poked and prodded at the things, thumbing gears and tapping glass—all things I, too, had longed to do, but had been far too afraid to try. She just did it. Nobody stopped her. Nothing broke.

She learned a great deal about optomechanical workmanship in those weeks of self-imposed incarceration. I spent every spare second I had in the tower with her, teaching her how the tools worked, showing her what they could make, occasionally snatching something out of her hand if she were about to lick it. She never objected. I asked her, on several occasions, if she wanted to try her hand at anything, or request something for me to make, but she always demurred. As far as I could tell, it was not from any cultural reluctance; she truly had no wish to participate in the creation itself. She just wanted to watch, and play with the results.

I asked her once if she thought we had the wherewithal on hand to try making paper, so she could show me how. She went curiously still and wide-eyed, before giving a single curt response: “No.”

I did not ask again.

The only time I willingly left the Observation Tower was for fencing. I wasn’t getting as much sleep as I should have been, loath as I was to leave Sheshef, and Master Fiore noticed. After three successive lessons of failing to parry a simple thrust fast enough to avoid a touch, he finally ripped his mask off irritably and snapped, “All right, who is it?”

“Who’s what?” I panted. Sweat trickled uncomfortably down my spine.

“Who are you pining for?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked nervously.

Master Fiore snapped his fingers at me impatiently. “Out with it. We’re obviously not going to make any progress until you get Miss Whatsit out of your mind. Please don’t tell me it’s Lady Francesca.”

“It’s not,” I said fervently. Truth be told, she should have been more on my mind. She had written me a week ago with the latest update from her travels through Grecia. I had read the entire thing, despite it being five pages long; she was as verbose in her writing as she was garrulous in person. Her girl-kiss count was now up to nineteen. She kept a running tally. “Um, I probably should write her a letter though.”

“Who, then?” Master Fiore seemed to be genuinely interested. “The farrier’s daughter? The new scullery maid? The boot boy?”

“What?” I asked, startled.

“You heard me.”

If my mask had been off, Master Fiore would have seen me go as red as a beet. “I don’t—it’s—she—”

“Aha! There is a ‘she’!”

“No, I mean—”

“What color are her eyes, lover-boy?”

“That’s none of your business!”

“It is when you can’t fence straight.” Master Fiore put his mask back on and tapped it into place with a fist. “Very well—it seems like today’s lesson will be on the theme of ‘How to duel properly when in the throes of lovesickness.’ Heaven knows that’s stood many a lord in very good stead well into his later years. En garde!”

And he advanced too fast for me to do anything but bring my blade up to his.

I did poorly; the fencing master had rattled me. I was still thinking about it now, standing in the Observation Tower, looking up at Sheshef on the stairs. The morning light made her pale skin almost luminescent. I wondered vaguely if Winged Ones ever got sunburned.

Father was nudging me. I came back to myself with a start. “Sorry, what?”

“Breakfast,” he said succinctly. At the blank look on my face, he added—repeated, most likely—“Six eggs, plums if there are any left, and bread with butter.”

“Right. Be back in a minute.” I had to keep muttering the order to myself under my breath to remember it. This did not elicit comment, even as I raided the kitchens: Renella was an inveterate mutterer. Muttering under my breath was probably the least eccentric thing I’d done for the last five weeks.

But it was hard to act normally when, on top of everything else, I kept hoping for another kiss. And it had yet to manifest.

It was not for lack of opportunity. We stood very close, by the lathe or on the stairs, feathers brushing my arm. One time, she’d approached me so silently from behind that I had turned around and stumbled right into her. It had felt like running into a pair of trousers on a drying line; I’d nearly knocked her down. Neither of us had done anything but leap backwards in shock and, in my case, apologize profusely.

I was becoming increasingly, sickeningly convinced that our clumsy kiss at the edge of the twilight woods was no more than a Hesh adventure; a dare to prove one’s mettle, or else something akin to the convoluted machinations a handful of the nastier girls at school had started inflicting on their classmates. I couldn’t bear to initiate a kiss myself, and run the risk of confirming her only sentiments were scorn and revulsion. Or pity; the last time I’d been the kisser, and not the kissee, that is exactly what had happened. I had a zero percent success rate on initiated kisses with a non-zero data set.

If she really liked me, she’d try and kiss me again.

I told myself this every day of her convalescence until the night her father found her.