The school lay in a dusty crevice of the mountain village. Sheer rock walls towered over the schoolhouse’s peeling roof on two sides, and an equally sheer if shorter drop on the other two necessitated a low stone boundary wall set well back from the edge. Punishment for crossing this wall, either over it or through the gate that opened onto the switchbacks leading to the village proper, was a thorough caning with the dreaded rod of Master Norelli. No gnarled mountain pine could have produced that evil thing, which left its victims unable to sit for days on end, and rumor had it Master Norelli ordered it special from river gypsies who’d crafted it from the branch of a haunted willow.

It was a spectacularly bad location for a school. I think it must have been founded by community members who secretly wished to do their brats in—if not by falling to their deaths, then by asphyxiation from the impenetrable dust that billowed round and round like a tornado within the curve of the rock walls. When the winds were especially strong, the dust devil picked up larger gravel and pelted it at the schoolhouse, making both glass windows and outdoor play impossible. Instead, Master Norelli bolted the shutters and made sure we were suitably miserable as we huddled in the candle light away from the spurts of grit that filtered through the cracks.

The only method by which we could not perish was avalanche, since any loose rock upon the clifftop ridge had long ago crumbled to dust, but none of us knew that. During recess on a day when the air was still, the older boys exerted their brutish superiority by grabbing a youngster and holding him on the ground at the base of the cliff while others beat against the sheer rock with their fists or kicked it hard enough to knock themselves over, yelling “Avalanche! Avalanche!” at the top of their lungs. Transgressions meriting such a sentence included things like throwing gravel, tale-telling, and being fat. When a large boulder failed to land precisely on the squirming, often squealing boy being punished, he was pulled up by his ear and informed that he got lucky this time, but he’d better not throw gravel/tattle/be fat ever again.

I kicked and yelled at the mountain with my fellows a fair few times, but I neither dragged anyone to the cliffs for punishment nor found myself held down. I never got a caning for scaling the boundary wall, but I didn’t escape a few sharp raps across the knuckles for passing notes and looking out the window when I ought to have been studying Signore Redicci’s Anthropologica. I was picked neither first nor last for sports and I got good marks but not spectacular ones.

In all ways, I was a normal boy of eleven, completely defying all expectations.

It had been immediately apparent that everybody expected something unusual from me. Parents and children alike craned their necks and stared when Renella led me from the carriage on the first day of term, and whispers burst out in my wake. She ignored the attention with her head held high, but I could not suppress a growing sense of unease. This couldn’t all be a byproduct of my nobility; I wasn’t the only highborn boy there, I knew, even if I was the highest. Yet they inspected me like a pig at a fair, gazing into my eyes and pointing at my back as I went inside to meet Master Norelli. I could hear the whispers swell to a murmur as the door to his office shut.

Master Norelli was the only person as prepared as Renella to completely ignore whatever it was that had set the others alight with curiosity. He barely glanced at me as he stood and bowed over Renella’s hand to brush it with a whiskery kiss. Within five minutes I was sent out to stand awkwardly in the yard with the other nervous newcomers. Two older boys immediately dropped the gravel they were stuffing down their unfortunate victim’s trousers and walked over to me.

“Hello,” said one without preamble. “Are you mad?”

I stared up at their curious faces, terrified at being addressed with such a question. “N-n-no,” I stammered. “Why would I be mad?”

The boy stroked his budding lip fuzz contemplatively. “Me mam said you’d be mad,” he explained, and then added for clarification, “as a March hare.”

“Well,” I said with as much conviction as my rattled nerves could muster, “I’m not.”

“Here, Johnny,” said one of the other boys suddenly, “let’s have a look at his back.”

“My back?” I instinctively backed up against the wall of the schoolhouse. “Why d’you want to look at my back?”

“Hain’t got nothing wrong with his eyes,” said Johnny, sounding vaguely disappointed, “prolly nothing wrong with his back neither. Anything wrong with your back?” he asked, now addressing me.

“No.”

“See? Just a frosh in fancy pants.” Johnny turned and walked away, already reaching down for another fistful of gravel.

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The other boy hesitated. “How’d we know for sure without looking?” he said, but contented himself with a longing glance at my shirt before rejoining his friend.

I looked around at the other new boys who had stood gaping at this bizarre exchange. They all hastily became engrossed with the scenery.

I asked Renella the question as she picked me up at the end of the day: “Why did people think I was going to be mad?”

“Because they are ignorant gossips who don’t know what’s good for them,” she snapped, gripping the windowsill of the carriage so hard her knuckles turned white.

I swallowed the rest of my questions and stared out the window at the dust kicked up by the horses.

Once again, nobody in the house answered my questions, but this time it was clear their silence was not for lack of answers.

“Best ask Lady deRye, little Master,” said the butler.

“Not my business to say, Master deRye,” said the cook.

“Don’t know what you mean, Master DeRye,” said the maid, polishing the silverware furiously.

Obvious as the answer was, it was only an accident that I found it out that day at all.

Angry at everybody for their silence, I growled my way through grace, scowled at the soup, and sulked over the meat. When I sighed explosively after being requested to pass the butter, I was banished from the table without dessert. Stinging with injustice, I stomped up to the nursery and flung myself onto the bed, scattering charcoal pencils to the floor. It was in this position, still fully clothed, that I woke up in the dead of the night with a strange red light glittering through my window.

I rolled over, stiff and sticking to my school clothes with sweat. The light twinkled and shifted, throwing dim rubies onto the charcoal monsters drawn on my nursery wall. All the villa was dark except for this rosy glimmer from the Observation Tower.

I stared at it for a moment, breath steaming up the window. I had never seen these lights from my father’s tower before, but I had never been awake at this hour. Perhaps the Observation Tower always twinkled red in the middle of the night.

The stairs felt especially cold under my bare feet as I crept down from the nursery, trailing the edge of the blanket behind me as it slipped from around my shoulders. It offered little protection against the chill in the courtyard. I tiptoed past the goose pen and skirted the stables, which I could recognize only by placement and smell; the night was moonless and dark as the cellar except for a few stars twinkling through the haze above. The door to the Observation Tower loomed ahead, heavy with wrought iron fittings. I pulled on one of the handles, and found it just as it always was: locked. I turned to go, but hadn’t taken more than a step when I heard the bolts drawn behind me and the hinges creak.

Dimly silhouetted by a faint red glow stood my father. He held a strange wrench-like contraption loosely grasped in one hand and a rag in the other. “Oh,” he said, looking down at me. “You’re the one rattling the door.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” I whispered. “I didn’t know I was rattling it.”

He waved the wrench dismissively. “I just wondered who was prowling about the tower at this time of night, thought it might be someone. What brings you out?”

“I saw light coming from inside,” I answered, noting how much more alive his hands were, how they darted from pockets to hair to rag. His eyes, too, shone with a fullness I’d never seen, for once devoid of empty stars. I felt he was actually talking to me.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m adjusting one of the refracting mirrors on the parascope. Red light is the least obtrusive. It keeps me from burning my eyes.” He drifted back into the room, drawn like a moth to flame. I followed.

Red lights winked at me from all over the room, reflected from tiny spinning mirrors and refracted through facets of cut glass. Spindly metal springs coiled and uncoiled themselves with the delicacy of a butterfly, twitching brass gears around one tooth at a time. A vast pendulum swung majestically over a patch of floor marked with chalk and littered with fallen brass pegs. Everywhere I looked, burnished surfaces shone and light flickered.

“Are these telescopes?” I asked, gaping at the metal parts strewn across a workbench that curved around half the circular room.

“No,” my father replied. “All the telescopes are upstairs.” He indicated the staircase that spiraled up through the ceiling, the banister of which was draped with annotated charts.

“What are all these things?”

“That pendulum is charting the rotation of the earth. That device over there with the wooden knobs is a catadioptric focal tester, and this bench is where I clean and repair all my equipment.”

“What about the thing with the gears?” I asked. “Or the machine over there with all the spinning glass?”

“I have no idea,” my father replied softly. “Your mother made them.”

I stared, first at the mysterious contraptions and then at my father. “You don’t know what they do?”

He shook his head gently. “No.”

“She never told you? You never asked what they were for?”

“Oh, I asked,” he replied sadly, “but I never understood the answers. She was quite mad, you know.”

My throat felt as though it had suddenly grown a melon. “My mother was mad?”

“Of course.” My father looked at me in surprise. “You didn’t know? Everybody like her is. So they say.”

The melon was so swollen I could hardly speak. “Like her?”

“You don’t know?” For the first time I can ever recall, my father looked perturbed. “Nobody’s ever told you?”

“Told me what?”

“Your mother was half Winged One.”