The tinkle of a peg knocked over by the pendulum sounded like a hammer blow in the silence that followed. My father was looking at me as though waiting for me to confirm that, yes, I had heard that before, I’d just forgotten. When I found my voice again, all I could do was mutter, “Nobody ever told me.”

“Never? My goodness.” He sounded shaken. “I’d imagine that’s an important thing to know. Renella never said anything?”

“No.”

“My goodness,” he repeated uncomfortably. “Well, that’s… well.” He pulled off his glasses and rubbed them with the rag, adding smudges that hadn’t been there before. “My father found her in the gutter of the short tower’s roof when she was just a baby, wrapped in a hairy blanket and tucked into a basket filled with leaves. She’d been cooing at the doves.”

“She’d just been left there?” I asked, aghast. “On a roof?”

My father nodded, still absently wiping his glasses. “That’s how we knew it must have been her mother who was Winged. They consider fraternization between our peoples just as abhorrent and forbidden as we do, so I can’t imagine what it must have cost her mother to brood her for months and nurse her for another one or two after hatching until she was just strong enough to be deposited on a roof.”

“How did her mother know your father would take care of her?”

“She didn’t.” My father smiled dreamily. “It was an enormous gamble. My father had good relations with the Winged Ones, but taking in a half-breed orphan left in the gutter would only offend them and his human household. There was even talk that she was my father’s bastard, although since she was as dark-haired and fair-skinned as my father was blond and tanned, and grew to look less and less like him as time went on, that talk soon died. Still, my mother wouldn’t speak to him for three days, and the servants refused to touch or care for the baby because of her eyes and the marks on her back. They said she was cursed. So I was the one who fed her goat’s milk from my old bottle and carried her about the nursery when she woke in the night, crying like a sea bird. I must have been about your age.” His smile widened with the memory. “I used to sing to her, silly songs I’d make up about moon lizards and lily pies. She’d gurgle for a little and then fall fast asleep.”

“Did you know she was mad?”

“Well, it’s rather difficult to tell with a baby.” My father finally put his glasses back on, squinting at the smudges. “But everyone watched her anyway. It didn’t take long to see the legends were true. She didn’t speak a single word until she was four, and when she did it was usually nonsense. She often escaped her evening bath by soaking the maid trying to wash her hair and then running naked all over the house. Sometimes she’d hide and we’d find her curled up in the larder licking cream out of a bowl, or sitting with her legs dangling from an upstairs window singing at the sky. Eventually it was decided it was easier to let her play with the craft and smithy tools she stole from wherever she could find them and let her build her strange senseless contraptions in her room.

“And her bones…” My father touched his own arm gently as he spoke. “Her bones were so fragile. She was graceful as anything, she never tripped or fell, but when she fought against the maids when they tried to put on her frock, or braid her hair, she snapped like a twig. She broke her wrists seven times and fractured her collarbone twice. She’d cry then, always that seabird call. I was the only one she’d allow to set her bones. I knew childbirth would kill her.”

He spoke without anger or regret, twining the rag around his fingers as gently as he must have caressed her broken limbs and kissed the tears from her eyes. “She was never happier than when she was pregnant. She sang to her belly every day, the same songs I’d sung to her.”

“Didn’t—” I forced myself to swallow. “Weren’t your parents angry?”

“Furious,” he said simply. “My mother fell ill as soon as the maids told her they hadn’t had to wash her blood from the sheets for two months—swooned into her bed and never got out again. My father swore he’d kill me, and kill her, and you, but I’d locked us in the tower. My father had just built this tower to be the most fortified part of the villa, so I locked us in and barricaded the door and deafened the sounds of his threats and sword-hammering with curtains torn from the windows. She never liked curtains anyway, they blocked out too much of the sky.”

“For seven months?” I asked. “How did you eat?”

For the first time, my father looked a little embarrassed. “She called birds to the window,” he said. The red glow of the room masked any flush that crept over his face. “She had always preferred raw food, and I stopped being sick after the first week or so. We drank rainwater from the gutters.”

Nobody. Nobody had told me this. “Nobody told me.”

My father sighed. “Well, I suppose they’re better off pretending it didn’t happen the way it did. I’m not the first lord to emerge from the birthroom bloody, bearing his squalling son while the mother’s body lies behind. The rest was routine from then on, or enough to be getting on with. You certainly seemed normal enough.”

“What about Renella?”

“Renella is a good woman,” he said sadly, “ and she deserves better than what she got. She was the best my father could find for me after the scandal—the youngest daughter of a Viettan sea-merchant. She wept through the whole marriage ceremony.”

I tried to imagine Renella crying and failed. “How come she never had children?”

“Well,” my father replied wearily, sitting on the first stair of the spiral staircase, “I suspect she’s barren. Then again, I never tried too hard to make children. I would have enjoyed having a daughter or two, but I couldn’t risk another son. You are my heir.”

I sat down opposite him, leaning against a chest of drills and awls. I had cousins—or some kind of relative—among the Winged Ones. Cousins who ate raw bats and bugs and pissed in midair and copulated in the clouds over the sea. Maybe Sheshef was my cousin.

My father looked up at the hole of darkness the stairs spiraled into and twisted the rag into a knot. “You are my heir,” he said again, “and the townsfolk will accept you. Don’t worry about the others at school. It doesn’t matter.” I didn’t ask how he knew about school. “It doesn’t matter,” he repeated, still looking up. He did not look down, not even when I curled up and went to sleep with my head pillowed on a satchel reeking of linseed oil.

I moved from the nursery to the tower the next day. Even before the butler and porter and maids could clear the old room of broken furniture and the dour portraits of my uglier ancestors, I slept there, cocooned against the draft in my old blanket as I watched the dusty cobwebs waft in the moonlight. I helped them daub the cracks in the wall and directed the placement of my furniture after the pieces had been levered up the stairs and rebuilt, mostly by myself. It was a miracle they’d been able to successfully disassemble most of it, although I suspected some blind wrenching had been involved.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Most of the house thought I had decided I was a big boy now that I was going to school, and was leaving the nursery as a sign of independence. I rode out a number of hair-tousles and patronizing responses along the lines of, “Of course, Master DeRye,” and, “At once, Master DeRye,” in silence, glad they were blinded by their own condescension. Only the butler looked at the vast windows and wide sills of my new tower room with a frown on his face, and only Renella gazed suspiciously at my innocent face over dinner. She jumped every time a dove fluttered in the cote.

After my new room was settled, I returned to my normal activities. I spent the after-school hours drawing or swimming or climbing in the orchard for apples and throwing the cores to the pigs. Sometimes, though, I shut myself in my room, ostensibly to paint with my oils or sketch with charcoal, but in reality I did this very infrequently. Usually I napped, watching the clouds or distant airborne figures until my thoughts drifted into dreams, and woke when a servant knocked on my door for supper.

Those days when I napped, I spent the night with my father.

As soon as the table had been cleared, I ran up to my room and watched the bats leave on their nightly hunt, always hoping for another glimpse of Sheshef, then waited for the villa to quiet. When the dogs had settled in their kennels and the servants retired to their quarters for sleep or gambling, I gathered the star charts I’d penned and slipped into the Observation Tower. My father let me in and locked the door behind me.

Through his telescopes, he showed me the celestial family that arced through the sky: gentle Cytherea, soft and bright, danced a counterpoint to her bloody lover Marés as he paraded across the night; fat Joveus, swollen with his own weight as he spun, spurned his titan father Kronus and his mighty ringed court; the cold tide of the Moon waxed and waned through the eyepiece, recorded on parchment by my deft hand every day for twenty-eight days. I hung these pictures up in my tower, as well as paintings of meteors that flashed their molten gold over the sea as my father and I leaned dangerously far from the highest windows, straining our eyes through binoculars. My pair still smelled of the cold-oil I’d used to mill the brass without warping or singing it. I burned my hands many times, working the metal too delicately for gloves. My father showed me the scars on his knuckles from his own burns and cuts while he helped me guide the flyblade over bluesteel shutters or polish ruby lenses.

If the night sky was covered by haze or storm, we worked on the ground floor, mending or modifying or making. Often an entire night would go by without either one of us speaking, the only sound the patter of rain and the clink of our tools. When the midnight bell rang in the village, I set down my work or shuttered the scopes and returned to my tower, silent as a shadow. My father kept working. I undressed and lay in bed, coverlets pulled up to my chin against the cool night air. Sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep, I heard the shush of feathers go by in the dark.

One night, the soft sound of wings didn’t wait for me to go to bed. The sky was particularly clear, rained free of gritty haze earlier that afternoon. Now it was cold, very cold; the first chill of the season. My father and I wore our coats in the tower and our breath steamed in the starlight, condensing on the lenses every time we forgot to hold our breath while looking through the scopes. I had ink and paper by my side, ready to capture the coordinates of the bright conjunction the celestial bodies had been slowly winding towards for the past few days. I had just unstoppered the ink bottle when I heard a rustle behind me and turned.

A man stood in the window.

I froze. The man didn’t move either.

Even with the light at his back, throwing his features into shadow, I could see the bundled silhouette of huge wings folded tightly to his back. The fine down at his shoulders ruffled in the breeze, mirroring the silver of the stars, as did the splitting tendrils of his uncombed hair. He was hardly an inch taller than I, but how old he was I couldn’t say. I couldn’t even see his eyes.

My father’s head appeared on the staircase just then, rising from the dim red glow below. He saw the Winged man at once, and gave him a cordial nod. The man nodded back, silent as the clouds, and stepped into the tower, making sure his wingtips cleared the sill. He crossed to the other side of the room to where one of the secondary telescopes stood. It was already angled at the same patch of sky. My father had set it yesterday.

The Winged One began unscrewing the caps and adjusting the lenses as I watched without a sound. He spun the focal knobs as far out as they would go, searching for the point that would not ache his hawksight. When he found it, he blinked, slowly, right eye slightly preceding the left. He did not blink often. When he did, a moist translucent membrane slid across his whiteless eyes before his heavily lashed lids closed.

Three more Winged Ones arrived, all men, all naked, each as soundless as the next. For the first time, I wondered if they could talk at all. Perhaps their mouths, as human as my own, were only for eating.

I did not ask. Instead, I watched them.

They watched me with equal curiosity, although they seemed to be taking turns leveling their dark gazes at me so that they were not all staring at once. The dim red light from below illuminated the planes of their body, taut and stringy, all hollow bone and ropy sinew. The muscles in their legs and arms and stomach were long and tight from twisting with the currents of the wind, arcing against the pull of the earth, but their chests bulged like a bull’s. The great slabs of muscle rippled when they breathed or shifted their massive wings to squeeze by each other without knocking into any equipment. It was hard not to stare.

The rest of the night passed, silent but for the scratch of my pen and the muted rustling of feathers. I didn’t leave when the bell struck midnight. When the bright conjunction began to dim as the sky lightened to gray, the Winged Ones nodded to my father and stepped to the windowsill. Then, one by one, they leaned out, stretched their wings into the morning breeze, and slid heavily into the air.

I’d never been so close to a full-grown Winged man. It was still too dark to see each detail clearly, but I could tell that had the smallest of them spread his wings inside, he would have brushed the tower’s walls.

When I could no longer hear the sweep of wings though the rising mist, I looked up from my notes. My father was still bent over the eyepiece of his telescope, adjusting the dimmer to catch a last glimpse of the heavens, and sighed in defeat when a thin ray of pink reflected from the church’s windows in the village below. He stepped away from the telescope and rubbed his eyes as a dog barked in the kennels.

“Why did they come?” My voice was a harsh whisper, little more than a croak after a night of wakeful silence. I stuck my fingers, numb from gripping the pen in the cold, in my mouth and tried to suck life back into them as my father began to cap the lenses.

“It was a sacred night for the Winged Ones,” he replied, voice equally raspy. “The stars and planets are holy to them, and an alignment is a great omen. They take auguries from what they see in the heavens and think on how they can steer their lives by it.”

“Why didn’t they use their own telescopes?”

“They have none.” My father stepped back and threw a canvas cover over the telescope. “They cannot work with metal as we do. Everything they possess is light, light enough to carry in flight, no heavier than wood or flint slivers. They do not go underground to mine. They cannot forge with bellows and fire and they do not trust clear glass.”

He tugged the edges of the cover snugly over the sharp contours of the telescope and turned to me. “But they love telescopes,” he continued. “It opens the beauty of their sacred sky to them, and it draws them like all things that gleam and spin.” After a moment of idle thought, he added, “That’s why they like watches and weathervanes so. The old pastores put obsidian shard-gravel round the Rose-Crux on the steeple because the Winged Ones were always at it, urinating in the raingutter and molting on the congregation.”

And that is when I got my idea.