“Why were you so surprised when I said I had never made paper?”

Sheshef looked up from where she lay nestled in the crook of my arm, dark eyes gleaming. We were in the forest, secreted in a thicket of ferns, hidden from sharp eyes above and dull eyes below alike. The back of my shirt was damp and moss-stained, utterly ruined, but I didn’t care. Sheshef tasted like pine resin and something savory that I could not identify, and her wings were as I had always known they would be; downy-soft, flight-sleek. I could not keep my hands from them, my touch as light as her feathers. She seemed as pleased by my awe and admiration as I was to have her beside me.

“All Hashaa make paper,” she replied evenly, and resettled her wings against me. My skin goosepimpled under their brush. “It is the first thing children learn to make, even before fire. Paper and ink, so that we may write, and carry our writing with us.”

“Do you write?”

“Sometimes.” She ran her fingers over the line of my jaw. “I prefer the making of things.”

“Like the rose you made me.”

“Yes. And the beads.”

“Beads?”

Sheshef stretched her arms out and touched her bracelet. “Yes. These are paper.”

“Not wood?”

“No. Paper and resin and paint.”

“May I…?”

She held her wrist out to me. I began to untie the cord there, strung with beads of red and yellow and blue and black, bright against her pale skin, taking care to be as gentle with her skin as with her feathers. I didn’t want to hurt her.

When the bracelet was off, I held it close to my face. Only then could I see each bead was a coil of paper, lighter even than wood. Everything must be light to fly; the musculature beneath her skin could only do so much. My hand drifted to her again, to stroke the muscles running across her chest. Her nictitating membranes half-closed in pleasure.

And then suddenly she was upon me, wings half-raised, straddling my hips, disconcertingly light. My hand spasmed around the beads. She gazed down at me, eyes clear once more. “Make love to me.”

“I—”

She began to unlace my trousers.

“No!” I half-sat, hands scrabbling at the dirt and moss, digging under my fingernails. “Sheshef, I—”

She straightened up and looked at me. “You do not want me?”

“Oh my God, Sheshef, I want you.” Even if I hadn’t said anything, she’d be able to feel my want. “But it’s not safe.”

“Safe?”

“I can’t get you pregnant,” I said flatly. “I mean, I could get you pregnant. That’s the problem.”

“Mmm.” Sheshef traced the lines of my trousers. I shuddered beneath her touch. Maybe, my mind whispered, if we just—

No, I told myself firmly.

“Please,” I begged. She looked down at me pitilessly, weightless as a basket. “Please, we can’t. The risk is too high. I don’t want to hurt you.”

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“You won’t hurt me,” she said softly. “You are gentle. I will stay on top.”

“No, I—” My words lost themselves on the way out as her hand slipped inside my trousers. I managed nothing more than an indistinct groan before I regained my senses, and by then, it was almost too late—

“My mother died!” I screamed desperately.

That got her attention. She froze.

“My mother was mad,” I rushed on, frayed by despair and lust, “and she died giving birth to me. If I got you pregnant—”

“I would not die,” she said simply.

“No,” I agreed, “no, I know, you’d—”

“I would make a nest,” she said, voice dreamy. “For our egg.”

“Your flock would banish you!”

“My flock,” she said bitterly, and folded her wings against her back with an angry snap. “They are not worth the worrying. Moth-brained, all of them. I would make a nest in your towers.”

I thought suddenly of Francesca’s great-great-grandmother, the one who bore a mer-man’s child, and wondered if her lover had made protestations such as mine. Surely, the fire in eyes of the women they held was the same. Had he cared? Or had he just taken his pleasure and throught nothing of the consequences?

I would not do that to her.

“Our child would be mad, Sheshef,” I said. “All half-Winged are.”

Sheshef tilted her head. “Our child would not be half-Winged.”

I opened my mouth to object, and froze.

She was right.

Our child would be five-eighths Winged.

Did that make a difference?

Sheshef leaned forward and kissed my open mouth. “I am not ready to brood yet,” she said matter-of-factly, once she pulled away. “We will do other things.”

“Other th—”

And that was the last I managed to speak for a while.

🜁

Five-eighths.

I thought about it all summer, even as Sheshef and I took care to limit ourselves to the Other Things. What she wanted was utterly impossible, of course; she would be banished and reviled, I would be—I didn't even know what I would be. A major embarrassment, if nothing else. Renella might expire on the spot, like my paternal grandmother had. It would certainly undo all her hard work. And I would not abandon Sheshef with any child of mine. I would not do that to her. I would not do that to my child.

I found myself thinking of this imaginary future child, in the moments when I was not altogether preoccupied with the Other Things Sheshef and I were doing wherever we could find a sufficiently secluded spot: our bower of bracken, the entrance to the mine shaft where I’d taught her to pick locks, one glorious, secretive full-moon midnight in my tower room that left me picking down from my bedsheets for an hour afterwards, lest they be found by the maid in the morning. In the middle of filing a burr from a gear with my father, I would get a sudden flash of vision; a little boy, his dark hair tousled and cheeks flushed, nictitating membranes flickering over his whiteless eyes with wonder as I showed him a spinning gear. Or, while putting on a sock; a little girl, toddling across the room, storm-gray wings flaring for balance. Would they have wings like Sheshef, or ouïes like me?

Would they be mad?

“Father.”

My father looked up from where he was polishing a lens and resettled his spectacles. “Yes?”

I swallowed. I had been dithering all summer about whether to ask him or not, but now was my last chance. I left for school the following day. I would ask him—I had to know, I had to, even if it meant revealing my own secret—but I could not meet his eyes. I looked down, cheeks flaming.

“Would a child who was five-eights Winged be mad?”

My father grew very still. I don’t think he even breathed. I didn’t either.

“I don’t know,” he replied at last, very slowly. “Leo…”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” I said tightly, and looked up with what I hoped was a firm and manly gaze. “I was just curious.”

Father regarded me with an expression I had never before seen on his face. “Leo…” he started again.

“Nothing to worry about,” I repeated, and looked down once more. I began buffing the lens I held with single-minded vigor.

Neither of us spoke again.

🜁

As the carriage took me back to Queen’s University the next day, rattling and bumping down the steep and rocky road, I realized there was, in fact, one other person who might know the answer—assuming I dared to ask him. And I knew, as I slid my hand under my shirt to feel the necklace of paper beads hidden there, black and white and blue, that I didn’t dare. It would be too much. Too far.

I looked out the window, at the trees and sky and the shadow that slid over the cliff face from high above, and my heart leaped with equal measures adoration and despair.

I had to find another way to answer my question, but I didn’t know how.