I hadn’t seen Sheshef since the fateful night at the nursery window years ago.

Not for sure, anyway. I knew she must be one of the smaller forms that lazily spiraled overhead on sunny days, blurred by the ripple of rock-heated air, and I had twice found the tough membranous remnants of half-chewed bat wings at the foot of my tower, but I neither heard nor saw her. Sometimes I thought of unhooking my binoculars from their brass peg in the Observation Tower and bringing them back to my tower, to seek her out in the flock from afar, but every time this thought crossed my mind, an overwhelming sense of preemptive peeping-tom guilt washed over me, leaving my face on fire and my stomach in a knot. What if her hawksight caught the flash of sun on lens and turned on me, my spying eyes magnified like a pair of brown-irised eggs? Shame, my burning face and taut stomach insisted, although I couldn’t articulate why. Shame and scorn. So the binoculars stayed in the Observation Tower.

But now I had a different way.

I started with the old lightning rod. I simply took it one night, pulling it from under the drifts of metal shavings in the corner behind the mill in the Observation Tower, brushing it off, and walking out. My father watched me for a moment and then turned back to his work.

It was heavy, scabbed with corrosion, and slightly melted at one end. Its replacement, I knew, was much slimmer and lighter, less likely to tear out tiles as it javelined down the slope of the roof after its mooring nails were melted to brittle spindles by a lighting strike so tremendous it blew out the glass in three windows.

It hid under my bed until Solday, smelling so strongly of old pennies I couldn’t believe the maid never discovered it while cleaning. I feigned sick that morning over breakfast, making what I hoped was a subtle yet persuasive show of picking at my food and swallowing with my eyes closed, and was summarily excused from the weekly hymn-mumbling with the rest of the household in the stuffy little chapel.

As soon as I had shuffled around the corner, I broke into a silent sprint and tried not to think about what I was about to do. I didn’t have much time.

The silver was off-limits; the butler kept obsessive tabs on everything, down to the last demitasse. The one time something had gone missing—a sugar spoon—he locked the entirety of the household staff into the dining room until it was located, three hours later, wedged in the hollow space behind the sideboard drawer. The maid he had originally accused of theft was bawling by the end, her great braying hee-haw sobs audible even through the stone walls. Renella herself had to make an apology on the butler’s behalf to prevent her from quitting that very day.

So it was to the Repair Room that I ran instead.

Things of great value broke in the house all the time: chandeliers, candelabras, pocketwatches, earrings. The room, hardly larger than a closet—it had previously been a pantry—was full of chipped corners, sharp edges, and clouded facests. They crowded every surface and spilled from shelves, unable to be contained, a grandmother pirate’s trousseau of fussy old treasure.

This was due to the fact that the items within were rarely repaired. The room would better have been referred to as the Closet of Broken Things. Nothing would be missed.

And yet the monetary value within was staggering. So when I reached the door, slightly pink in the face, it was locked, as per usual.

But oh, how locks opened to me. They were nothing compared to the inner workings of a telescope. The door yielded to the picks in my hands within a dozen rapid heartbeats.

I had no light, and the room had no window; the door had to remain open to see. Quickly then, quickly. Cracked vanity mirrors, a cut-glass necklace missing a clasp, the orphaned hinge of a crystal matchbox. Anything that glittered—or looked like it might, if scrubbed free of its patina and dust—all went into the bundle I had made of my overcoat, streaking the lining with tarnish and verdigris. An old parasol, waxed paper riddled with mouse-nibbled holes, completed the ensemble.

I paused only long enough to re-lock the door, trickier now that I had sliced my thumb on a shattered glass bauble, and ran up the stairs.

I worked on my contraption all that day and into the night. When all the household but my father was asleep, I crept out to the Observation Tower. In full sight of his silent, expressionless regard, I took several fine-toothed gears and a roll of soldering wire and crept back out.

I feigned illness all that day and the next, door barred with a deadbolt I myself had installed—but had not yet dared to employ—praying none would try to open it and discover what I’d done. They would all see it, soon enough, and pitch their fits. I only cared that I got what I wanted out of it first.

I worked in a state of fevered calm, somewhere between panic and bliss, immersed in a sea of concentration. Things fit together just so. And if they didn’t, I rearranged them until they did.

At last, I was done. It was evening—dinnertime. All would be busy in the kitchens and dining hall below. There would be no better time than this. I lingered only a moment to rub my reddened eyes and check the tension on the guy wires before hauling open the shutters on every single window, raising my hands above my head, and pulling the cotter pin.

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Weights dropped. Chains slithered. Gears spun. And then, slowly at first, but increasing in speed, my whirligig began to turn.

Truth to tell, it wasn’t much. The balance was off; the entire contraption wobbled as it rotated, and it made a sound like a drawer full of cutlery dropped down a mining chute. But I had bolted it to the floor, and it did not fail. Most importantly, it did what it was supposed to.

It glittered.

Light prismed from every facet, amber and gold in the setting sun, spattering my walls with flecks of light. They whirled around the inside of the tower like a shoal of minnows, a maelstrom of intangible delight. From the outside, it should appear as though my room sparkled. I sank down to my bed and watched, entranced.

So mesmerized was I by my own contraption, I didn’t notice that it had worked until the soft brush of feathers against wood startled me from my reverie.

She crouched there on the wide windowsill, pale skin nearly luminescent in the sunset, split ends haloing her head in a tawny nimbus, as bright-edged as the down at her shoulders. She hadn’t seen me yet; her whiteless eyes were fixed on the whirligig, following its motion with darting saccades. I held my breath.

She perched there for a moment, evening breeze luffing her hair and feathers, before stepping carefully to the floor, keeping her wings tightly folded to her back. They were mottled tones of gray—dove gray, storm gray, slate and cloud—and the same buff color of the chickens that ran in the yard, same as her hair. The muscles in her chest slid beneath her skin like the haunches of a horse.

She saw me then, though I hadn’t moved. Perhaps my gaze was felt. She froze then, muscles tense, but she did not look away.

I blinked.

Cloudy membranes flickered across her eyes.

“Hello,” I said softly.

She did not reply.

The whirligig was slowing now, the weight nearly at the bottom of its chain. I gestured at it slightly. “Would you like me to set it spinning again?”

She said nothing; she only stared at me, gray eyes fixed and unblinking as the contraption spun to a stop. I remembered then how she’d snapped the bat’s ribcage, how she’d painted herself with its blood. My hair prickled as it rose.

But then, so faintly I thought I might be imagining it, she nodded.

Slowly, slowly, I moved forward and winched the chain back to the top of its travel. As it fell, the whirligig began to spin once more.

Three times I reset the chain, and set the sparkles to dancing around the tower. Her eyes never left the whirligig. My eyes never left her face.

I had just reached forward to reset the whirligig for a fourth run when there was a knock on my door.

“Master deRye?”

I jumped. So did my visitor.

Our eyes met, somehow equally panicked.

“I’m Leo,” I said, voice cracking slightly. “Leonardo deRye. What’s your name?”

“Master deRye?” The knocking on the door grew more insistent. “Are you well?” It sounded like the butler.

“I’m fine! No—wait!” For no sooner had I shouted my answer than the Winged One I had so laboriously lured to my chamber had leaped to the windowsill, wings half-spread. I reached out to her, as though to hold her there.

The door thumped; the butler had tried to open it against the deadbolt. There was a muffled oath. I ignored it.

“Wait,” I begged, “what’s your name?”

But by the time I finished my sentence, I spoke to the empty air. She had flown away.

There was no way to hide what I had made. I didn’t even try. I simply slid the deadbolt back and opened the door to await my fate in silence.

The butler took one look at my contraption and sucked his lips into the tightest lemon-pucker I had ever seen. My stomach sank.

“Wait here,” he said curtly, and marched down the stairs.

When he returned, not five minutes later, Renella was marching right behind him. The blood drained from her face as she looked upon what I had wrought. I thought she might faint.

The butler evidently agreed, and reached into his vest pocket for what I presumed must be smelling salts—he kept them on hand ever since a soft-stomached maid passed out and fell down a flight of stairs after watching a grisly death match between a particularly large rat and a foolishly determined kitten—but Renella waved him off irritably.

“Fetch his Lordship,” she said, voice tight.

My father was evidently not pleased at having been interrupted in the middle of whatever it was he had been doing. He emerged from the stairwell scowling, fingers busy with re-settling his glasses on his face after what appeared to have been a prolonged bout of lens-polishing. But as soon as he saw the whirligig, his expression, too, changed. He grew extremely grave, but he said nothing. He took his glasses off, fiddled with them absently, smudging them once again, then put them back on. Then he approached, moving as slowly as I had with the Winged One—as though I were a Winged One he was trying not to frighten off.

The cracked vanity mirror was still twisting slightly where it hung, agitated by the evening breeze blowing in through my still-open windows. Father reached out and grasped it gently, then let it go again.

Then he looked at me with a tenderness I had never before seen. “How long did it take you to make this?” he asked softly.

“A day and a half.”

He looked back at the whirligig and fingered a chain. “May I see it?”

Renella made a noise. Father ignored her. He watched in silence as I pulled the chain once more, and kept his silence until the whirligig had once more spun to a halt. He looked down and scuffed his feet at where I had affixed the lighting rod to the floorboards. There was still sawdust from my hand-drilled holes.

“Make sure you clean up any grit,” he said, and walked out again, shutting the door behind himself.

He and Renella had the argument right then and there, outside my door. She started low, with a clipped hissing, but within five minutes she was screaming so loudly I couldn’t hear my father’s responses. I simply sat on my bed and stared sightlessly out the window. It wasn’t until my cheeks began to ache that I realized I was smiling.