I didn’t realize what was happening at first.

An old villa made many noises in the night. So accustomed was I to the sound of warping wood and settling stone that my dreams had long ago begun to incorporate them into their soundscape; the creaking of masts on a pirate’s ship; the cracking of whips on a runaway carriage. It wasn’t until I rolled over to settle myself in a brief moment of murky lucidity that I realized there was a figure at my window, and it was making the small metallic noises of lockpicking.

Even then, I thought I must be dreaming. I watched with distant somnolescent curiosity as the window latch—it wasn’t a true lock, obviously, who would need such a thing on the outside of a tower window?—trembled, fluttering like a butterfly’s wing, before rising from its catch and letting the window creak open.

The slice of frigid air that cut across the room was enough to rouse me instantly. This was not a dream.

The only muscle moving in my body was my heart. It began to gallop.

Into the patch of moonlight below the windowsill stepped a small, pale foot, followed by another, silent as the wheeling of the stars in the sky. The shadows of the mullioned windows slid across ghostly skin, barred black on milky white, blurring as it passed to the feathery gray of wings.

Slow and silent as a cloud, the Winged One crept into my room. She’d come back—had picked a lock to return to the contraption I had made, had made for her. My heart beat so forcefully it hurt.

She stopped when she reached the closest bauble—a crystal earring that had long ago lost its mate—and touched it gently. Her face was in shadow, and I could not see her expression. Only the gentle rise and fall of her wings as she breathed, and the wild snarls of her tawny hair, leached of all color in the moonlight to the same indistinct silver as the lighter patches on her wings. She moved from there to an old spring-steel corset bone dangling at the end of a chain, then crouched on her haunches to investigate where the lighting rod was bolted to the floor. She reached out gingerly.

Only then did I dare to sit up, as slow and silent as she. She didn’t notice; her fingers were busy exploring the square bolt-heads.

“I really wish I knew your name,” I murmured dreamily.

It was barely more than a whisper, but the effect was as though I had shouted. The Winged One leaped to her feet, still in a crouch so as not to hit her head on the branches or baubles of the whirligig, wings half-spread in a tense sickle. Her whiteless eyes were two pools of shadow in the dark, but I knew she looked at me.

I neither moved nor spoke. I merely waited.

At long last, her wings began to relax. She ducked out from beneath the whirligig and straightened, settling her wings against her back with a silken rustle. The motion set the slim silver tools on the chain around her neck to glinting on her bare chest.

Somehow I, the boy who could not bear to gaze upon an un-stockinged ankle for more than a moment before flushing with guilt, felt nothing more than an overwhelming desire to see her eyes. The rest of her was simply as she was; the nudity was no more than the natural order of things. I would sooner have blushed and quailed at the sight of the naked trees in winter.

But oh, how that image is burned into my mind.

We were of a height now; me sitting bolt upright in my bed, her standing at the foot of it. Her split ends and wing down stirred in the faint breeze.

She spoke then. It was the sound of summer wind soughing in the pines.

It took me a moment to understand. “That’s your name?”

She hesitated a moment, then nodded.

I tried it out for myself, the shape of it strange in my mouth. “Sheshef.”

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She cocked her head slightly. I suspected my accent was probably as bad as my kissing, but there was nothing to be done about it. I simply said, “My name is Leo.”

“Leo.” Her voice was not the melodious call of a songbird. It was soft, but sharp, like the chirrup of a kestrel.

“Yes. Leonardo deRye.”

She blinked, first with her nictitating membranes, then with her eyelids, white over black. Then she turned back to look at the whirligig. “You made this?”

“Yes.”

I expected her to ask me why, or what it was for, but instead she simply gazed at it for a long time.

“I like it,” she said at last.

Warmth flooded me. “I like it too.”

Having made this pronouncement, she turned and made as if to leave.

“You can stay,” I said quickly. “I don’t mind. I—you can stay.” I had almost told her I had made the whirligig for her.

But she shook her head. “I must go,” she said, in her soft hawk’s voice. “Before they notice I am gone.”

“Can you come back?”

She blinked again, thinking. “It is hard for me to see at night.”

Hawk’s eyes, not owl’s. I pointed at the whirligig. “This looks better in the daytime anyway. Sunset.”

“I can come?” she asked, excitement heating her voice. “In the day? They will let me?”

My face fell. Renella’s screams echoed in my memory. Sheshef saw my face, and her wings slumped, ever so slightly.

“Wait,” I said swiftly, hoping I sounded firm, rather than desperate. “Can I come to you?”

For the first time, her eyes showed expression; they widened. Still, there was no white. I could see only because the moonlight had caught the side of her face as she turned, and shone obliquely through her avian corneas. It was as though I were regarded by two moons. I shivered.

“You cannot climb that high,” she said flatly. “You would fall and die.”

“Can we meet somewhere then?” I realized even as I said it that she was coming here for my whirligig, not me. What could I offer her that she would like? I couldn’t very well lug a telescope up a cliff.

And then inspiration struck.

I nodded at her necklace, with its glittering, rudimentary shims. “I can bring my lockpicks to show you.”

Her hand flew to her neck, perhaps a little guiltily. “You have lockpicks?”

I smiled, a touch proudly, and nodded at the whirligig. “It’s how I got the supplies for that.”

Her hand dropped again. She looked impressed, and then thoughtful. Eventually, she nodded. “Yes.”

“Where?” I asked eagerly.

She settled her wings again, uncertainly. “I do not know your name for it.”

“What does it look like?”

“An old mine shaft entrance,” she replied, “on a south-facing cliff between a century oak and a stand of larch.”

There were hundreds, if not thousands, of abandoned mine shafts, on countless north-facing cliffs. The tree reference was of no help to me. “Could you find it on a map?” I asked, with only the faintest of hopes. Did Winged Ones even use maps?

But Sheshef brightened up immediately. “Yes!”

I ripped the covers off myself and leaped out of bed, my nightshirt flapping wildly. I liked maps. I had an entire atlas right here in my room, an expensive one, gifted to me by my father on my tenth birthday. But that was not what I sought. I had found an old prospector’s map deep in some forgotten corner of the villa and liberated it for my collection. It would serve now. I pulled it from my shelf and unrolled it on the floor, kneeling to keep it flat. The free edge still struggled to spring back into a coil until Sheshef joined me and pinned it in place with her own knees. Together we knelt upon it, heads together, with the stilled whirligig spreading above.

Maps, I discovered, were used extensively by Winged Ones. They are lightweight and easily folded or rolled for transport, and quickly recovered mid-air if dropped. The Feather Folk are in fact magnificently accomplished cartographers, whose skills far surpass our own, due to their natural vantage point and spatial reasoning. Why this is not better known to mankind, I can only attribute to rank bigotry.

But that was not what consumed my thoughts that night. As Sheshef found the mine shaft entrance in question, kneeling there on the floor in the moonlight, her feathers no more than an arm’s length away, all I could think about was how I longed to touch them: the sleek, rigid primaries, the glossy coverts, the down at her shoulder that faded imperceptibly to the mammalian peach-fuzz of her back.

And how I wished I weren’t so terrible at kissing.

We made our plans, and bade each other farewell; I with a formal, “Goodnight, Sheshef,” she with a susurrus of consonants that I presumed meant the equivalent in her own tongue. She leaped lightly to the windowsill and did not look back as she cast herself into the cold night air, wings flaring open as soon as she cleared the frame. She dropped at first, then beat the air a few times and rose, her wingspan wider than she was tall.

I thought for a moment that I saw movement from the Observation Tower, as though somebody had hastily moved away from a window, but then Sheshef circled back overhead and I leaned out of my own window, dangerously far, to keep her in sight.