The Nest
I smiled the day my sister hatched without wings.
Among the birdfolk, wings are a rarity. For my family, however, they are not a privilege. They’re an expectation.
Ravenworths do not tolerate useless children. They push their winged young to the front, to the spotlight, for all of their socialite friends to adore, for all of the clergy and the matchmakers to notice, and quietly tuck their wingless ones behind their skirts and feathers.
On the day I hatched, my mother and father were at a business meeting. The hatchery was stocked with a dozen hatchservants who specialized in egg care. The egg’s temperature, position, sunlight–everything was designed according to the latest trend or theory for how to produce the child with the grandest, most powerful wings.
Wings that were dipped in gold and somehow still lighter than air.
Wings made of clouds and sunshine, the breath of old gods transcending into the physical realm to rest upon the shoulders of a child.
Strange to think that the gods would care about how many blankets are wrapped around an egg during its third nesting month and whether those blankets are made up of dyed wool or cotton, but those theories tend to reside in that realm of quackery. They either refer to the ancient gods and the mythology of birdfolk ancestors, or they spiral into the precise positioning of an egg based on such-and-such research done by one doctor without supervision fifty years ago. Sometimes both.
If this was not my story, and someone asked me whether I thought any of those methods would work, I would tell you no. I’ve read the latest in genetic research and studied up on wing growth and development in birdfolk–it’s all very interesting, actually– and it’s basically chance. Not morals, not heat, not the timing of the egg’s conception during the seasons. Chance.
Chance that, of course, increases or decreases based on the genetic pool one is working with. The Ravenworths have a very shallow pool.
However, this is my story, so I suppose the hatchservants must have done something terribly right.
I was born with the best wings in Oakheart.
I’m not bragging, but I should be more specific. The story, after all, has been recounted to me more times than I can count. My wingspan was sixteen handwidths when I was born. The previously held record was eight. The black baby feathers caught the sunlight and shimmered, rainbows shifting across the glossy night, the speckled gray shell bursting around them the instant I stretched my wings.
Hatchlings normally need to struggle for their shell to break, their wings or their legs unwinding and slowly tearing through the soft velvety eggs. I did not struggle. It was instantaneous–thoughtless, even–like I could have done it the whole time and I had just decided that moment was convenient for revealing myself.
When hatchlings break through their shells, they tend to have the strength to sit up and crawl after a couple of hours of getting used to the explosion of sensations outside of their egg and testing the mobility of their little limbs.
When my parents got the news about my hatching, they raced home, and they didn’t ask about my sex or my health. They asked about my wings, and they were not disappointed.
“And there my baby daughter was, with her perfect, strong, beautiful wings,” my mother would crow any chance she got. “I couldn’t even carry you at first, your wings were so big.”
They gave me the name Farwen. I don’t know if the name was an afterthought or something they had planned to be just perfect for their winged Ravenworth. They never really mention that part of the hatching.
