She searched and searched until her wings and her eyes ached, thinking: “I couldn’t really be the only creature in the world like me, could I?”

After another long day of fruitless scouting, she was almost convinced that she was absolutely unique. It was a thought that made her desperate—and desperately lonely.

Then, just as the sun was setting, and she was about to turn back toward her loop, Ymeene flew over a forest clearing and spied below her a flock of kestrels—and among them, a young woman. It all happened in a flash. The kestrels saw her and took off, scattering into the woods. In the tumult, the young woman seemed to have disappeared. But where could she have gone so quickly?

Could she have turned into a kestrel and flown away with the others?

Ymeene dove after them and gave chase, and for an hour tried to track the kestrels down—but kestrels are the natural prey of goshawks, and they were terrified of Ymeene. She would have to try another approach.

It was dark. She returned to her loop, reset it, wolfed down five ears of roasted corn and two bowls of leek soup—flying all day was hungry work—and returned to the kestrels’ woods the next morning. This time she approached their clearing not from the air as a goshawk, but on foot as a human. When the kestrels saw her they flew up into the trees and sat watching her, cautious but unafraid. Ymeene stood in the middle of the clearing and addressed them not in human language, or in go-talk (the speech of goshawks), but in the few halting words of kestrel she knew, as well as her human throat could reproduce them.

“One among you is not like the others,” she said, “and it is to that young woman that I address myself. You are both bird and human. I am afflicted and blessed with the same ability, and I would very much like to speak with you.”

The spectacle of a human speaking kestrel incited a flurry of chittering in the trees, and then Ymeene heard a flap of wings. After a few moments, a young woman showed herself from behind a tree trunk. She had dark, smooth skin and close-cropped hair, a tall, finely boned frame that was distinctly birdlike, and she wore furs and leathers to protect against the cold.

“Can you understand me?” Ymeene asked her in English.

The young woman gave a tentative nod. A little, she seemed to say.

“Can you speak human?” said Ymeene.

“Sí, un poco,” replied the young woman.

Ymeene recognized the language as human but couldn’t understand the words. Perhaps the young woman was from a migratory clan, and had picked them up elsewhere.

“My name is Ymeene,” she said, indicating herself. “What’s yours?”

The young woman cleared her throat and made a loud cry in kestrel-ese.

“Perhaps we’ll just call you Miss Kestrel for now,” said Ymeene. “Miss Kestrel, I’ve an important question for you. Have you ever made something happen . . . more than once?”