Chapter 1
Ezra Bright had fallen asleep on the face of an angel.
The act was neither as wondrous nor as blasphemous as it sounded—seeing as the celestial being was a drawing on a very old page.
Still Ezra couldn’t help but feel a bit guilty as he wiped the sleep from his eyes.
His advisor back at Oxford would consider using a medieval-era manuscript as a pillow to be sacrilege.
The angel itself didn’t seem too miffed.
It stared back with a placid expression, halo shining almost as brightly as it had when the monk scribe first applied the gilding four hundred years ago.
Thank God he hadn’t drooled.
Ezra was usually far more careful with books.
He’d been in their debt from the moment his mother had first started reading to him by the light of an oil lamp.
Not the shiny brass contraptions that sunburnt British men toted around in the Valley of the Kings, but a humble ceramic pot that was much more fit for lighting desert tombs.
He was fairly certain his mother had used the lamp for such a purpose, once he was safely tucked in bed and serenaded by the Nile’s lullaby.
There were nights when he’d awoken for a glass of water, only to find there was no one to bring it to him.
Mornings when his mother’s shoes were filled with the sort of fine sand that you could only find beyond the streets of Luxor.
He’d always meant to ask her why she’d been wandering out into the desert.
Was it to see the stars? Was it to loot some of the tombs the aamus hadn’t discovered yet?
(This was what Ezra’s mother called the foreigners when it was just them—when she felt free to speak her mind, and her first language.) Secret treasure might explain the steady flow of money that kept a young woman and her fatherless child in such a fancy flat, so close to the river.
It would also explain the antiquities that turned up around the house—scarabs carved out of amethyst and turquoise and lapis lazuli, amulets engraved with the Eye of Horus, jars that held kohl, jars that kept… other things.
Sometimes, at night, whenever his mother was gone, the boy imagined he could hear the jeweled bugs scuttling outside his bedroom door.
This might’ve delighted him if it had only been the insects, but sometimes his mother brought home mummified cats, and the prospect of them prowling around the parlor with their wrappings slowly falling away was enough to keep the child under his covers.
He thought of the bedtime stories his mother had read him—tales where men could use their magic to lasso sunbeams or steal secrets from the forked tongues of serpents or trade bodies with more majestic beasts.
Where death could be swindled as easily as an aamu at the market.
The boy knew these tales backward and forward.
He sometimes had dreams where he was the main character, sprouting hawk wings and soaring out over the blue-green tapestry of the Nile Delta.
Where he caught falling stars in his hands and turned them into jewels.
Where he cried every single tear in his body and collected them in a shallow bowl, until their reflection started to show the future.
Where he was never afraid, because he knew the worst could never happen. He knew The End.
When Ezra grew older, after Ezra became Ezra, he realized that no one else he’d met—Egyptian, English, or otherwise—had heard of these tales.
Whenever he recounted them, the response was always a curiously twisted face.
It made something inside Ezra twist too.
It prompted him to search every single bookshop in London, even the barrows lining the curbside of Shoreditch High Street, in hopes that he might stumble across a copy of the book his mother had read to him.
Alas, he could not remember the title. He could barely remember the cover, only that the stories had fit quite precisely in his mother’s brown hands.
That image felt far too small for his memories of the stories within. It felt too small for his mother too.
He couldn’t remember her face—at least, not as clearly as the inked angel he was currently staring at.
Ezra blinked and rubbed his eyes again. His surroundings settled into place.
He wasn’t at the paper-besieged desk inside his flat, nor was he in some forgotten corner of the Ashmolean.
This museum was far larger. A glance at his wristwatch told Ezra it was well past midnight.
Not that London took any heed of this. Sounds of life growled outside the British Museum’s windows: Automobiles rattled down cobblestone streets, and jazz bands made the night a little less dark.
Ezra carefully closed the book, peeling off his gloves and collecting the notes he’d accrued earlier in the evening.
He really should get back to the boardinghouse.
He couldn’t spend the rest of the night at the British Museum.
It was essential that Ezra stayed in their good graces—the collections here were beyond the scope of what he could’ve imagined when he proposed his doctoral dissertation to Professor Blythe.
I want to search for wings was how he’d first worded it.
This, of course, had gotten a rise out of his advisor’s incredibly bushy eyebrows.
“Then I suggest walking down to the Department of Zoology. There are several ornithologists who’d be happy to show you drawers of dead birds—”
“Not bird wings.” Ezra felt his heart pounding the way it had in the trenches.
The way it had when he’d seen an… Don’t say angel, he thought.
Don’t give him any reason to discredit you.
“It’s just that, in all the cultures of antiquity, there’s a common thread of symbolism.
Winged beings show up in almost every mythology—there are Valkyries in Norse lore and Harpies in Greek.
German swan maidens, the peri from Persia, the genies from Assyria.
I could list at least ten more examples off the top of my head. ”
“It’s called a motif, Mr. Bright. Humanity’s fascination with flight is nothing new.
Even in this modern age, we gawp at the war’s fighter aces.
” The professor had glanced at the bold sky outside his office window—made even bluer for its odd panes of stained glass—and sighed.
“So you propose to map out our evolutionary obsession with flying into the sun?”
Ezra had looked out the window too. He could taste that childhood dream on his tongue: the one where he’d spread his wings across the desert and grabbed sunlight with his bare palms. His own hands had started to grow sweaty, but he folded them calmly over his lap.
“Icarus can’t be the only one,” he’d said. “I’d like to dig deeper to find more comparable myths—and yes, I’d like to map out the spread of these stories throughout history. I’d like to see where they meet and diverge.”
I want to know if there’s any truth to them.
“You’re a very intelligent young man, Mr. Bright.
I daresay you’d be here at the college even without your connections to the Ellingtons, but I believe this idea sounds a bit…
unwieldy. Do you propose to dive into every known mythology on earth?
To what end? If I were you, I’d narrow my focus to mythologies I’m more familiar with: Egyptian, obviously.
” Ezra got the impression it wasn’t his undergraduate degree Professor Blythe was referring to, but more outward characteristics.
Lashes so dark and long that flappers sometimes asked what kind of mascara he used.
A strong, straight nose. Skin that browned easily under too much sun.
“Perhaps you could compare the Greek and Egyptian pantheons. They were neighbors and trading partners after all, so there’s merit to the idea that they would’ve shared myths as well. ”
Everything inside Ezra wanted to flinch at this, wanted to point out that Egypt could stand on its own, as a subject of scholarly study. He didn’t need a Western pantheon to legitimize his ancestors’ gods.
But he did need Blythe’s blessing.
So he shook his head and tightened his sweating hands. “Give me three months to come up with a proper proposal, sir.”
Professor Blythe had sighed again. “Normally, my answer would be no, Ezra, but I’d be lying to say I wasn’t curious about this potential compendium of angels.”
Ezra exhaled. He hadn’t said the word. It felt like that counted for something. “Thank you—”
“Don’t thank me yet. You have two months to convince me that your idea has legs. Much less wings,” the professor said with a little laugh. “Try not to fly too far into the sun, Mr. Bright.”
Ezra had gone to London by train. While a normal visitor might have ridden in a double-decker bus around Piccadilly Circus or gaped through the crested gates at Buckingham Palace, he’d spent the past three weeks searching the British Museum’s archives for wings.
There were plenty to be found. They graced Byzantine rings, Ethiopian paintings, talismans from ancient Rome, Greek vases, Renaissance artwork, triptychs and tiles and tokens and textiles.
Ezra could hardly turn around in the exhibition halls without spotting a winged god.
He’d tried his damnedest to catalog it all.
He’d gone through five fountain pens, ten notebooks, and two pairs of gloves.
Twenty-one days in and he’d only touched a fraction of the museum’s collection.