Ray Cummings 
Aerita of the Light Country 

Aerita of the Light Country is Cummings’ final novel of the winged women of Mercury. Years have passed, and the doings of Tama, Princess of Mercury, have become the stuff of legend to the women of the Light Country. But now tyranny threatens the winged daughters of the first planet again, and one fearless young woman, Aerita, inspired by the stories of Tama, locates Guy Palisse’s legendary spacecar and blasts off for Earth in search of help.

There she finds herself a prisoner in a traveling menagerie, taken captive and presented to the public as a strange creature from South America. Then Alan Grant steps into the tawdry sideshow where Aerita is being held to kill an idle hour—and found himself plunged head-over-heels into a maelstrom of battling adventure that took him across a hundred million miles of space, involved him in a vast civil war on an alien planet, and shouldered him with the fearsome responsibility for the safety of Earth!