I distract myself from his gymnastics routine by scrubbing the figurehead until its every tiny painted pore is clean. All the while, I try to put things here in perspective by thinking of them in terms of my old life.
This boy, Dai, he’s nothing to me. He’s essentially one of the kids from school, tramping down the hallway, not super interesting.
But um, except not really at all. And I can feel Magonia sidling up around the edges of my brain.
I should be grateful, it says. I’m walking around. I can breathe. I’m not the dead girl I was always going to be.
I’m something else. Something important. What? No clue.
It’s different here. Aza, YOU are different here. Better?
But no.
Even if I’m in this place for the rest of my life. Even if I never see my family and Jason again, I can’t forget them. I won’t. Because, what if I forget myself along with them? Who will I be then?
I scrub until my fingers bleed blue, and as I scrub, I chant.
“Jason, Eli, Greta, and Henry. Jason Eli Greta Henry. Jasoneligretahenry. And Aza.”
When I look up, Zal’s standing above me, a disappointed look on her face.
She kneels, and extends her hand to help me back on deck.
“I started out at the lowest rank on this ship and made my way up to captain, faster than anyone imagined,” she tells me. “These were the years when everything went wrong. Magonian ships couldn’t harvest enough to sustain even our own sailors. Our squallwhales sickened. Our people began to know hunger.
“Our problems are worse now than they were before. The world is overtaken with drowner poisons. Magonians suffer and die. We’re at their mercy.
“You’ll soon understand, Aza, what it means to be in charge of the future of your people. Some of us are born to crew ships, and some are born to captain them. This ship was my salvation, as it will be yours. And as you will be to your people.”
Zal puts her hand on my back, and it feels strangely good. Is it because she’s my mother? Or is it because of her power aboard the ship? Is it because part of me likes being in favor, being special?
“Amina Pennarum sails for treasure, Aza,” Zal whispers. “You’ll be the one who raises it from the deep.”
“Treasure?” I ask. “What do you mean?”
“Learn to sing for us,” she says. “And you’ll see. You must see.”
My brain whirrs. Is there actually still treasure in the world? The notion is exciting. I think about curses and pirates. Skeletons guarding booby-trapped hideaways.
I think about the bird I keep hearing—the one who, every night, sings along with my emotions, my pain—the one Wedda called a ghost.
I mean, obviously it’s not really a ghost? But what do I know about Magonia? There could easily be ghosts all over this sky. I wouldn’t know about it. I’m a stranger here.
Zal takes the ship’s wheel, her charts open to some highly cartographed territory. I can see monsters drawn in the margins.
Below us, for a moment, I see a flash of earth, but then a squallwhale comes between us and the ground, stirring the air until there is only cloud, and we’re only a thing hidden inside it.
Jason (stop it, Aza, just stop thinking about him, just stop) would love it here. He’d be prowling around with his hands out, asking question after question after question. And people would answer him, because he never met an expert who wouldn’t tell him anything he wanted to know.
He never met a fact he didn’t want to add to his secret fact-hoard either.
There were things Jason didn’t know, of course, but in the realm of the memorizable, not that much as far as I could tell.
What did he not know? How to be a normal person? Neither did I. But apparently I have a better excuse.
God. Jason, my best friend and the most annoying thing, who’d rattle off a thirty-minute monologue of his mind’s flotsam and jetsam and then cackle when I didn’t have the same levels of geekitude at my disposal.
Jason, who once forced me to dance in front of all the curators at a museum because I lost a bet.
Jason, who once in a while, when I’d be coughing, wouldn’t even be there at all. He’d be standing right next to me, yes, but inside he’d just be a frantic calculating machine, tallying oxygen percentages and dust quotients, pollens and amounts of time between wherever we were and the hospital.
Which I hated, because it reminded me that I was sick.
Some days he’d be muttering to himself, diagramming things he wouldn’t show me, thinking things he wouldn’t discuss.
So he wasn’t perfect, Aza. He wasn’t. It’s just that your brain keeps trying to revise him into something he never was. Never mind that the moment you saw him, your first memory of him in the alligator suit, you thought, Oh god, finally, someone like me.
He’s not like me.
He’s human.
Right, then.
Shut up, Aza’s brain. Shut up.
I hear, from far off inside our ship, the awful cry of that invisible bird again.
No, he sings. Leave me or kill me.
He shifts into wordless screaming, which chills my whole body. The ghost bird—Caru, I remember his name now—sings again, an anguished wail. Everyone pretends it’s not happening. Everyone ignores him.
I try to block out the sound, but then, from nowhere, I get flashes of something I can’t quite—
Someone leaning over me in a crib.
For a moment I see my own tiny hand held in a black gloved one.
And that’s all I have, a gasp of a memory.
Kill me, the ghost bird screams. Broken heart. Broken string.
I’m jolted again by Dai shaking my shoulder.
“Move, if you’re not working,” he says. “You’re in the way of the nets.”
“Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“The bird?”
He tilts his head. “No,” he says.
What am I remembering?
I tug Dai’s sleeve. “Magonian babies. What are they like?”
“They?” he says. “We. We hatch. A lot smarter than drowner babies when we do.” He struts a little. “I can remember my own hatching.”
I don’t give him the satisfaction of seeming impressed.
“The screaming bird?”
“The ghost,” Dai says tersely.
“Is it a canwr?”
“That’s two questions,” he says grumpily. “Or four, depending how you count.”
“Dai, please.”
“Just—” he hisses, glances around, then pulls me away from the nearest crew members. “Just let it go, Aza. The ghost’s been agitated since you came aboard.”
I pause, thinking. “But, if it is a ghost, it was something else. What was it?”
Dai sighs, impatient with my ignorance. “A heartbird.”
“What’s a heartbird?”
All he says, after a minute, is, “Heartbirds are special, but this one was broken long ago. He can’t hurt you. He’s gone but for his sorrow. I assume that’s why he lingers here.”
“Are you sure he’s—”
“I’ve never seen him, Aza, and I would have if he were real. He’s nothing. Old sadness with a loud voice. Broken bonds are serious things. Sometimes death doesn’t close them. Feed the sail.”
He hands me a small net, and points me toward the fat moths batting about the ship’s lights.
When I bring it its wriggling meal, the batsail looks at me and I look back at it. Its obsidian eyes are weary, and . . . kind?
It sings softly so only I can hear.
Find him, the bat trills. Heartbird.
That night, I sleep badly in my strange hammock; I dream of being kidnapped, of being lost, and of losing everything, and all night, the heartbird’s song haunts my sleep.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
>
Dai and I are out on deck at twilight, sharing watch, peering off into the sky. There’s nothing in view, just a darkening not-much, a shiplessness.
I think about the crew’s tall tales—the ones I’ve overheard or, lately, asked about. They’re reluctant to share with me; they peek around corners, drop their voices to a whisper. Still, I’m learning.
They talk about airkraken, and about ghost ships in the skylanes. They whisper about fields of Magonian epiphytes, these magic plants that can grow in the air. These plants were once so common, they’d halt Magonian ships. Fields of them all over the sky, and their roots would tangle in the batsails’ wings until the Rostrae grew weary, and they fell from the sky.
Some of must be pure legend, of course. But some of it seems worryingly plausible. So it’s not crazy that I’m constantly looking over my shoulder, off the deck rail. If the crew is to be believed, there’s plenty to be afraid of.
“What am I doing?” I mutter to myself after I’ve been staring into the dark for a while. “Nothing’s out there.”
“Everything’s out there,” Dai says.
He’s pacing, and I’m dithering starboard. Despite the cold, he’s shirtless, possibly just to stress me out. His canwr, Svilken, is in and out of his chest, singing and chattering to the birds above us in the cote.
Against my will, Dai’s biceps keep appearing in my peripheral as he climbs around in the rigging and circles the deck. Magonians are casual about nudity, and seem not to feel cold.
Well, unless they’re me. Apparently my ability to regulate my core temperature was ruined by years in the milder climate of the undersky. I have no likelihood of shedding my shirt out here.
Also, I’m still Aza from earth so shirt-shedding? Never, never, no, and no.
I’ve been on Amina Pennarum almost four weeks, or at least, that’s what I can count. I’ve started understanding things, started remembering that I do, in fact, have a brain, even if I’m new to this world. And I may not be singing the way Dai desperately wants me to, but I can listen.
Periodically another ship comes alongside us, unloads our holds, and takes our harvests to Maganwetar—the Magonian capital. So there’s plenty of food around, but as far as ship’s rations go, the crew—the Rostrae—live on what seem to be cakes of birdseed.
There are no plants in Magonia, of course. So our foraging from earth, our storm creation, is necessary.
Up here, all the weird things people see from below and wonder about make sense: the freak snowstorms, the rains from sunny skies, the way a wind can kick up out of nowhere and blast half a city block. Super tornadoes. Hurricanes. Giant thunderstorm cells?
Magonia, all of it.
Apparently, once, in the 1600s, Magonia harvested a bunch of fields of blooming tulips from Holland, because Magonians assumed the tulips were food. They weren’t. Disgusted Magonian ships ended up dropping tulips from the sky, and the poor people of Amsterdam must have been utterly bewildered. It was like a rain of frogs, but flowers instead, and it made a mess of the economy.
(I would’ve loved to have seen that.)
The Rostrae do most of the hard work—both onboard and during harvest. When they visit earth, and drop below a certain height, they transform from the human-bird hybrids on deck up here, into normal-looking birds.
The Rostrae know basically everything about all things sky-related, so I make conversation where I can.
The golden eagle told me a story about the extinction of passenger pigeons.
“The horizon used to be full of silver ships crewed by them,” the eagle said. “To hear my ancestors tell it, they’d stretch to the edges of the sky. But they were all gone by the time I was born. An entire race exterminated. The drowners shot into the sky and ate them.”
She shuddered then, understandably. Because, genocide.
“The drowners tried to kill my own tribe too. Eagles’ eggs went soft and broken, because our nesting areas were destroyed. But we survived. We’ll survive Magonia too. Perhaps you’ll be the one who helps us, Captain’s Daughter.”
Before I can ask how, or what she means, she takes flight, and around her talons her chains glint. When she flies, she tugs Amina Pennarum higher.
No one here seems to question their duties, or their station. The whole ship sings the same tune.
The ghost—the heartbird, Caru—is the only thing that disobeys, the only creature that dares to be dissonant.
He screams no matter what Zal says. The bird’s voice is so agonized, so painful, so lonely, that I feel tears starting every time I hear it.
He’s singing now, in the growing dark.
A few of the squallwhales come closer to the ship, pinging at Milekt, who informs them snarkily that I’m only sad. Not hurt.
Will she cry a storm? one of the calves asks, and I can feel its pleasure in my tears. All it has to compare them to is the squallwhale storms. It can hardly be expected to understand human sadness.
“I’m not even crying,” I protest. “I’m fine.”
The mother squallwhale looks at me with first one eye, then the other, buffeting bits of gray storm about with her feathery fins.
Sing, she recommends, like I’m her calf.
I frown. It’s not as though I need yet another mother.
I scrub my face with my sleeve.
Magonia functions in other ways I have yet to understand. Earlier tonight, another ship sent us a message by shooting a glowing arrow with a letter attached to it onto our deck.
“Among the drowners, I’ve heard they call that a shooting star,” Jik told me out the side of her mouth. I imagined the astronomers below us watching this light arc across the dark, charting it. “Here, it’s a letter from captain to captain.”
Zal pored over the message.
“Stay on course,” she muttered at last to Dai. “They acknowledge the loss of the spyglass and demand a fine. They’ve employed a Breath to fetch it and clean up any repercussions. They don’t know about Aza.”
“Better than expected,” said Dai, and he nodded.
“What do you mean, clean up repercussions? What do you mean, don’t know about me?” I asked, relying on her lack of focus. Also, the word “Breath”—I keep hearing people use it, and I still don’t know what it means.
“The capital knows I brought a harvest up from below, and that in doing so, I lost the spyglass. Maganwetar tracks everything. The loss of the glass wouldn’t have escaped their attention. Artifacts from Magonia have fallen amongst the drowners before, and created undue interest from below. Those who dropped them were punished.”
“Why couldn’t you say you were recovering your daughter?” I asked her. “Are you ashamed of me?”
She looked at me in a way that said I’d missed every memo ever sent.
“Far from it, Aza. You are the answer to everything. And, simply, I could not,” she said.
So—onward, into mystery.
Sometimes the air around us is warm, and other times there’s ice in my hair, and Milekt complains and roosts in my chest, irritated. Milekt is a grumpy teacher. In between irritations, he drills me in Magonian alphabets, which are sung rather than spoken. I spend my time singing ABCs. I’ve reversed course and become three years old again. How am I supposed to learn a whole language in just a few weeks? How am I supposed to know everything everyone else knows?
I catch Dai staring at me, concentration in every line of his insanely beautiful face, but he looks away fast, like he got busted leaning sideways to get a look at my homework.
I sing Magonian ABCs silently in my head, and gaze out into the mist—there, a dotted line coming in from the horizon, above the clouds, up where the highest insects float. Bats. A whole colony of them.
They angle toward the boat and part in two when they meet the prow. Then they soar further up into the sky. One of the bats brushes against my cheek.
They remind me of hotel maids, these creatures. Industrious, rolling the evening into alignment, straightening it with
small pulls, high voices chattering in a song that now I hear and a little bit understand.
Hunter, this bat informs me, its voice high, and I say it back as well as I can, proud that I’m starting to learn how to speak its language.
The little bat looks out into the night, at something I can’t see. Hunter, it says again, looking at me. The batsail looks down at us. Hunter, it echoes. The ghost bird cries out from below.
I peer off into the bluish dark. We’re drifting into a cloud of smoke. Not clouds—no, actual, thick acrid smoke.
There’s something over there, something kind of roiling, something full of bright spots. A flash of lightning resolves into a long streak of white.
A creature.
Something with a lot of teeth and then it’s gone.
I’m sprinting to Dai.
“What’s that?” I ask, stabbing my finger urgently in the direction of the chaos.
He squints at the thing happening not that far from us. Not that far at all. He looks worried. Seeing his expression makes me feel I should be worried too.
“Stormsharks,” he says, and he adjusts the knife in his belt.
Did he just say stormsharks? My inner nerd is elated. Can anything I will ever hear from now until the end of time sound cooler than stormsharks?
Dai steps protectively between me and the ship’s rail.
“Um, do I need to freak out?”
“As long as they already have something, they’re not coming for us,” he says. He squints at the twisting mass of white dappled dark. There’s something in the center of it, something I can’t quite see. Our bearing takes us closer. Twenty feet, now fifteen.
A mast. Sails. A ship. And white flames all around it.
A high, high call from the ship’s batsail. Comrades, it cries. Distress! DISTRESS!
A flash of lightning and I see things better suddenly. A pointed mouth, open wide, and a stormshark leaps up out of the sky and over the mast of the other ship. More distress calls.
“By the Breath!” Dai curses. “We have to intervene!” He takes off running. “Captain!”
Our batsail opens its wings and our Rostrae surge up, tugging lines, throwing hooks and ropes overboard and flying at the fray. Zal’s on deck, shouting. She sees me and barks an order. “Belowdecks! You’re not here!”