Wedda shifts in her berth and her chains jingle softly against each other.
Almost a wind chime, almost a song.
So many tied to this ship, I think. Would they all rather be free? Would they be better off that way? Or are they safe here from the famine that afflicts the cities? Is this ship their home?
The solution to starvation seems so simple. Just a matter of providing food to a bunch of people who are hungry. Jason’s mom Eve once told me that if everyone shared the resources they had, there’d be enough for everyone. Instead, we have this— parts of the world that have too much, and other parts that have nothing.
Magonia has nothing.
I think about Dai’s family. I think about Dai. I think about how I’ve never been hungry. I think about how I’ve never even really thought about hunger before.
Nothing is perfect here. Nothing is perfect down there either.
I spend the next few days privately trying to figure out where the captain’s canwr is hidden, and publicly practicing the old Magonian songs Milekt and Dai have taught me. I sing the moisture in the air into sand, then the sand back into water. I sing quietly, tiny things, a small piece of ice made of a drop of rain, a drop of rain made of a stone. I sing things into their opposites.
I’m not perfect yet. Sometimes a note makes the air crackle, and Milekt scolds me. Sometimes a note meant to turn water to stone turns it to fire instead, and Milekt shrills and pecks me inside the lung.
But not so secretly, I keep hold of the missed note. Because water into fire? Um, hell yes.
It keeps me from obsessing about the sad song of Caru, and the dark misery I feel rising up inside me when I listen to it.
I have to find him.
I roam the ship, looking in every passage, but nothing. I search the bottom of the ship, in the cells, but I see only blackness, not even Ley, our prisoner, nor any of the other pirate prisoners either, which makes me wonder what Zal’s done with them. Could they be dead? Did she throw them overboard while I was sleeping?
And there’s no real bird. No ghost bird.
Is there some part of Amina Pennarum I still haven’t discovered?
In the mornings, we’re over silver-gray ocean, and icebergs. We keep sailing. Tiny little ice islands dot the water below.
Out in the Magonian sky, I see planes passing each other by. Each one its own world full of passengers, entwined with one another, overlapping one another, unaware of the rest of the people flying past out there in the air.
Just as earth is unaware of Magonia.
It’s freezing. Even Dai’s wearing a winter uniform, and Wedda dresses me in multiple layers of woven feathers beneath my spider-silk jersey and jacket.
I’m sitting in the captain’s chair now, at Zal’s encouragement. She’s teaching me how to steer, how to read charts that go in multiple directions, up and down, east, west, north, south.
One level of sky contains stormsharks and ship-tilting winds, and another contains firefish and airkraken, and then there’s the possibility of colliding with mountaintops, and the danger of flying too close to city borders with a ship that is too large.
Dai’s over my other shoulder, pressing his warm hand into my back, and I can feel our bond, bone to bone, voice to voice. Milekt is calmer now that we’ve sung. He chirrups in the canwr cote, and nests in my lung while we practice. Our control is better and better. Water to stone, stone to water.
I lift the liquid from a cup held by Dai, turn it to ice in midair, with Dai singing alongside, delicately, perfectly monitoring my strength. He ends up with a faceful of water, which he wipes off and flicks at me, laughing.
There’s still fun here, despite the seriousness of what we’re planning, the thing we’re moving toward.
“We’ll change the world. We’ll bring the plants back to life. The way they were before the smokestacks below made them wilt into dormancy,” Zal says. “I don’t remember them. But there are legends of a time when the skyfields were full of them. All Magonia could eat. We used drowners’ crops only to supplement on long voyages back then, and didn’t need them to survive. With the plants back, our dependence on the drowners will vanish. They’ll be . . . superfluous.”
I think about the last two hundred years of machinery on earth. I think about how the Industrial Revolution starved Magonia. And now it’s starving parts of the earth too.
Zal gets reports from elsewhere, birds landing on Amina Pennarum’s deck with letters from other ships. Flaming arrows shot after sunset. She spends a lot of time staring out like she’s a figurehead, her face unreadable, but one letter, delivered by a ragged sparrow Rostra, makes her stand up straight.
“Breath ship in range.”
Everyone whips to panicky attention. I can smell the dread, and it’s mine too. What does that mean? Are we in danger? Are they coming for us? Zal keeps reading.
“They may be employed by Maganwetar, or someone else. We’re not pursued. Yet. I won’t risk it. Bring up the dead.”
Dai springs down the ladder with several big, muscled Rostrae, and returns with Ley, dragging her up from her unknown dungeon. She’s struggling, twisting, and chained.
“This goes against all law of the sky,” Ley shouts. “I am owed a trial!”
Zal uncoils a whip from her jacket and cracks it. It’s something not quite metal, not quite rope. It uncoils and hovers in the air, a twisting cat’s tail stripe, just in front of Ley’s face, twitching there.
“You are owed nothing. You’re a pirate, Ley Fol,” Zal says. “This is your trial.”
Ley watches the whip warily, her arms pinned by Dai and another guard.
“Maybe we should wait,” I say nervously. “Until we can—”
“Do you remember the day she took you?” Zal asks me. “It was the worst day of my life, and that misery lasted fifteen years.”
“But you can’t execute her—” I say.
“She was the worst sort of betrayer. A friend turned enemy. That you survived her sabotage is a miracle. A life for a life.”
“But I’m not dead,” I protest.
Ley looks at me. She seems apathetic.
“Don’t trust your mother,” she says. “She wants more from you than she admits. She is bent on vengeance, not on reason.”
Zal flicks the whip, and it lashes Ley’s face.
Ley recoils. The whip leaves a line in her skin, which is first white and then blue, glowing letters of ice, slipping into her body. I watch as the chill spreads through her, a snake of light slipping beneath her skin.
“To die with dark secrets is to die without a deathsong,” Zal says. “Who told you what I was planning?”
Ley cringes, sags slightly, but her eyes stay open. Whatever else she is, she’s brave.
“Wait,” I say. “She saved me back then. They would have killed me. Drop her in the sky near Maganwetar. Put her on a launch. Isn’t there a jail there?”
Zal looks at Ley, and then at me.
“You are alive, Aza, because you’re extraordinary, not because she was merciful. She didn’t save you. She betrayed me. This is an execution. Not a conversation.”
Ley looks steadily at her.
“Sail the skies, then, Zal. Take what’s ours from the drowners, flood their strongholds, kill everything below, but know that there can be no balance without the people of the ground, and without balance, Magonia falls. You’re not the first to think she had a violent solution to the problem of centuries. You are wrong, as they all were.”
“ENOUGH!” Zal’s eyes are lightning, and her skin’s actually shaking.
“Now I will sing my final song,” Ley demands.
“Oh, I think not,” Zal says. “Those who refuse me deserve no privilege. Because of your betrayal, my first mate’s family starved, ignored by Maganwetar. Had you not betrayed me? This sky would be fed now, and full. You ruined a future that, if we’d made it then, would have been joyful. I might have spent the last fifteen years in a different kind of country, my daugh
ter beside me, my heartbird singing. Instead?”
Zal pauses, and we all hear Caru scream, a blood-chilling lament.
“This was your doing, and for it, you die without song,” says Zal. She pauses. “As a sympathizer to Maganwetar’s policies, you’ve betrayed your true people. A deathsong is for those who die with honor. Not for you.”
There’s a slight movement in the crew, people shifting. I look around. The crew’s all on deck. Some of them are spreading their wings in excitement or anxiety. I can see teeth and fangs and beaks open.
“It was him who told me,” Ley says.
Zal jolts.
“Who knew your heart but him? He did not agree with your plans. He came to me. Caru told me everything. Your canwr betrayed you.”
Zal is rigid. She takes one painful breath.
“Liar,” she says.
Ley stares steadily at her. Her face reveals nothing.
“The deathsong,” says Ley.
“Denied.”
There’s a startled shuffling on the ship, all the Magonians and Rostrae murmuring in shock as Zal breaks her word.
Zal waves a hand toward Dai, who brings out a long cloth from behind his back. He ties it around Ley’s mouth, stopping up her voice. This, I realize, was planned. This denial of deathsong was on purpose.
Ley takes a small breath through her nostrils. Then she shrugs in the manner—I know it well—of someone who knows her time is ending.
I look around for an executioner. Hood. Ax. Nothing.
Ley nods. She takes a step backward, then another. Zal’s face is tight, her jaw working.
Milekt lands on my shoulder, beak to my ear. It’s no comfort.
Shuffling along the plank, Ley meets my eyes. She’s mute. She sings no deathsong. The blue-white chain of light Zal sent into her moves through her throat and down her arms. She glows with it.
Her hands shake, and so does her chest. She stands at the end of the plank.
She looks only at Zal.
She opens her chest and shows her canwr, a black-and-white magpie, broken as she is. She holds him in her hands.
Zal takes a step forward, meets her enemies’ eyes, stretches her elegant blue fingers, and smiles coldly, just before she pushes Ley off the plank.
Ley falls backward into the sky, tossing her bird up into the air as she goes.
Deathsong, sings the bird, alone, blistering, dissonant notes as he cries, fall, break broken bright light fall, fall.
I’m standing, limp, undone. Off the ship’s side, a vulture rises up and looks at me.
Ley’s canwr keeps singing.
Then a final sound from him, wordless, a bone-chilling wail of despair. Caru cries out, an echo from elsewhere.
The vulture takes Ley’s canwr.
Dead thing, another vulture croaks, and dives. I run to the rail and try to see down into the cloudy mists that surround us. Nothing at first. Then a shred of fabric drifting up. A bit of her uniform jacket.
And a mist of blood, swirling through the air, coloring the clouds for a moment before that, too, disappears.
My stomach churns.
Zal passes close beside me. “One day you’ll be a captain. One day you’ll have vengeance of your own. This is how it is done in the real Magonia.”
But the skin beneath her eyes is darker than it should be, her face drawn. She holds one hand to her heart. She walks away, leaving me. I see Jik glance in my direction as she follows Zal belowdecks. Her eyes, too, are dark.
The sky is full of shreds of clothing now, drifting like milkweed. I can hear vultures below us, and more than vultures. I look down and see a giant smoky tentacle of something, moving slowing, taking some part of Ley’s body, and curling away into a dark cloud. It’s so huge I can’t see all of it, but a flickering mass of eight silvery arms, large enough to tear this ship from the sky, before it pulses away again.
Dai passes me and touches my shoulder. I shriek and clench my fist. He wrestled Ley up onto the deck. He’s unquestioningly loyal to Zal and the ship. What does that mean? What would he do if I was on the wrong side?
Dai frowns, then swings himself back up into the rigging, Svilken chattering away at him, telling him to get back to work or there’ll be more work later. Milekt flits away to the top of a mast, where he roosts in a hunched ball of brightness.
I feel sick. I keep seeing Ley fall, again and again. Her words—about not trusting Zal, about Caru, echo through my mind.
There’s a feeling—a dread that doesn’t go away. There’s nothing to be done about it. Ley is left far behind us in the sky, buried in the clouds and circled and consumed by creatures. Dead thing.
I remember the story Jason told me, four Magonians showing up in a town on earth, getting put in the stocks. But they would’ve drowned if they’d really fallen.
Maybe they did drown. The story didn’t say how long they were down there, nor did it say what ultimately happened to them.
Magonians—we—don’t look enough like humans to pass. If I went overboard and didn’t die, what would happen? What would they do to me on earth now?
Some part of me still hoped that maybe I could go home—
But no. There’s no maybe. I can’t.
Eli might be going to school now. She might be in algebra learning enough math to calculate the size of the universe. She might be in English, learning words to describe the way her sister left her one night in the middle of a snowstorm.
I guess I’m never going to know what Eli will turn out to be.
And she’ll never know I’m up here training to—
What am I training to do?
I grit my teeth and climb up into the rigging a little way below Dai. I look out at the nothing and wait for him to speak, but he doesn’t. He just stares out into the clouds, looking worried.
I can feel something changing. I’m not Dai, trained my whole life to obey orders.
I can feel uncertainty, but also ferocity, branching alongside everything.
Dai puts an arm out, and I cautiously lean into him. Once I’m there, against his body, there’s that rightness when we touch. He looks out at the sky.
“That was the first execution I’ve seen,” he says, and I feel him shaking.
“Yeah,” I say. “Me too.”
For a moment, I think about my dream, the interrupted dream, Jason walking through the dark air of the undersky. Holding up his hands to me. Then I forget him again, hard, and on purpose, letting him go forever. He was a dream from a place I used to know.
He was a drowner.
And I am Magonia.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
Jik shows up in my cabin before dawn. My canwr’s in the cote, sleeping with the rest of the birds, and I’m down here, supposedly sleeping too.
Did I miss a watch or something? That would be Dai after me, not Jik. Jik has no authority.
“You should know something,” Jik says after a moment.
I sit up, eager to listen.
“I feed him,” she whispers.
“Who?”
“The captain’s bird. It’s part of my duties.”
“But Wedda says—” I say.
Jik shows me her hand, each finger surrounded by a metal ring, and shakes it in the air.
“None of us can be trusted,” she says. “Wedda? And Dai? Have they made you think there’s nothing wrong in Magonia? Magonians are at war with one another, and we, the feathered classes, are at their mercy. Don’t you ever wonder—”
“What?”
“Which of the Rostrae and canwr who serve you do it unwillingly?”
I stare at her as the implications of what she’s saying fasten into my brain.
“Your Milekt is a lungbird, and loyal to the captain. The captain was granted a heartbird, and when she lost her bond to him, she was unwilling to let him go.”
“What a
re you trying to say?” I ask. “Just say it.”
“Caru betrayed Zal. Her own canwr refused to sing her song with her. Are you sure you understand your mother? Are you certain you trust her?”
A few things are falling into place in my head.
“I’m not asking you to free the Rostrae,” Jik says. “There is a time for rebellion, and it is coming. Some of us work toward those ends. Some of us work from the inside.”
She looks at me, her gaze a challenge.
“Aza. There are places on the ground that will be lost to us all if Zal has her way.”
“She only wants the airplants,” I say defensively, hearing myself and feeling suspicious of what I’m saying.
Jik looks at me.
“Did you see what she did tonight? She broke her word. Denial of deathsong? That is against all Magonian laws,” Jik whispers in the harshest, sharpest tones. Like I’m a fool. Like I know nothing.
“Do you trust a woman who would deny a deathsong? Your mother, Aza Ray, is a criminal. She has no honor.”
It’s too much.
“Do you presume to question the captain’s judgment, Rostrae?” I interrupt, and I hear it coming out of my mouth, this wrongness, this not fairness.
Jik bristles. Looks at me icily.
“Her canwr rose against her. Now he’s mad and broken. How will you fare if something goes wrong with her plan?”
A moment and I’m up and moving.
I shove a little knife into my boot. I wrap a rope around my arm. I put on my warm uniform. If Jik is right and Caru’s alive, then what he’s been calling for is saving. He’s been calling for me.
If he betrayed Zal, she’ll kill him. I can’t let that happen.
Not after
Ley
I just can’t.
Something moves in the doorway. I look up and see Wedda there, her eyes glowing.
“Nestling,” she says. “Jik wants trouble. Don’t listen to her.”
Jik’s shoulder feathers spike up as though she’s wearing a motorcycle jacket. Her eyes are wider than they were a moment ago, and her blue crest stands up, too, sharp and brittle. She looks small next to Wedda, though, and like a kid.