And Heyward. Dead because of something I did. Dead because of something all of them did.
I want to throw myself at it, to sing a song that will tear it all apart, make it all right again. Sometimes, to find balance, you have to hurt rather than heal, isn’t that true? It must be true. Use her own technique against her. If she’s singing a destruction song, then my only option is to sing one that is stronger than hers. To outsing her.
The Flock stares steadily at me, then sighs.
“Sing, then,” he says. “Sing the song you have to sing to do this. Can you find it?”
“I obviously don’t know how,” I say, losing every bedraggled bit of patience. “OR I WOULD BE SINGING IT RIGHT NOW.”
The Flock taps on my lung door, and it opens for Vespers. WHAT?
Oh my god. This isn’t what I was planning. A bat in my chest?
Vespers flies into my lung.
A bat in my belfry. That’s how this feels. It feels like I’ve just inhaled something that’s gone down the wrong tube, but worse than any other version, much worse than Milekt down my throat. This feels like I just choked on gasoline, or like the end of the world is showing up, inside my lung. A tiny lung-pocalypse. I feel all wrong, doomed and dimmed, and insecure that even as I hate the feeling of the bat, the bat hates the feeling of me too. Will she hang upside down? Is that what’s about to happen?
“You asked to learn this song,” the Flock reminds me. “It requires more than one canwr. You’ll get used to it. This canwr knows how to sing with you.”
I swallow, trying to be okay with it. I inhale, and go as Zen as I can go. Which is not the most Zen, but it’s something.
And so Vespers and I sing together. Not sing exactly. Vespers vibrates a song, something I can’t even hear, and I try to sing alongside it, wrapping my song into the bat’s voice, a voice that is twitching my skin, from inside out. I feel like a guitar string.
The Flock was able to command thousands of birds with his song. I look out alongside the ship, watching for a flock of sparrows rising, and instead, I see one old seagull. He gives me a dark look before he moves on.
The Flock is watching.
“You have to try harder if you want this,” he says. “It’s not the song you’ve been singing in Magonia.”
I don’t have time to wait. I want a hack! I want the learn-a-little-and-do-it version, the way things usually are for me, the way I’ve lived my whole life. Factoid expertise in narrow slices equals the illusion of larger clarity.
“What song is it, then?”
“You are singing sky. But this song is everything,” the Flock says. “Not just the sky. The earth alongside it. You’re singing only Magonian notes. And you’re singing notes you learned from Zal. It’s no surprise the song will not come for you. It requires . . . purity.”
The Flock sings two notes and a thousand sparrows arc across the sky, spelling a word, in fancy calligraphy, which only makes me feel more frustrated:
Seriously?! What life is this? What kind of life, where even the birds are spouting things from greeting cards you wouldn’t send to your enemies? What kind of life where there is no sarcasm, no cynicism, no reasonable suspicion of romantic gestures—
And then I think . . . purity?
Oh, wait. Oh, hell no.
I’m full of mortification and fury all over again. This is made of trite. This is typical. This is bullshit! I feel myself almost levitating off the deck, because this is ancient crap used to control girls since the beginning of time, since the legend of unicorns and blah blah blah, this whole notion that—
“Purity. You mean I have to be a virgin?”
The Flock looks at me, with a look that says I’m missing nine degrees of the point.
“What is a virgin?”
“It’s a person who’s never . . .”
I discover that I don’t really feel like explaining my sexual history to some old man on a glass boat in the sky, thank you.
He looks at me, and the look reminds me of so many things, makes me miss so many people.
“I see,” he says. “And no. That has nothing to do with it. The only way to sing with so many canwr is to sing peacefully. They sing your truth, and if that is fury, they show it. It will destroy you, and them. It’s possible to cause an entire flock to die mid-flight. To sing with a flock successfully, you must sing joy.”
Blushing is a thing. I have no idea what color I am. And also—
Maybe the idea of having to sing joy pisses me off as much as the idea that I couldn’t sing this song if I’m not a virgin. How can you sing joy if you have no joy? How can you sing love if you have no love?
“I know your song. I’ve sung it. Had I continued singing that way,” the Flock says, “my canwr would have taken me and torn me to pieces. As they will you.”
I look out at the sky, the misty miserable white, and I know he’s right.
He sings another note. I do my best to echo it. We trill it out into the sky together.
The smooth wave of birds twists on itself and dives rapidly toward the sea, freaking me out. Are they—
The Flock sings a sharp note that somehow manages still to be full of the sun, and Vespers sings it too. The Flock’s birds shift direction, arcing across the sky, now smooth again. Caladrius comes out of nowhere and prods my ear with her beak.
“That is what happens,” says the Flock.
Vespers unhelpfully trills a little bit of radio. Some random pop song about love and longing.
I sing a note that causes the tremendous, calm flock of birds to spread out from their murmuration, and into shooting stars of frustration. All of them shriek and drop in midair, flipping, twisting, and crashing into one another.
The Flock patiently sings another note, bringing the birds back together, calming them.
I sing again, trying my hardest to dim the problem elements of my soul, and the birds just whirl over my head like a tornado of feathers, screaming, until Caladrius and the Flock sing them into a soothing wave of lighter than air.
Vespers makes a disgruntled sound from inside my chest, but I can’t help it. I’m reminded of Milekt, and of Caru. Milekt hating me, judging me, singing fury from inside my chest. And then . . . I don’t even want to think about what happened to Milekt when we parted. We were bonded. There’s no way Milekt is okay after that, no matter what wrongs he did to my song.
Caru, though, is the one I ought to be singing with. Caru is wild and filled with danger, but he understands how to sing with me, and I understand how to sing with him. I never had to learn it. It was just there, the moment we heard each other’s voices. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be?
Are you supposed to have to work this hard?
Vespers comes out of my chest and gives me a look that tells me this bat would never trust me to sing the stars across the sky with her.
I’m crying, but crying doesn’t help me sing any kind of joy. Crying only makes me worse. And it only makes me think about how much I miss the days when I knew nothing about Magonia, when I was safe on earth, when I knew that people loved me—
Never mind that I was dying back then.
Never mind that some of the anger I have lurking in my throat, fucking up my song, dates to fifteen years of dying out loud.
Never mind that. Never mind the whole truth, this giant mess that I’ve been trying to turn into a less complicated story, a story in which no one died so I could live, in which no one’s life got stolen, and no one’s destined singing partner forcibly controlled her voice, and no one’s mother was a psychopath, and no one’s only totally trusted person lied to her.
Never mind that I understand the reasons for all of it. Never mind that I get it. Never mind that I know what’s wrong with me. It doesn’t make anything less painful, knowing its origin.
I’m still angry, and it comes out every time I open my mouth. The birds look at me, and Vespers looks at me, and the Flock looks at me, and for a second I just want to give up on all of this and
roll off the deck, down through layers of icy air, and into the ocean. Maybe a frozen version of me can be brought back in a hundred years, and maybe then there won’t be fury hiding in every note I sing.
That might be what it takes to erase seventeen angry years from my song, a full reboot. I already had one of those, though, and here I still am, stewing and fucked up.
“Again,” the Flock says.
And again, singing drills, until I’m gasping, until I’m singing notes I’ve never sung before, but they’re all still full of wrong.
Finally, after hours, Vespers sings . . .
Well, Vespers sings vespers. Or an equivalent. An evening prayer anyway. Some kind of prayer. To no one. To everyone.
Starlight, she sings, and I’m pretty sure she’s about to sing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” which would be ridiculous but would also kind of make me happy.
Instead, though, she just sings a lullaby that brings all the birds in the sky into full voice, a flood of rapture, all the birds rising up, and then falling through the air. All of them singing snow as I shut my eyes, exhausted.
The last thing I feel is the Flock picking me up off the deck and carrying me to my cabin. And I feel, for a moment, totally safe.
“Wait,” I say.
The Flock pauses in the doorway, Caladrius on his shoulder.
“You sang with her?” I ask. “I just want to know what it was like. No one’s ever told me what her voice actually sounded like. I never heard it. Or, at least, I don’t remember it. I was tiny when I was taken from her ship. I only remember being on earth. They put me with the drowners, in a skin, and they left me there.”
I’m telling him more than I should, probably, more than is wise. Does he hate drowners? I don’t know. He looks at me and I can’t tell at all what he’s thinking. His face is troubled.
“I did sing with her,” he says, and sighs. “A long time ago. She had a voice like no one else in the sky back then.”
“And you don’t?”
“I do. There was a reason we were well-met,” he says. “I was on Amina Pennarum. I was a cabin boy. Assigned to scrubbing, mainly, every plank, feeding the sail, untangling ropes, and mending nets. She was lower even than I was, the cook’s girl, and so she saw the hunger firsthand. She was in the galley, watching provisions come into our ship from below, seeing things broken by the ground, and stretching our stores to feed the ship, until, one day, she stood on the deck and sang out in frustration. She created a wave of wind and storm to tear the corn up from a field below us and bring it onto the ship. The drowners, she said, were polluting the crops, ruining the feed, spraying it with things that poisoned insects, eagles, Magonians. She knelt in the corn she’d stolen and cried. Her voice was so powerful that the captain, Ley Fol, noticed her. I noticed her too.”
I jolt. Ley Fol is the pirate Zal made walk the plank last year. She’s also the Magonian who sent me to earth when Zal was punished, when her chest was sealed so that she would never again sing with a heartbird. I have a history with Ley Fol myself. She’s the reason I had a life at all. She was ordered to kill me, and instead she saved me.
The Flock smiles, but his smile is sad. Now Vespers is in the cabin, hanging from the top of the invisible ceiling, stretching her tiny silver wings. I can’t even imagine this version of Zal, my age, younger? Or of the Flock, for that matter. He seems ancient.
“What happened, though?”
“She was a wonder of the sky,” he says. “She sang, and I sang with her. She rose. I rose alongside her. Eventually, she took over the ship. She became the captain, but being the captain of a single ship did not make the forage better on the ground. Singing the songs she sang did not keep her crew fed, and the capital had strict regulations about forage, and how it was managed. Her anger and frustration grew. Her first and most powerful songs were songs of destruction. Those were the ones she sang naturally. The rest, she sang with effort, and practice, but they were never the easy songs for her. She made enemies in the sky, singing those songs, but they were the ones that seemed they could change everything, at least to her. At last she returned to them, singing without a partner, using only her heartbird—”
“Caru?” I ask.
He looks even more troubled with the mention of Caru’s name.
“She used him to sing songs no heartbird should sing. No bird at all should sing those songs. That is what I know now. I did not know it then.”
“She was punished,” I say.
“I know she was,” he says, and winces, his own hand over his heart. “But she was not always so made of night. She could sing creation songs too. For a time, long ago, Zal Quel was the light of the sky. There was a time, but that time is done. She made a choice, and her choice was destruction. Her choice was to flood.”
“Why?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer me. He just strokes the heartbird on his shoulder, his face furrowed.
“Because she knew how. I made choices of my own. As will you,” he says. “As does everything living, everything singing, everything in wind and weather. Sleep now, singer. There will be another morning.”
“I hope so,” I mumble.
“There will be,” he says, and he pats me awkwardly on the head. “Caladrius sings of it already, and Vespers too. All the birds in this sky have been around the earth and seen tomorrow, and we will see it too.”
“Is that a lullaby?” I ask.
“It’s only the truth,” he says.
His golden eyes shine as he leaves my room, Vespers singing a soft song of stars and constellations, Caladrius singing with her, and finally the Flock joining in, all three singing with one bright voice.
I fall asleep hearing their voices wrapping around the ship, a song of crackling ice and singing whales, a song of birds riding the wind and the ocean washing itself into brilliant frozen waves, each one of them full of the voice of the sea, and of the songs Vespers sings from the radio, a combination of love songs and temperatures, all of it merged into one thing, the voice of the world.
CHAPTER 24
{JASON}
I careen my drone back in the direction I think it came from, boomeranging it toward whomever sent it at us.
That would be Zal and Dai, and wherever they are, Caru is. That’s what I’m hoping. Guessing.
I’ve pulled up its origin coordinates, and that’s where I send it, steering it through a vortex of wind currents, and weirdnesses. It makes sense to me on some level, these flight simulation video game–style controls. The drone is showing me video as I move it through the sky.
I can see warships. None of them look major, there’s nothing that seems to be Zal. And none of them are moving. They’re just . . . waiting for something.
It occurs to me that maybe they’re waiting for Aza to show up. Maybe they’re waiting for her to be unable to stand it. Or they’re waiting for someone to bring her back. Maybe she’s already been captured somewhere else in the sky and that’s why she didn’t answer when I called and—
Stop.
There’s a lurch and my drone spins furiously in the currents, flips upside down, and flies backward for a moment. I see other drones, flying fast in the opposite direction of mine, a high-pitched clicking sound. My drone swerves upward in a draft, and down, and then barrel rolls, and another drone passes, beeping.
Now, through drone camera eyes, I can see the vague edges of Maganwetar, the nothingness that is its camouflage, and the definitions of its WHERE—all guarded from every angle. Nothing else would need so many guards.
But. What does it mean that the drone came from Maganwetar?
A wall of whirlwinds, surrounded by lightning-full stormsharks, their teeth bared, their bodies made of sparks and dark. There’s a humming of song all around it. High above the blankness, I see a ring of additional drones, hovering in the sky, protecting the perimeter. These drones are bigger than the archaeopteryx I’m piloting, their wings flapping slowly, mechanized, their toothy beaks open. These are the size of ea
gles, their black feathers a serrated edge of metallic gleam. There’s a halo of them hovering over Maganwetar.
Why the hell are they there? They should be with Zal.
How many drones did SWAB send up here? Or did Zal somehow manage to gain access to drones from elsewhere in the sky? There are at least fifty of them, and they are wing to wing, the blades at the tip of each wing making a fence of barbed wire to keep out anything that might be coming toward the invisible capital city.
Maganwetar is powerful. There’s more to it than just a mass of invisible ships and invisible buildings. The capital of Magonia is full of magic, but it seems like I can’t see anything coming out of it. The ships are quiet. The city is quiet. The sky, despite all the guards, is quiet.
There’s no ship guarding it precisely, no ship I can pin down as the one they’re on.
Where is Zal Quel? Where’s Dai? Where, most importantly, is Caru?
Magic and science. The drones are from earth, but the song they’re singing is the heartbeat of Aza’s song turned into something evil and destructive, twisted into something that could turn solid to liquid, rock to water, flesh to blood. Destruction.
Zal’s song, in other words. That’s all I can think, hearing it twisting around the city. Which means she must be—
And then.
I see it.
The faint tops of the buildings, a glassy city. It looks like the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, an ice palace, a Disney version of splendor.
There are towers shaped like birds, and towers shaped like phoenixes, towers shaped like airkraken. Creatures from the sea and sky converge into the shapes of the city of Maganwetar, and all the buildings seem to move, swaying gently in the wind. I can’t see any people from here, and no guards either, beyond the stormsharks and the little flotilla of drones.
It blinks in and out of visibility. The city seems to be sailing with a fleet of manta rays as sails, and ray is an accurate word, as in sun’s rays. These are sending out rays of dark, not light. I can see their huge wings moving, and there must be thousands of them. They fold the city up in a cloak of wings, and then unfold it. I see the city flicker in and out of view.