Aerie (20 page)

I'm shrieking at a city in the sky, singing my song into it. I'm going to break
Maganwetar open. I'm going to destroy it. Caru and I are singing together, our voices a fine-pointed weapon flying up into Magonia's capital. We blast them.

The sky's full of silver sails and sharks. Thousands and thousands of them. Manta rays soar, their wings rippling. I can't see the chains that hold them to the city, but I know they're there, glittering and silver. They've been captured by Zal. My mother doesn't care who she hurts. She never has.

I don't care anymore either.

I sing fury at her.

I sing

She's my enemy.

I see Dai beside her, Dai who betrayed me, and I sing at
him too. At everyone I couldn't trust, who lied to me, who tried to control me without ever asking what
I
wanted.

I'm singing with a flock, a huge wave of birds, a tsunami—

Singing death at everyone who assumed I wanted what they did.

In me, something is rising up, a dark power. It reminds me of Svalbard. Of that crest I felt with Dai. His power taking over mine.

But this time it's my power, my own choice—

This is what I want. I'm going to kill them both. This is my choice. MINE.

The birds rush around me, their beaks sharp, their talons out, and Zal's singing a storm made of knives, a storm made of arrows.

The world starts to change below us. The ground begins to turn to liquid. The street becomes a river. Feathers are on fire, and I can tell that above me are miles of dead, broken bodies, killed by my mother, falling—

She's singing me to the end of the story. She's winning—

NO, I'm going to sing the end myself. I'm going to destroy everything she wants revenge on, before she can. I won't let her do it. I'll destroy her too. She wanted to control me and I will NOT BE CONTROLLED.

My own birds start to dive at me, attacking me, tearing at me, and my body isn't my own, my heart isn't my own, my song is full of death and horror.

I feel my body starting to turn to stone, first my fingers, and then my arms, until it reaches the bottom of my lungs, and I feel them starting to seize, morphing into some sort of dark rock, my body becoming not anyone's—

I wake up, someone shaking me, my throat feeling blistered, like it's sung notes I don't know. The Flock is sitting beside my bed, his canwr all around me. He's watching me carefully, and his hand is on my shoulder.

“You were singing in your sleep,” says the Flock. “A dark song.”

I look around. Nothing's broken. No one's hurt.

“It was an endsong,” he says. “How did you know it? Did Zal teach it to you?”

“No. I didn't know I knew it at all.”

“It is nothing you should sing.”

I hesitate. “What's an endsong?”

“Your deathsong,” he says. “But more than just
yours
. It's a deathsong in which you kill not only yourself, but every other thing in proximity. You un-sing them and yourself at once.” He pauses. “Do you wish yourself dead?”

“No!”

“What do you wish, then, Aza Ray?”

I glance at him. This man with golden eyes, and an exhausted face.

Heyward. I can't stop thinking about her dying, and about how it wasn't me. It should have been me. I think about Ley Fol now, executed by Zal because she saved me. I think about all the people I've hurt, all the people who've starved in Magonia, all the people who are at the mercy of Zal, people who'd still be alive if I had just surrendered to her and given her what she's always wanted. She wants me to be her daughter, her heir, and instead, I—

Chose everyone else.

“I don't know,” I say. It's the truth. It's as close to the truth
as I've ever gotten. I thought I knew what I wanted, and it was Jason. It was both of us alive, and in love, and in one place. And then?

No plan beyond that.

I thought I knew what I wanted, and it was home with my family, on earth, but—

Then I came to Magonia, and when I returned, I wanted more.

Maybe I'm like Zal. I think about the songs that are easy for
me
to sing. I think about the things that have been easy for
me
to do. Sing with Dai. And what we sang was—

Destruction songs. I'm like her. I'm so much like her.

Maybe I'm worse than she is, because I've been better. I've had a happier life. And yet, I'm
still
this angry, this confused.

Vespers is on my shoulder now, singing a song that makes my heart hurt. She's singing the world, singing the songs humans sing, but in her own voice, the songs of people falling in love and falling out of love and trying to understand one another.

“Dying would be easier than THIS,” I say. “Dying wasn't hard. It wasn't horrible. I've done it before. It's living that's hard. Who
chose
me anyway? Why am I supposed to do any of these things?”

I can still feel the endsong all over my body. I feel like I did something I may never be able to take back.

“Chosen or not chosen,” the Flock says. “All you can do is what you are strong enough to do. You have a song. You can only sing it. It doesn't matter what others think of that, whether they think you have any power at all. Everyone has power, every person, every bird, every bat.
Chosen
is only because it makes things simpler. The world is like a ship, and
you can climb the mast, or scrub the figurehead. You can keep the charts, or plot the course.” He stares deep into my eyes. “You have a song. Sing it.”

He looks at me, his golden eyes shining.

“What if I can't? What if I sing something horrible instead? What if I destroy things when I'm trying to save them?”

“Dying without song because you don't know which life you want isn't brave, Aza,” says the Flock.

“I don't want death. I just want—”

“You just want someone
else
to die,” he says, and nods. “That's easy too. You could sing death into the body of anyone you wish. You could sing it into me. You're strong enough.”

I am. I know that now.

“But if you do that, if you merely sing an endsong, you'll be like she is.”

I don't feel like there's much to me beyond anger, frustration, and misery right now.

“Who wouldn't be angry at Zal? Aren't you? She made me— She's your enemy. That's what I know about you. That's what they told me.”

“She wasn't always my enemy,” he says, and laughs a sad laugh. “I was her ethologidion,” he says. “I am still. There's no removing that bond, no matter how much one might wish to. But I will not sing with her again.”

I thought he was just part of her crew. I thought when he said he sang with her, he meant he sang in service of her song. But this is—

He was her . . .
Dai
? Which means . . .

Not only is he made to sing with her . . . he can control her song.

“You look like her,” he says. “And you sing like her. We sang the stars into alignment and sailed across the sky, before she was broken.”

A white tattoo appears on his skin, the face of my mother, a long time ago.

And beside her is Caru, perched on her arm.

I watch the tattoo move, the ghostly inked Zal open her mouth and sing, but there's no sound. She reaches out her hands and laughs, looking at someone who isn't there. Looking at someone with love. I've never seen her look this way, never seen her look so—

So trusting.

Rain tattoos its way down over her head, and covers her with ink dots. A disappearing woman, there on his skin.

He looks at it, considering, and all the white lines undo themselves and disappear again.

The old man stares at me steadily, silently, for a moment.

“We are long since finished with our singing, Zal Quel and I,” he says. “That time is done. But my song? My flock? You need no teaching. You have it already. It is your inheritance.”

Wait.

I stare at him.

“Are you—?”

“I was done singing with Zal, but I did not leave you. I was told you'd died. That you'd been kidnapped, that they'd killed you. That is why I'm here. That's what made me leave Magonia.”

I say it, because there's nothing left to say. I discover that I knew it already.

“You're my father.”

“Daughter,” says the Flock. His face is startlingly gentle for
a moment. “Perhaps your mother taught you your song, but I heard you sing it. Your song came from me too. And from who you are. Believing anyone else is in control of that—living in such anger—will not let you sing the song you're meant to sing,” he says. “You are strong enough to sing as you wish, not as your pain has forced you to. You aren't your hurt. You're other than that. You are not the broken things you've been. Look at yourself. You're living, not a singer in the midst of her deathsong.”

I'm sputtering, still feeling that endsong, still seeing Zal before my eyes, still in pain, and now. Another father. Out here on the edge. A father who ran from Zal. A father who won't help me fight her—

“Zal was my only love,” says the Flock simply. “But she was capable of horrible things. As am I. As are you. That's something you'll learn if you live a long time. Everyone can break things.”

I jolt, because I already know that. On every level.

“You're strong enough to heal things too,” he says, his hand on my shoulder, pressing hard on it. “Not just break them. It's simply that breaking is easier.”

“What if I can't help it? What if I just destroy? What if I don't know how to do anything else?”

After a moment, he smiles.

“You remind me of myself. I wasn't strong enough to sing beside Zal,” says the Flock. “Not without destroying us both. The love we had wasn't enough. I was angry too, and the anger would have destroyed us both. You are her daughter, not her singer, though. You ARE strong enough. You just have to choose to be.”

I sit with that for a moment. I've seen what's wrong with the world. Once you've seen it, you don't get to go back.

“Please,” I say, sitting beside him. “You told me you were the last of your kind, but you don't have to be. Teach me. I'll do what you say. I'll try to figure it out.”

The Flock nods and opens his mouth to sing when—

FLASH. I suddenly see through Caru's eyes for the first time in days. I shake, frozen.

AZA!
Caru screamsings.

I see him. Caru's loose, flying free, flinging himself through the spires of Maganwetar, frantic, searching for me.

He twists past the last of the stormsharks, and throws himself into the air outside the city, flying as fast as he can, but I can tell he has no sense of direction, no idea where I am. He's lost.

Aza
, he sings, desperate.

Oh god. I stop and stand in the center of the deck, singing, trying to strengthen him.

Vespers starts singing her beautiful bat song, hard with me, and I'm so grateful.

I feel Caru's pain. Tiny bones in his wings are fractured. He wonders if he should dive out of the clouds and die, but he doesn't, because he's hunting for me. He can feel our bond, but he doesn't know where I am. He's panicked. He's been tortured, and they've forced his song from him, twisted it into other songs.

The Flock is beside me now, and he's singing too, with me, with Vespers. Now Caladrius joins too.

He's singing to Caru, to guide Caru here.

I feel Caru taking it in, sensing it. I call again to him and feel him hear me at last, with a blasting trill of relief and exhaustion
.

AZA
, he sings. AZA.

Suddenly there are hundreds of other birds in the sky around
Caru. The Flock's sending all the canwr in the area to help.

I glance at him, but his face is only focus, intensely singing with his heartbird and heartbat, and with me.

I tentatively start to sing with them. Because this is Caru. This is the rest of
my
heart.

I have a vision through Caru of a string of birds leading him to us, and of those birds all around him, supporting his song. Caru is barely flying, but the birds bring him, hiding him in their midst.

The Flock sings the whole time, calling in more of his birds, through the dark and into the grayness that heralds the dawn.

It lightens, and the sun starts to blaze the sky into orange and pink. I see a black speck out on the edges, followed by a wave of wings. Caru is flying fast, a vibrating song of terror coming from him.

Then I see what's wrong. He's being pursued by one of the birds I've seen attacking us over and over, the black ones. Mechanical. Singing machines.

All around us the air vibrates with that monstrous song, the song of an entire city screaming for Aza Ray, the song of the deaths of everyone on earth I love, and everyone here too. I see the vibrating vision of the earth flooding and burning at once. I feel the sky dividing into something that's basically all on fire.