Aerie (22 page)

We fly past constellations, past shooting stars, past asteroids,
past parts of the sky that are burning. The wind is high and it burns my face. We tilt and then slide fast across clouds, just us and our flock of a million birds, out in the sky.

We go faster.

As we go I feel what we're doing to the sky we're leaving. There are waves in the air, and ripples, and shudders of wind in our wake.

A giant wave of birds is carrying us across the sky to Maganwetar. I try not to think about what's waiting there. If we have to raise an ocean to drown Zal, we can do that. If we have to die fighting her, we can do that too—

I don't want to die.

I think about Eli all the way to Maganwetar, and I know some things about my sister. She's not weak. She might be hurt, but she's brave.

I think about Jason.

I can't think about the Jason I know right now. I'm still too dark, too hurt, too guilty. So I think about his alligator costume. In my mind, Jason on skates, spinning in his suit, spinning, and
spinning and spinning in the middle of the roller rink.

If I die, I will still see him spinning. If I die, he'll spin there forever.

I think about Dai, who has them both. Dai, who could be better than this. Dai, who could be the other half of my voice. How could someone who could sing with me so perfectly, so clearly, so easily, be so different from me? How could he end up trying to turn my song into some horrible thing?

It feels so right to sing with him. It always did. But I can do it without him. I have new songs now.

And they are MINE.

We fly all night. I look up at the stars, and think about something I read, back on earth, about how the stars can vibrate like bells (astroseismology, in case you were wondering) and some astronomer started making their noises into symphonies. I wonder. Then I stop wondering.

I twist and braid my hair into the knots Wedda taught me, the style she called my own battle style. It feels so long ago that I was on
Amina Pennarum,
scared and still feeling like a dead girl, trying to learn to be
this.
So long ago that I found Caru locked in a cage in Zal's cabin, screaming his ghost song.

A poem I learned—it's a poem everyone learns at some point—is in my head, rattling around, weirdly comforting. “Invictus,” it's called. I don't know the whole thing. It's probably about something other than going to war against your mother in a sky kingdom, but I'll take what I can get. I yell it out at the sky.

              
It matters not how strait the gate,

              
How charged with punishments the scroll,

              
I am the master of my fate:

              
I am the captain of my soul.

Caru perches on my shoulder, looking out into the distance, me singing with him, maneuvering the Flock's birds, moving this murmuration across the sky.

The sun's rising when I finally see Maganwetar, and I can't help but think the whole city is in battle stance, just like I am. One girl, and her heartbird.

I'm still worried this isn't enough. I'm shaking with terror, not for myself, but for everything and everyone around me, earth and sky, air and ground, sea and stars.

Maganwetar's not like I saw it in Svalbard, not anything like what I saw there, the underbelly of something tremendous, hardly seen at all.

No. Now I see much more.

It's a terrifying sight, each building with a figurehead of birds and bodies, each sail a tremendous ray, wings rippling.

There must be thousands of Magonians in that flying city, along with Zal. She has crews. All of them can sing.

Small Nightingales are on the outskirts, and they hum around our heads. So much for surprise. I watch the robot birds click photos above me.

It's now or never. I blast a note out into the air.

“ZAL QUEL, SHOW YOURSELF! I'M HERE!” I shout.

Caru sings the bottom note in my scream. Not just Caru. I hear something else. Other birds, from far away. They sound like . . . I don't let myself hope.

A raft approaches, speeding through the sky, a blue jay at its helm.

Jik, Wedda, and the Rostrae of
Amina Pennarum.
The raft is bristling with weaponry, Jik with a sword in her hands, Wedda too, and both of them are rising up from the deck, their wings wide, their feathers on end.

“Aza!” shouts Jik.

“Nestling!” shouts Wedda.

I look around frantically, hoping they have Jason and Eli, but they don't. It's Rostrae only.

“Have you seen Eli?” I ask them. They're the first ones to know what I'm talking about. They're the only ones who will understand about earth, about Jason. They were with me when I was saying good-bye to all of it. “Is she here? And Jason? We were told they were here.”

I'm hoping it's a lie, all of it. Except that north led us directly here.

“Dai took your sister,” says Jik. “And your drowner. They're in the city. Our ship was set on fire, and we've been fighting since.”

Other Rostrae are coming toward us. Some on their little ships, some of them flying. All with their wings spread, their talons out, their ships mobilized. They war the way birds war, with rocks and branches, with knives and song. Our ship is quickly surrounded by Rostrae.

I hear song coming fast from other parts of the sky, beautiful and strange. I look up, through the whirlwinds and madness of Maganwetar, and see batsails. Dozens of them. Their wings are as wide as the mantas' wings, and all of them are singing.
They're echolocating one another, and none of them are attached to ships with chains, but many of them have ships with them. They're towing of their own will.

Each ship is full of things I've never seen, and some I have, people from the edges of the sky. There are things here I saw in the prison, and I'm flooded with gratitude. Maybe some of them came because I set them free. Maybe not. Maybe everything here is here because this is Zal Quel trying to destroy the world, and there are many things in the world. This is the reckoning for Zal's rebellion. These are the forces she will face.

Thousands of batsails. Millions of birds. There are raft after raft of Rostrae.

We're not alone. The sky is full of silent ships. All waiting for something to happen.

For someone to sing it.

Two sides of the sky.

The capital city of an empire, buildings and people, ships and sharks, manta rays, frozen and hovering in the sky waiting for an order from my mother or a feint from me.

The remnants of its camouflage, the veil created by song and by the manta rays drops, and I see it for real now. All of it.

A dazzling metropolis emerging from fog, all spiky buildings, and streets full of Magonians.

There are Magonians carrying dark storm clouds in their hands, and Magonians singing spirals of snow. There are Magonians holding oblongs of stationary rain, and Magonians carrying strings of ice, each piece formed into a spike. The city's energy is focused entirely on the place in the sky where we're floating.

Stormsharks circle, spitting lightning. The air creaks with
thunder, but nothing's louder than the voice booming out of every building, out of every Nightingale, every stormshark, every ship.

I know that voice.

It's Jason. Oh god. I quiver, hearing him, over and over, his voice, his pain. He's hurt. He's REALLY hurt. Something's wrong. He's gasping. Over and over it repeats, out of every mechanical bird's throat, out of the whole city.

I LOVE HER. TELL HER I'M SORRY FOR EVERYTHING.

THE TIMES I TOLD HER WHAT TO DO.

THE TIMES I DIDN'T TRUST HER TO KNOW HER OWN MIND.

THE TIMES I THOUGHT SHE TOOK TOO MANY RISKS.

His apology list. That's the format. I know it well, because this is my whole childhood, my whole list-making version, all of us trying to keep each other safe.

This means he's
dying
?

I open my mouth, my lungs full of fury, full of deathsong for Zal, wherever she is, full of blast—

The Flock grabs my hand from where he's hidden inside the transparent camouflage of the cabin. “Steady,” he says.

Maganwetar is low, I suddenly realize. I glance down, and I'm stunned. Last I looked, we were over the ocean. Now?

I know my hometown.

I know what it looks like from above. I know what it looks like from every angle. I know what it looks like when we're watching my funeral from a ship. I know what our house looks like, and Jason's house. There are cars in the driveway.

Maganwetar is full of weapons. I watch as the Magonians wielding them shift away from the Rostrae and me, and begin
to point downward. I feel rather than see the energy of my city looking up at us. What do we look like? A giant dark cloud full of danger? A hurricane? Do we look like the storm to end all storms? That's what we are.

I sing my vessel closer to the edge, and finally, finally—

I see him, standing on the edge of the city, my ethologidion, singing out to me.

Dai looks like someone punched him. Black eye, bloodied face. He looks ragged, like he looked last year, except much thinner, and much older. Like he's been hurt, a lot, for a long time. He looks made of misery.

Dai. I helped him rise in Magonia, and then I made him fall. All I really want to do right this moment, across from Dai for the first time in a year, is cry.

This is the end of something. Maybe I don't need an ethologidion. I can live without him. But can I kill him? Or is he the other one I'm bonded to? Do I need two heartbirds, and two ethologidions?

Can I kill Dai?

No.

His voice is still the voice that partners mine, the voice that feels like it should be coming out of his chest and mine at once. We're joined in this stupid bond, this thing we didn't choose, this harmonic language of power. Someone chose US for it, and I don't even know who it was. We're meant to sing together, even after everything that's happened. It's a year later and I thought I'd chased that bond out of my soul. My heart is mine. It belongs to me. And it hurts.

I'm terrified the moment I see him. He has power over me.
He knows my song better than anyone but Caru.

I swallow.

He doesn't know what I've learned. He only knows what I knew when he last saw me. I can do this. We're close enough.

Then I see something else. Eli, tied up, her face made of fury.

And Jason. Very still. So still. His chest is covered in bandages, and there's blood on them, and he looks—

He can't be.

Maganwetar doesn't need you, Aza Ray
, sings a drone in Zal's voice.
But I want you. Join us
,
or they die.

The rest of the Nightingales join in, singing me the twisted version of an old song, an element-shifting song, sung in harmony.

I see my mother, at long last. She walks out from behind a building, and stands, looking at me. Her face is furious and her tattoos are everywhere. Her skin is covered with white ships, white lights, the sun and moon and stars.

I'm not the only one who's changed. I'm not the only one who has a new song.

“ZAL QUEL!” I shout.

“Daughter,” she says, and smiles at me. “Choose.”

I look down and in the rivers and lakes surrounding my town, I see waves beginning to stack themselves into columns. The rivers are stirring, twitching up from their beds, and it's the song that's doing it. Out at the northern edge of the city, on the lake, I see something else happening. A piece of land liquefies and slips into the water.

The Nightingales have my song. They can turn land to
water, and water to stone. They can do whatever I can do. Not all of it, though.

They don't know all of it.

Zal's making a hurricane. She's stirring up a storm surge, a windblast, a disaster. I watch as the sky darkens, as wind begins to whip up from everywhere. We're above it, and I can see garbage and dirt, trees and bits of buildings, things blowing and joining the song. We are the eye of the hurricane, Maganwetar, and below us, the whole world is a spiral of furious song.

“You're my daughter,” Zal sings out over the space between us. “You belong to me. Your song is mine.”

Zal opens her mouth and all the Nightingales scream at once, with her voice. She was silenced, but now she's not. This is her, mixed with me, mixed with Caru. This voice is a cacophony of metal and fire.

She doesn't know everything. She doesn't know what I have. She doesn't know that I know who I am now.

All of it.

All of me.

I'm here.

We're here.

I start to sing the song the Flock taught me, a song that can bring everything to this battle, a song filled with blazing light and all the canwr in the sky.

I feel things starting to shift, a movement, a startling ripple everywhere, and beside me, Jik takes off, and rises up, fighting another Nightingale, and Wedda too, taking another one down.

A strong note, a blistering note of communion, and on my side of the sky, things start to almost glow with it. I feel my father with me, and Vespers and Caladrius, feel them calling
out to the world and everything it contains, and I wrap my song around theirs—

Zal looks bewildered by what I'm singing. I'm singing a song I inherited from someone she hid from me.

I'm singing a song I learned from my father. She has no idea he's here.

But Dai's singing too now, and I hear another voice. A shrill, maddened, yellow voice. The door in Dai's chest opens, slowly.

Tiny, missing feathers, ragged. Golden less gold than it should be. Slowly, Milekt turns his head and looks at me.

Broken string!
he shrieks.

I know the song of a canwr that's unbonded with its Magonian. I know it from Caru.