Magonia (13 page)

I’m expecting to breathe in the fresh air and cough, to touch the hospital gown embroidered with my name, and to feel frozen on my back where the thing gaps, but I stumble out into the cold air, and there’s no parking lot. No
earth
.

No.

There’s only a sky. A huge sky.

And it is full of ships.

All directions, at all distances, all kinds—small sailing vessels, big ships similar to this one. Ships veiled by their own weather.

A bank of vessels moves together, bringing a larger storm with them. Little boats, catamarans, yachts, freighters—all moving through the sky.

All flying. The ships are flying, yes, yes, that’s exactly what’s happening, and they don’t have wings. They’re just . . . floating along in the middle of nothing.

And I’m standing on the deck of a huge ship too. Sails and rigging. Planks. We rock gently in the breeze.

In a moment, Zal’s behind me, holding me up, because I’m swaying like I don’t even have legs, a jellyfish.

“Aza Ray Quel, this is your country,” she announces, her voice booming over the deck. “These are your country’s ships.
Amina Pennarum
is first among them. There is no better and no braver than she.”

A crew of blue people clusters around us.

“These are her officers.”

“Captain’s Daughter,” they say in unison, these uniformed blues with their impossible whistling voices. They raise their hands to their brows. They salute me in the same way everyone saluted the captain.

Throwing up is the only rational option.

I lean abruptly over the rail and look into the tossing clouds there, stomach spinning.

Something enormous looks back at me. Sleek silver skin with a slight pattern on it, tiny eyes. It blinks at me, opens its feathery fins, and scatters drops of rain. It fountains a gust of wind and rain out of its . . . blowhole?

It swims sideways through a cloud, and as it swims, it sings.

Sea of stars
, it trills—in words, kind of, but not.
Greetings
, it sings in a beautiful voice.
Sea of rains and snow
.

Legions of therapists have tried to make me understand the supposed healing powers of tears. I’ve never understood them until now.

“Don’t cry, Captain’s Daughter. It’s only a squallwhale,” says a feathered crew member from behind me.

Indigo mohawk. The blue jay girl, I realize.

Only a squallwhale
. I glance over at the giant creature—it’s not below us now, but above the level of the deck rail.

“One of our pod,” says Zal. “They make storms to hide us from drowner eyes. They’re part of our camouflage.”

I stare at the shifting vaporous edges of these creatures, half whale, half climate.

“Not all the clouds you’ve spent your life looking at are squallwhales, but some are.”

More of that, then. “Not all, but some.”

I look down, past all the ships in the sky, past the cloudy, misty whales, and suddenly below me, there is a checkerboard of green fields and roads and buildings. Earth. I’m paralyzed with wanting,
but I’m not allowed to keep looking down.

“This is
Amina Pennarum
’s mainsail,” Zal says, pointing up the mast.

The mainsail looks down at me and makes a high sound of recognition, a cry of song.

Flyer
, it says.
Welcome, firefly.

The mainsail is a giant bat.

Giant, as in the size of a living room. A tremendous white-silver bat, its body chained to the mast, its fingerlike bones splayed, stretched out, wings wide open for the wind. It looks down at me, its teeth slightly apart, tasting the air.
Girl
, it says, and whirrs a high whirr.

A crew member flies up to bat face level and offers the bat something fluttering from a bucket. A moth, I realize. Albeit one the size of my head.

The bat snaps it up, and moves its wings and I feel us sailing faster.

I notice a nose-prickling smell of oil and fire. The crew is scrubbing the deck. Black marks. A hole in a rail.

Déjà vu pulls my gaze up again to the bat. There’s a burn on its silken wing, healing, but bad. Something about that, something about a crash—

But it’s gone. I can’t remember.

“Is it hurt?” I ask.

“Don’t bother yourself. Batsails are only animals,” Zal says. “Ours is well-cared for. They don’t understand pain.”

I spin slowly around to look at the rest of the deck. There’s a wheel to steer by. There’s a very solid-looking metal crane, dangling over the side of the vessel, huge and covered with chains and pulleys.

And at the top of the mast, there’s a little house filled with yellow birds. They’re the same kind as the one that flew into my mouth. The one that flew into my
lung
.

“The canwr,” Zal says. “Our cote of lungsingers. Milekt’s kind.”

I touch the spot on my chest where I feel fluttering, and there’s a severe shriek from the bird in there.
Milekt
, says the bird in my lung.
Milekt.

It’s only when one of the little golden birds above me takes flight that I notice the tethers. It flies out to test the wind, screals, and returns to its perch, tied there by a thin cord. For a moment it looks down at me, black beady eye, but it has nothing to say. It doesn’t shift into anything human-ish.

“This is my ship. Your ship now. This is my crew. And these are the rest of the feathered class,” Zal says. She claps her hands. “Rostrae!” she shouts.

Birds start dropping out of the sky, landing on deck, ropes in their talons. Many of the same birds that came to my backyard, I realize with a jolt. They carry a tangle of ropes, small ones, large ones, some gossamer fine, some heavy as chains, all attached to the masts and deck. Three more owls. Hawks. Crows. Birds I’ve never seen before, tiny and covered in candy wrappers of feathers, bright red and blue and green, pink and silver. It’s as though a piñata has broken.

A golden eagle sails down and looks at me, its eyes the color of caramel, but made of fury.
Nothing kind in that gaze. It looks like what it is, a hunter. Its wings must span eight feet. It has talons as long as my fingers.

My knees are shaking, and my head is spinning, but I stay upright. Zal’s hands are on my shoulders.

A hummingbird the size of a bee buzzes up to me and hovers, turned sideways, considering me with one eye at a time. Next to my face, a robin, but not an American robin, a European one. Even here I know things from Jason. Such as, European robins are smaller than ours, and much fiercer. This one looks at me, with a black, gleaming eye, and makes a judgmental chirp.

Then all the birds shift.

They stretch their wings and their bones crackle and groan as they expand, gaining height and weight. Their beaks open and open until faces appear around them, heads bowed with feathers. They ruffle up their plumes and then, with a shiver, a new thing where the bird was standing.

All of the birds have shifted into people.

There’s a tiny, beautiful man where the hummingbird was, his nose a beak, his fingers fluttering, a giant woman where the eagle was, her hair golden feathers, her arms muscular. The robin morphs in ways I can’t even remotely describe into a man with orange-red tattoos on his chest and dark eyes lined in white.

All these imaginary things look at me. All of them salute me, a fantasy made up by some little kid—like the little kid I was, the girl who read every book of Audubon, the girl who cut ships out of paper, and got harassed by the classroom canary.

“Captain’s Daughter,” the bird people shout, all in one voice. Twenty-five different songs, but they agree on who I am. There seems to be no doubt.

Everyone feels certain of my identity but me. They stare, waiting.

I look at the captain.

“I want to go
home
,” I say as politely as I can. This feels like my last chance at something I’ve already lost. “Something’s confused, okay? I’m not actually your daughter. I was born in a hospital on earth. My dad made the whole staff margaritas in a blender he’d brought in the car. He had four hundred limes. There are pictures of me being born, bloody ones. I’m not adopted. I’m not who you think I am. I want to go home. My parents are going to think I died. Please, let me go.”

Another memory surfaces—Jason, oh god, Jason, holding my hand, telling me he’d find me. How can he find me if I’m
here
?

The blue-skinned boy from my cabin, the beautiful, rude one, is suddenly right in front of me, and he looks at me directly.

“Permission to speak?”

Zal nods. “Granted.”

“As predicted, she wishes to return to her situation. Perhaps we should listen when she says she doesn’t belong here. Perhaps she’s right. We can’t afford to waste any more time.”

Zal turns me around to face her. “The drowners didn’t know you needed Magonian air. They
didn’t know you needed your ship, your canwr, your
song
, because they know nothing about how we live. There, you were dying. There, you died. Here, you thrive. This is your country, Aza Ray. We’ve brought you home.”

“But,” I say. “I’m not what you think I am.”

“Look at yourself,” she says, and smiles, holding out a little mirror. “See who you are.”

My reflection’s blurred at the edges, dark and tangled, and for a moment all I can focus on is the hair that moves and twists as though it’s made of snakes. It whips around and everywhere, and then it moves away from my eyes and—

I see my face, kind of, the face I’ve always had, angular and weird, huge eyes but—

But this girl has wide, full indigo lips instead of my skinny, grimacing ones. And—my eyes—I recognize them as my own, but there used to be a dark blue over the colors I see now—gold and reddish, like fish deep under water.

This girl has high cheekbones, and when I open my mouth, her teeth are sharper than mine.

I’m looking at her skin, at her hair, at the echo of my face, then the forever bone-thin-weakling-no-boobs Aza body I’ve always hated, and my body, too, is converted into something else entirely.

I don’t know what to say I don’t know

what

to

do.

I want the old me. I want her pale skin and gaspy voice, I want her skinny arms.

I don’t even notice that I’ve dropped the mirror until glass splinters all over the deck.

I look up at the captain, my jaw slack. Zal doesn’t flinch. She regards me steadily.

“You
are
my daughter, Aza,” she says, and her voice softens. “Your life here is better than it could ever have been below. The undersky is a shadowland, and the drowners are a shadow people. You were kidnapped and placed below as a punishment for my sins, not for your own. None of this was your fault. It was mine.”

Another black tear on her face.

“It’s been sixteen years since you were born to me, and fifteen since you were taken. You do not know the pain of it, Aza. You do not know the effects it’s had on Magonia.”

She straightens up and smiles, shaking her shoulders.

“But tonight, as is fitting, we celebrate. The time for mourning is done. Tonight we glory in your birth and your return. Dai—”

She turns to the black-haired boy, who still looks at me, grudgingly, judgingly.

“—the drowners will be celebrating her birthday with a burial.”

I jolt.

“We’ll do something finer. You’ll give Aza a taste of Magonian song, the first she’s heard in fifteen years. The one she’ll join in for the deliverance of her people.”

He hesitates, but nods, and then closes his eyes for a moment. The skies have gotten much emptier than before. I can’t see any other ships around us now. This ship is moving very quickly, and I feel the wind kick up as, in his chest, he starts singing a complex song full of beats and trills.

Then his throat starts to sing along with the melody already begun.

I feel a rattling inside my ribs. This boy—Dai—has a bird in his chest, just as I do.

They sing together in gorgeous harmony. The sound is so beautiful, I’m blown away.

In my chest, Milekt trills out,
Learn. Sing with him. It’s what you’re meant to do.

“No,” I say, irritated with Milekt’s insistence, and my own strange desire to do his bidding.

There is something massively important about song here. I suspect—no, I know—that it can
do things
.

It makes me feel nervous and too excited just thinking about trying. It’s a feeling like—

The thought surges into my head.
Jason.

Dai’s looking down at me with a twisted expression on his face. I hear a fussy trill from his chest too.

“No,” Dai barks, and thumps his chest with his fist. “It isn’t time. She’s not ready.” His bird shuts up. He spins himself high into the rigging, twisting his arms in rope. The crew stands at attention, and Dai sings another note. As if he’s summoned them, stars wink on all over the sky.

A few are brighter than the rest, flaming extra hard against the blackness that surrounds them.

I count. Sixteen of them. So bright that they could be candles.

Up at the top of the mast, the other birds join in the song, and then my own bird starts, too, from inside my chest. He fills in the gaps in Dai’s song with his own notes.

I suddenly know that I should be singing too. I almost can’t keep from doing it, but why?

Seriously? I’m not a singer.

Finally something starts to emerge. This song, it causes the air to wobble around us, around Dai and me.

Who is he?

I don’t know, but my heart is pounding, and then, arcing across the sky, the Northern Lights appear, rippling out in the dark.

Green

blue and

r

o

s

e

and

R

E

D

and