Magonia (18 page)

He’s not like me.

He’s human.

Right, then.

Shut up, Aza’s brain. Shut up.

I hear, from far off inside our ship, the awful cry of that invisible bird again.

No,
he sings.
Leave me or kill me.

He shifts into wordless screaming, which chills my whole body. The ghost bird—Caru, I remember his name now—sings again, an anguished wail. Everyone pretends it’s not happening. Everyone ignores him.

I try to block out the sound, but then, from nowhere, I get flashes of something I can’t quite—

Someone leaning over me in a crib.

For a moment I see my own tiny hand held in a black gloved one.

And that’s all I have, a gasp of a memory.

Kill me
, the ghost bird screams
. Broken heart. Broken string.

I’m jolted again by Dai shaking my shoulder.

“Move, if you’re not working,” he says. “You’re in the way of the nets.”

“Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“The bird?”

He tilts his head. “No,” he says.

What am I remembering?

I tug Dai’s sleeve. “Magonian babies. What are they like?”

“
They?
” he says. “
We
. We hatch. A lot smarter than drowner babies when we do.” He struts a little. “I can remember my own hatching.”

I don’t give him the satisfaction of seeming impressed.

“The screaming bird?”

“The
ghost
,” Dai says tersely.

“Is it a canwr?”

“That’s two questions,” he says grumpily. “Or four, depending how you count.”

“Dai, please.”

“Just—” he hisses, glances around, then pulls me away from the nearest crew members. “Just let it go, Aza. The ghost’s been agitated since you came aboard.”

I pause, thinking. “But, if it
is
a ghost, it
was
something else. What was it?”

Dai sighs, impatient with my ignorance. “A
heartbird.
”

“What’s a heartbird?”

All he says, after a minute, is, “Heartbirds are special, but this one was broken long ago. He can’t hurt you. He’s gone but for his sorrow. I assume that’s why he lingers here.”

“Are you sure he’s—”

“I’ve never seen him, Aza, and I would have if he were real. He’s nothing. Old sadness with a loud voice. Broken bonds are serious things. Sometimes death doesn’t close them. Feed the sail.”

He hands me a small net, and points me toward the fat moths batting about the ship’s lights.

When I bring it its wriggling meal, the batsail looks at me and I look back at it. Its obsidian eyes are weary, and . . . kind?

It sings softly so only I can hear.

Find him
, the bat trills.
Heartbird.

That night, I sleep badly in my strange hammock; I dream of being kidnapped, of being lost, and of losing everything, and all night, the heartbird’s song haunts my sleep.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

Dai and I are out on deck at twilight, sharing watch, peering
off into the sky. There’s nothing in view, just a darkening not-much, a shiplessness.

I think about the crew’s tall tales—the ones I’ve overheard or, lately, asked about. They’re reluctant to share with me; they peek around corners, drop their voices to a whisper. Still, I’m learning.

They talk about airkraken, and about ghost ships in the skylanes. They whisper about fields of Magonian epiphytes, these magic plants that can grow in the air. These plants were once so common, they’d halt Magonian ships. Fields of them all over the sky, and their roots would tangle in the batsails’ wings until the Rostrae grew weary, and they fell from the sky.

Some of must be pure legend, of course. But some of it seems worryingly plausible. So it’s not
crazy that I’m constantly looking over my shoulder, off the deck rail. If the crew is to be believed, there’s plenty to be afraid of.

“What am I doing?” I mutter to myself after I’ve been staring into the dark for a while. “Nothing’s out there.”

“
Everything’s
out there,” Dai says.

He’s pacing, and I’m dithering starboard. Despite the cold, he’s shirtless, possibly just to stress me out. His canwr, Svilken, is in and out of his chest, singing and chattering to the birds above us in the cote.

Against my will, Dai’s biceps keep appearing in my peripheral as he climbs around in the rigging and circles the deck. Magonians are casual about nudity, and seem not to feel cold.

Well, unless they’re me. Apparently my ability to regulate my core temperature was ruined by years in the milder climate of the undersky. I have no likelihood of shedding my shirt out here.

Also, I’m still Aza from earth so shirt-shedding? Never, never, no, and no.

I’ve been on
Amina Pennarum
almost four weeks, or at least, that’s what I can count. I’ve started understanding things, started remembering that I do, in fact, have a brain, even if I’m new to this world. And I may not be singing the way Dai desperately wants me to, but I can listen.

Periodically another ship comes alongside us, unloads our holds, and takes our harvests to Maganwetar—the Magonian capital. So there’s plenty of food around, but as far as ship’s rations go, the crew—the Rostrae—live on what seem to be cakes of birdseed.

There are no plants in Magonia, of course. So our foraging from earth, our storm creation, is necessary.

Up here, all the weird things people see from below and wonder about make sense: the freak snowstorms, the rains from sunny skies, the way a wind can kick up out of nowhere and blast half a city block. Super tornadoes. Hurricanes. Giant thunderstorm cells?

Magonia, all of it.

Apparently, once, in the 1600s, Magonia harvested a bunch of fields of blooming tulips from Holland, because Magonians assumed the tulips were food. They weren’t. Disgusted Magonian ships ended up dropping tulips from the sky, and the poor people of Amsterdam must have been utterly bewildered. It was like a rain of frogs, but flowers instead, and it made a mess of the economy.

(I would’ve loved to have seen that.)

The Rostrae do most of the hard work—both onboard and during harvest. When they visit earth, and drop below a certain height, they transform from the human-bird hybrids on deck up here, into normal-looking birds.

The Rostrae know basically everything about all things sky-related, so I make conversation where I can.

The golden eagle told me a story about the extinction of passenger pigeons.

“The horizon used to be full of silver ships crewed by them,” the eagle said. “To hear my
ancestors tell it, they’d stretch to the edges of the sky. But they were all gone by the time I was born. An entire race exterminated. The drowners shot into the sky and ate them.”

She shuddered then, understandably. Because, genocide.

“The drowners tried to kill my own tribe too. Eagles’ eggs went soft and broken, because our nesting areas were destroyed. But we survived. We’ll survive Magonia too. Perhaps you’ll be the one who helps us, Captain’s Daughter.”

Before I can ask how, or what she means, she takes flight, and around her talons her chains glint. When she flies, she tugs
Amina Pennarum
higher.

No one here seems to question their duties, or their station. The whole ship sings the same tune.

The ghost—the heartbird, Caru—is the only thing that disobeys, the only creature that dares to be dissonant.

He screams no matter what Zal says. The bird’s voice is so agonized, so painful, so lonely, that I feel tears starting every time I hear it.

He’s singing now, in the growing dark.

A few of the squallwhales come closer to the ship, pinging at Milekt, who informs them snarkily that I’m
only sad. Not hurt.

Will she cry a storm?
one of the calves asks, and I can feel its pleasure in my tears. All it has to compare them to is the squallwhale storms. It can hardly be expected to understand human sadness.

“I’m not even crying,” I protest. “I’m fine.”

The mother squallwhale looks at me with first one eye, then the other, buffeting bits of gray storm about with her feathery fins.

Sing
, she recommends, like I’m her calf.

I frown. It’s not as though I need yet another mother.

I scrub my face with my sleeve.

Magonia functions in other ways I have yet to understand. Earlier tonight, another ship sent us a message by shooting a glowing arrow with a letter attached to it onto our deck.

“Among the drowners, I’ve heard they call that a shooting star,” Jik told me out the side of her mouth. I imagined the astronomers below us watching this light arc across the dark, charting it. “Here, it’s a letter from captain to captain.”

Zal pored over the message.

“Stay on course,” she muttered at last to Dai. “They acknowledge the loss of the spyglass and demand a fine. They’ve employed a Breath to fetch it and clean up any repercussions. They don’t know about Aza.”

“Better than expected,” said Dai, and he nodded.

“What do you mean,
clean up repercussions
? What do you mean,
don’t know about me
?” I asked, relying on her lack of focus. Also, the word “Breath”—I keep hearing people use it, and I still don’t know what it means.

“The capital knows I brought a harvest up from below, and that in doing so, I lost the spyglass. Maganwetar tracks everything. The loss of the glass wouldn’t have escaped their attention. Artifacts from Magonia have fallen amongst the drowners before, and created undue interest from below. Those who dropped them were punished.”

“Why couldn’t you say you were recovering your daughter?” I asked her. “Are you ashamed of me?”

She looked at me in a way that said I’d missed every memo ever sent.

“Far from it, Aza. You are the answer to everything. And, simply, I could not,” she said.

So—onward, into mystery.

Sometimes the air around us is warm, and other times there’s ice in my hair, and Milekt complains and roosts in my chest, irritated. Milekt is a grumpy teacher. In between irritations, he drills me in Magonian alphabets, which are sung rather than spoken. I spend my time singing ABCs. I’ve reversed course and become three years old again. How am I supposed to learn a whole language in just a few weeks? How am I supposed to know everything everyone else knows?

I catch Dai staring at me, concentration in every line of his insanely beautiful face, but he looks away fast, like he got busted leaning sideways to get a look at my homework.

I sing Magonian ABCs silently in my head, and gaze out into the mist—there, a dotted line coming in from the horizon, above the clouds, up where the highest insects float. Bats. A whole colony of them.

They angle toward the boat and part in two when they meet the prow. Then they soar further up into the sky. One of the bats brushes against my cheek.

They remind me of hotel maids, these creatures. Industrious, rolling the evening into alignment, straightening it with small pulls, high voices chattering in a song that now I hear and a little bit understand.

Hunter
, this bat informs me, its voice high, and I say it back as well as I can, proud that I’m starting to learn how to speak its language.

The little bat looks out into the night, at something I can’t see.
Hunter
, it says again, looking at me. The batsail looks down at us.
Hunter
, it echoes. The ghost bird cries out from below.

I peer off into the bluish dark. We’re drifting into a cloud of smoke. Not clouds—no, actual, thick acrid smoke.

There’s something over there, something kind of roiling, something full of bright spots. A flash of lightning resolves into a long streak of white.

A creature.

Something with a lot of teeth and then it’s gone.

I’m sprinting to Dai.

“What’s that?” I ask, stabbing my finger urgently in the direction of the chaos.

He squints at the thing happening not that far from us. Not that far at all. He looks worried. Seeing his expression makes me feel I should be worried too.

“Stormsharks,” he says, and he adjusts the knife in his belt.

Did he just say
stormsharks
? My inner nerd is elated. Can anything I will ever hear from now until the end of time sound cooler than
stormsharks
?

Dai steps protectively between me and the ship’s rail.

“Um, do I need to freak out?”

“As long as they already have something, they’re not coming for us,” he says. He squints at the twisting mass of white dappled dark. There’s something in the center of it, something I can’t quite see. Our bearing takes us closer. Twenty feet, now fifteen.

A mast. Sails. A ship. And white flames all around it.

A high, high call from the ship’s batsail.
Comrades
, it cries.
Distress! DISTRESS!