What did Ley mean? My brain won’t let it go.
Zal takes me to the wheel, and from it, we look out across a star-filled sky. I stay silent, but I’ve got questions.
“You must be wondering what happened today,” she says, understatement of the year.
“I know what happened,” I say. “I defended the ship from pirates who wanted to kill me. What I don’t know is why.”
Zal looks at me, and smiles.
“In good time, Aza, you and I will have no secrets. The pirate Ley Fol was a surprise, and not a good one. Her presence in these skies means that knowledge of you has gotten out into Magonia. The Breath I brought aboard to bring you up from below, perhaps. I thought he could be bribed, but one cannot wholly trust them. They’re monsters.”
I take a moment, imagining what the hell a monster might be to Zal. To Magonia. Visions of tentacles and Godzilla, visions of teeth. Those stormsharks were monsters to me. The Breath are something different. And, seemingly, more feared.
“But what are they?”
“They can walk among the drowners, Aza, as I cannot. They can be paid for their services, but they’re nothing good.”
Have I ever seen her look frightened before? No, I haven’t. It makes me nervous.
“There are things here that do not need to be called by name. This is a new world for you, and for us, with you in it. You are the linchpin. You’re something Magonia needs.”
Something. Not someone.
“So what am I?” I ask Zal.
She grins, showing her sharp teeth, her hair boiling up around her collar.
“You, Aza, are my daughter, and you were born to sing the elements into submission. You inherited that song from me, and though my voice was taken, we have yours.”
She hesitates, then: “There was a time I could sing the way you can.”
She opens the neckline of her jacket and shows me the dark, ugly scar down the center of her chest. It’s not just a scar. It’s worse than that. The place where her canwr would go has been welded shut. It’s a harsh dark line of indigo skin, twisted and gnarled.
“I was punished for trying to change Magonia with my song, to shift us from dependence on the drowners. The officials of Maganwetar broke my bond to my canwr to stop me. That will never happen to you and Milekt. We’re stronger now, all of us.”
For the first time I really hear what isn’t there. I can’t believe I didn’t before. Her voice is raw because it’s solo. She has no canwr. Her bond is broken.
That’s why Caru screams. It must be. Caru is Zal’s heartbird.
“Is he—was he—”
Zal glances sideways. “You’ve heard him singing,” she says, reading my mind.
“The crew says the ship is haunted by him,” I say. “The crew says he’s dead.”
“He sings nonetheless,” says Zal, but something in her face, something in her movements makes me wonder.
“When they broke your bond, did it make him insane?” I ask. “Or was he already insane?”
“You’ve heard the remnant of his song,” she says, her face grief-stricken. “I thought I could heal him, but I could not.” She shakes herself. “Nothing can be done about that now. All we can do is move forward.
“Ley and I, when we were young as you, read the stories of an old Magonia, one free from our destructive relationship with drowners. Those stories are not fantasy, but history. I believed in them. I thought she did too, but she lied.”
Something occurs to me.
“So,” I say, “why? Why did they punish you? What was your crime?”
The look in her eyes startles me. I feel something, and for a second, I don’t know what it is.
“Telling the truth,” she says.
“About what?”
Dai appears from belowdecks, swinging himself around aft.
Zal nods in his direction. “Dai was hatched on a Magonian shipsettlement largely forgotten by the authorities. Once they’d had plenty of food, grain from below, their own small ships to forage, but when the drowner world began to dry up and they needed assistance, Maganwetar denied their rations. His people’s ships degraded into splinters. Their batsails died of old age. There were no squallwhale where he came from. There was no rain at all. His people starved slowly, as below them, drowners starved too. We could see drowner cities burning beneath us, and the green going to brown.
“Their Rostrae fled, taking flight for better forage, nesting in the rigging of official vessels. His father went on a mission, elected by the shipsettlement council. Dai was seven. He was with his father in the launch when they becalmed. They drifted, hungry and parched.
“Dai’s father died trying to let himself down from the launch and onto the ground. His body fell into the desert, his bones picked clean by vultures.”
As Dai works nearby, I notice his arm. A long scar runs its length, something I’d seen, but not understood. Everyone in Magonia seems to have scars.
“Vultures. Similar to the ones that tried to get you.” Zal grins halfheartedly. “He was thin as a husk, and so he mostly escaped predators, but when he returned home, his world was broken into pieces, everyone skin and bones, everyone dying. His mother. His brother. His sister. Starved by the drowners, who broke their own land and scorched their own earth. And forgotten by a capital who cared nothing for them.”
I take another look, longer this time, at the Magonian boy—my commander, and my taskmaster since boarding Amina Pennarum. Suddenly, he seems like only that to me—a boy. Maybe not as strong or sure as he pretends he is.
“I found him,” Zal says, following my gaze. “This ship was hunting for you, Aza, searching the skies of the world, when we happened through Dai’s section of horizon. It had not then occurred to me that you might have been dropped undersky. I sailed through his drifting shipsettlement, and docked my own ship, traveling by jolly boat through the empty skyways.
“Dai saw Amina Pennarum and stowed away on her, and, days later, I found him in our hold, eating a handful of corn. My heart aches at the pain Dai has known. It is the kind no creature—human, Rostrae, or Magonian—should have to suffer.
“I taught Dai how to sing,” Zal continues. “And I spent years reading the history of Magonia in eggshells, hatchlings that perished before they could fly, abandoned ships, skypictures and squallwhale song—”
This gives me an image of Zal I wasn’t expecting. A Zal kind of in the same category as me, in the library, reading and reading.
“I voyaged through the parts of the sky that went bad first. I watched the heavens toss with winds we had not before seen, whipping storms we had nothing to do with creating. Below us, the seas flooded over drowner coastlines, and crops died.
“They willfully destroy the earth they live on, and in doing so, they destroy us,” says Zal.
They.
What she means is all of humanity.
I try to think of Magonia as I would have when I lived on earth as a human. A parasitic kingdom feeding off of earth’s crops?
But then I imagine Dai, tiny, hungry, in a boat all alone.
I think of my family in their car, driving from place to place, spitting toxic things up into the sky and spilling them down into the ground.
Down there, cities glow out of the dark, red and green and white. As though the whole planet is made of cars trying to get somewhere.
I feel like I was blind when I was down there, and now, what?
“What do you want from me?” I ask.
“Look there,” Zal says.
I follow her finger, pointing into the dark. A mass of clouds which, as we draw near, resolve into something else. Zal stands beside me, her wiry weight against my shoulder. She points to a place darker than the rest.
Our pod of squallwhales, I realize suddenly, isn’t with us. “Where are—”
“They won’t come here,” Dai says, approaching us and once again breaking into my thoughts. “They await us on the other side. Look, Aza. Look at what the drowners d
id with their poisons.”
Dai aims a light at the mass, and then I see it. It moves a fluke, and then another. A small eye, rolling in the giant squallwhale’s head. There’s a wound on its skin, dripping from its tear duct to its jaw. There are wounds all over the squallwhale, not the wounds of weapons, but of something else. Burns. Bleeding.
It tries to sing, but it can’t. I watch as from its blowhole comes something red. I watch it fall, and I know exactly what this rain is called on earth.
The squallwhale keens and rolls in agony. It blows a storm from its blowhole, toxic red and black shifting to clear, with an oily shimmer. I’ve never seen a squallwhale storm-sing with anything but joy before. The sight makes me feel sick. I have to swallow bile.
“There are many of these, all over Magonia. New ones are being born daily, making storms of poison,” Zal says.
I look into the squallwhale’s eye, and want to cry too. Sing, it says, looking at me. Nightsong. Deathsong. As I watch, several more wounded whales appear and swim past us, their bodies glowing with wrongness.
They can’t even talk to one another. Most of the noise they make is just jumble and screaming.
Milekt starts up a song from inside my chest, and what comes with that song is fury. It shakes me.
As Milekt’s song swells, my momentary thoughts of all the good people on earth, of Eli and my parents and Jason, get tangled up with a rage that makes me clench my fists. I feel Dai beside me, vibrating, too, and in his chest, Svilken sings.
“What are we really doing?” I ask Zal at last. “Where are we going?”
She looks hard at me, staring into my eyes. “The drowners are destroying us, and so are the policies of Maganwetar.” She pauses before continuing. “The capital’s position is that Magonia has no choice but to live hidden from those below. Maganwetar is not the same as most of Magonia, a hungering mass of citizens, scavenging the crops below it wherever it moves. It takes its tithe from whichever ships acquire the best forage. There is more food in Maganwetar than its citizens need, but the capital demands the best of everything, and its leavings are the bruised and the moldering, the shriveled and the withered. Drowners starve and poison even their own people. Yet Maganwetar remains locked in the past when it comes to our policy.”
“It is no longer possible to follow the official position,” Dai says. “The drowners destroy our skies, our people, and our air.”
Humans don’t know about Magonia. They don’t know what they’re doing, a part of me wants to shout. But I’m looking at this giant animal singing acid rain. And earth knows about acid rain but does nothing to prevent it.
“The capital believes we need drowner crops,” Zal says. “But it’s a myth. There is another way.”
I can’t imagine a miracle that will fix all the burnt, broken places on the face of the earth.
“How?” I ask.
“We need you to retrieve something,” Zal says. “The drowners put it beneath rocks, in a place they thought it would be safe. We need you to turn those rocks to water. You and Dai. Together you’ll be strong enough. Then, we’ll bring it up into the sky.”
“What is it?”
“Aza,” she says. “If the drowners starve themselves, we starve with them. If they destroy our skies, we die with them. We must take back what belongs to us. You will help us steal something that was stolen from us, long ago.” Zal smiles and it pulls me in. “The drowners have our plants underground. In a hidden vault in the frozen North.”
The crew’s been cautious with me, I realize now. But there are a lot of stories about the Magonian epiphytes, because apparently they were magic food, enough for all of the skydwellers. Did some kind of bad bargain with earth take them away?
Are these plants the only thing Magonia wants?
“Why doesn’t Magonia just negotiate with earth?” I say, and Dai looks at me and laughs.
I imagine a delegation of Magonians landing on the lawn of the White House, asking to talk to the president about trade. It’s pretty obvious that said delegation would get shot out of the sky before it even landed.
Okay, yeah. I get that.
“There can be no more wishing for our people, no more relying on others to do the right things. Do you see what you can do? For me? For us?” Zal taps her chest, right over her scar.
I look up at Zal. “A plant,” I say.
She nods. “A plant, yes. And so, so much more. You, Aza, will save your entire people.”
Even though a small part of my brain is muttering about how no deal is ever simple, the angry song Milekt sang is still rattling around in my head, and it drowns out everything else.
“Yes,” I say to Zal.
“Do you swear to it?” she says, and puts out her hand, blue and calloused.
I offer my own hand, but I’m not prepared when she slashes my palm with a tiny silver knife. Inky blood, and pain, a searing sense of flood. I stagger back, but she presses her own palm to mine, her own cut.
“We already share blood, daughter,” she says. “But this is ritual. We’re vowed to our mission now. Swear it.”
Her blood drips onto the deck as the pod of injured squallwhales swim slowly past us.
“I swear,” I say, watching them go, listening to their broken, breathless song. Dai stands beside me, his hand on my back. Somewhere deep in the ship I hear Caru call, just once, a long wail in the dark.
“Daughter,” Zal says, and kisses my forehead.
I close my eyes and for just a moment, I’m on earth again. My mom putting me to bed, keeping me safe, keeping me alive every night.
Then I open my eyes and it’s cold wind all around me, and the fading song of the sick squallwhales as we sail away from them and into the night.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
I’m at Dai’s cabin the next morning, pounding on the door. He opens it, looking like I woke him up.
Does he ever wear a shirt? He stretches his arms out. I try not to be taken in by the look of him, but it’s useless.
He jumped off the boat to save me from vultures and pirates.
Um, you were already in the process of saving yourself, my brain points out, but I’m not in the mood for logic.
Dai cared. So I can trust him. I want to trust someone.
“So, I’m not just a normal Magonian singer. My song is different, right?”
“What do you think?” he says, and grins.
“And according to Zal, according to Wedda, according to everyone, you’re supposed to sing with me,” I tell him, trying to keep my voice under control. “That’s supposedly part of your official job description.”
“It is,” he says.
“How come you never do?”
“Because you weren’t ready.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because you never did before what you did yesterday,” he says, fairly reasonably.
His eyebrow goes up in a way that reminds me of—
I imagine Jenny Green ringing Jason’s doorbell, looking at him with sympathy in the wake of my death, and him answering the door muttering pi.
No. Jason wouldn’t actually want Jenny Green.
(He might.)
He wouldn’t.
Dai must see the messed-up look on my face.
“Are you okay?” he asks, and he puts his hand on my shoulder. The warmth of it makes its way through my jacket, and it apparently doesn’t matter that I just got derailed by sad, I feel my heart pounding as though I’m singing all over again.
I’m standing here with a boy who lost his own family, in a totally different way than I lost mine. Who am I to be sad? My family on earth is still alive. His isn’t.
“Fine,” I say, even though I have to grab my own fingers and hold my own hand to keep from touching him. It’s such a want that it’s almost not a want at all, but a need, like the need for water or food.
I try in vain to swallow down the guilt and the weirdness and the want and every single thought except about what’s in front of me. Dai shrugs on his shirt and jacket, giving me so much view of his back, his shoulders, his profile, I have to actually shut my eyes.
“You’re shy,” he says, reappearing beside me, and he laughs.
“You weren’t wearing enough,” I say.
“Drowner,” he says, but for the first time, it’s in a teasing voice.
“Exhibitionist,” I say.
“What’s that?”
“Someone who has a compulsive need to show other people his attractiveness,” I say. Primly.
Then I curse internally.
I’m awkward because of exhaustion. Because of the insanity of yesterday coupled with the captain’s ghost bird calling me in my sleep—calling for the sky, calling for freedom.
But it’s dead, I remind myself. A dead thing is already free.
Something else kept me awake as well. Want. I felt the power of my song and there was no doubt it could go further. That it could be stronger. There was more to it.
Whatever more there is, I want it.
“You’re the first mate,” I say. “You’re supposed to be professional.”
“And you are beautiful, Aza Ray Quel, Daughter of Zal, singer of sky into stone,” he says. “Even if you do need singing lessons. And lessons in everything else too.”
Then he’s past me and out of his cabin, up the ladder before I can say anything at all.
I climb the ladder behind him. The inside of my skin is too hot, and my brain is too small. My ears burn, and my heart pounds.
I hoist myself up on deck, and distract by looking at an airplane, far down, underneath our squallwhales. Aza Ray, I think. Aza Ray, your life is so gigantically not what you thought it was going to be. Your life is awesome, in the old sense. As in, full of awe. Though, um, the old word for “awesome” was actually . . . “awful.” A factoid from a certain person creeps in. I shake my head fast to rid myself of things I can’t think about.
“You have to play by the rules,” Dai tells me, sitting down on the deck beside me. “This isn’t about you. This is about Magonia. You’re just a piece of it.”
Magonia Page 16
