Magonia (20 page)

The pirate captain seems weirdly more familiar the more I look at her, and I shudder.

“I’m Captain Ley Fol. It was me who left you among the drowners, long ago.”

Zal shouts from across the deck, “Stay away from her, murderer! Betrayer!”

“Betrayer? I turned my back on your insanity,” says Ley Fol.

“You turned me in,” Zal spits. She’s frenzied, and there’s still a sword to my throat. I can’t sing, though Milekt is battering me from the inside, raging. I’m trying to understand what the hell is going on.

“I’ve no more love for Maganwetar than you do, but you’d have brought disaster on us all.”

Zal manages to loosen her bonds, slightly, glowering with fury. The pirates around her step forward in warning, but Ley nods to them. “Let her speak.”

Not that they’re going to keep her silent.

“You stole my child!” Zal screams at her.

“I
saved
your child. I was ordered to kill her, Zal. Do you think anyone else would have spared her? The capital knew what your plans were. And they knew her power—”

Kill
me
? And “my power,” again, “my power.” Everyone talks about my power. Is it the song?

Ley continues. “—but I wasn’t going to murder a baby. I kept her safe. Whatever they say about Captain Ley Fol, I never murdered a child. Which other captains can say that? Can you?”

Zal steps forward again. Ley’s pirates grab her arms.

“You hid my daughter from me for fifteen years!” Zal shouts. Her eyes are full. Even though she’s shouting, she’s weeping too.

Ley Fol turns to me.

“If Maganwetar had known you were alive, they’d have ended you. I paid a Breath to put you in a
skin and substitute you for one of the drowners they were bringing up. I intended to bring you back to Magonia as soon as things were calm, but the capital’s memory is long.” She looks harder at me. “If you are what you were, I gave my career for a reason. If not? The fates are cruel.”

She turns back to Zal.

“And so you’ve found her. I trust this is not merely a sentimental recovery for you.”

“I love my daughter,” Zal cries, indignant. “I have never stopped loving her.”

Ley nods at the pirates, and one of them gags my mother. She struggles, still shouting into the gag.

Ley looks at me and sighs.

“You should be dead, Aza Ray. How is it you live? How did the drowners keep you from collapsing?”

“I don’t know,” I say. And it’s true, I don’t know anything.

“That song. The one that saved you just now. You sang that same song on this ship when you were small, and it gave your mother ideas. It made her think you were the one to deliver us from all our hardship. Sing it again, little one. Show us what your mother wishes to do with you.” The expression on her face is hungry, searching.

“I don’t really sing,” I say. “I don’t know how. I don’t know what you’re looking for, but it’s not on this ship.”

“You do,” Dai whispers from behind me. “Sing the way you were singing when I caught you.”

I feel Milekt inside my lung, rattling, scrabbling. He wants to sing too. Everything feels slow motion.

Caru echoes from belowdecks. The notes of the ghost bird echo through my head, looping around me, raging against this ship, this life. I feel that song almost like I’m the one singing it. There’s a hum in my ears.

One of the pirates is at our batsail, tracing its wings with a sword. It makes a horrible high-pitched noise of pain.

I feel a jolt. That’s
my
sail. I realize, suddenly, that’s my
friend.
And no matter what Zal told me before, it feels pain. It’s being hurt.

I squeak out a single pitiful note of Magonian song.

Ley looks at me, her head tilted, her face tense.

“Perhaps your song isn’t what it was. Perhaps I might have left you with your mother after all.”

I make another peep, and she starts to turn away.

“Her time among the drowners has changed her, or we were wrong in the first place. She’s not the same kind of singer Zal was. Take
Amina Pennarum
’s grain,” she orders her crew, her voice strangely sad. “Take their stores. And sink them. Put Zal in the brig.”

Does she think I’m weak? Does she think I really can’t do anything?

Are they going to kill me? Will they kill us all?

One of the pirates grabs me by the arm. I throw myself backward hard, but I’m not strong
enough. He marches me toward the stern. Milekt shrills inside me and the ghost bird calls out. The sky below me, and my toes, one, two, three up the deck rails, lurching, struggling, hanging over open sky, and I’m thinking, like this? After all this? After I saved myself, after Dai saved me?

NO.

This time it actually comes out of my mouth, a raw screal, a loud whistling note. Milekt joins in with me, high and furious as I feel.

“STOP!” Ley screams at the pirates holding me, but I’m already singing.

Something changes, fast, a whipping energy coming out of my mouth and into the sky.

The horizon goes from blue to black and the air feels dense. There are raindrops over the pirate’s ship, for a moment, before the raindrops become something else. I see Ley look up, her strange eyes flashing.

The sound coming out of me is nothing like a cough, nothing even in the category of a song, but some kind of bird-of-prey roar, shredding my throat, pulsating my fingers, and Milekt beneath it, singing inside my voice, amplifying me, and making me stronger.

The sky roils black, and full of fast wind, lightning sparking out of every raindrop. There’s a weight in everything.

People have started to cover their heads and their faces.

Sand starts to pour from the sky, from the clouds that surround their ship, wrapping around the pirates, making them stagger. A rain of pebbles. Then larger rocks, and people are screaming and dodging.

The air gets muddy between me and the silver-haired pirate captain, who’s yelling orders at her crew. I see the enemy ship tilt, lurching up onto one end.

Zal is staring at me with a kind of eager joy.

There’s something I learned from Jason last year.
Sous rature
. If you need a certain word to communicate something, but that word happens to have years of baggage, and you want to get rid of the baggage it comes with, you cross it out, but use it anyway. Some people do it like this:
love
.

With this song, I write over the place where the old Aza was. I’m not that person. I’m
Aza
. I scream a song, punk rock without a microphone, the kind that makes boulders fall from the heavens.

Transforming rain into rock.

Destroying all those that can hear it.

I’m avalanching the sky.

I have no idea how I’m doing it.

A rock the size of my head lands on our attackers’ deck and splinters the boards.

I sing something that unbinds my crew’s hands, something I don’t even know. I move rope and chain. I’m not doing it on purpose. It’s unfolding from the song. I don’t know how it’s happening but everything’s shifting, whirring, surging around me and Milekt.

Like I’m in a movie,

like I’m not me,

like I’m someone I never imagined—bigger, stronger, and fearless. I grab the pirate captain’s sword and twist it to point at her chest.

Milekt trills in my lung, his own solo song of triumph. I open my mouth and let loose a whoop.

I am standing in the center of the deck, this time with a sword, not a mop.

I am the Captain’s Daughter. I’m everything they thought I was, and more.

“On your knees,” I tell Ley. I nod at Jik and she ties the pirate’s wrists. My crew moves quickly to disarm the rest of the pirates, and suddenly,
Amina Pennarum
has won.

Zal is free of her bonds, and laughing, looking completely exhilarated. Her shirt is torn. I can see a long scar running down the center of her chest. From what?

“Surrender, Ley!” she shouts in triumph. “This sky is not yours to command.”

But Ley doesn’t surrender. She stands, bound, looking defiantly at Zal.

“Where were you heading, Zal? To the north? Breaking every vow you made? You and I both know you want a new world. Maganwetar will not forgive you twice. They’ll take you for treason, and this time you will
both
be executed—”

Zal looks sharply at Dai, and he moves quickly, gagging Ley with his scarf.

“Who else knows we have her?” Zal says, looking around at the other pirates. “From where did the rumor come? Who spoke to you?”

They just look at Ley. All the pirates are on our deck, bound.

“If you will not answer, you’ll share her fate.”

They remain silent. Zal nods at me.

“Sink that ship, and its pitiful cargo,” Zal says.

“What do you mean?” I ask her.

“Sing it,” she says. “Sing the sky into sand, Aza. Do what you just did, and sink them. Milekt knows the song.”

Milekt sings a new note and I join him, following his lead. We sing rocks onto the chains fastening the other ship’s bat to their mast. We can all see the links breaking until finally they’re gone.

Their batsail stretches its wings, and for the first time I wonder how batsails end up tethered to these ships in the first place. The pirate sail spreads its wings and billows out and is gone, gliding out into the dark as the empty ship sags in the sky.

When I finally turn to look at Zal, I see her standing beside Ley, staring down at her, a hawk studying a rabbit. Except that they’re both birds of prey.

Milekt and I sing heavy air into the pirate ship, and without its batsail, it drops. I sing sand until I can’t see it anymore. Until all it can do is crash onto the world below.

At this height, there will be little left when it lands. What will the humans call it? Asteroid? Meteorite? There’s so much they don’t know.

I stagger a little, because my knees have gone weak. I look around. Everyone’s staring at me, the Rostrae and the Magonian crew alike, Zal and Dai and Jik, everyone.

“Take Ley to my cabin,” Zal says, and two Rostrae carry the other captain down the ladder and into the belowdecks. She doesn’t even struggle. She just looks at me evenly, and so does everyone else, my whole crew. The rest of the bound pirates go too, into the brig.

There is blood on the deck and holes in the ship and prisoners now in the hold and I wonder if I’ve done something massively wrong, something that I can’t—that no one can ever—take back.

And then I hear it. Streaks of bird voice, long trills and screams.

Jik is grinning and Dai is shouting in triumph, and with a great noise our own batsail spreads its wings and we push out hard, our squallwhales singing us a storm.

Cheers and shouting as the crew sets about making our ship whole again. And I’m glowing with what I just did, the craziness of it, the confusion, the
Aza
of it.

I’m dizzy, and so is Milekt. I can feel him inside my chest.

This, then.

This is what everyone meant when they said
sing
. This is what they meant about
power
. Dai’s hand is in mine. I don’t know how it got there, but it sends a pulse through me. Zal takes my other hand in hers and raises it up. We stand there, on the deck of our ship, surrounded by our crew and I’m maybe someone who’s finally been found. Dai looks at me.

“Together, Aza,” he says.

“Together,” Zal says.

“Together,” I whisper, because this is nothing I’ve ever felt. The batsail sings out to me, and Milekt, in my chest, sings too. The Rostrae look at me, and the Magonian crew nods in approval.

I turn my head and look at Dai. I’m not sure what all this means, not even sure what I did.

“You did
everything
,” he says, reading my mind. And he grins, and squeezes my hand hard.

For the first time in my entire life, I have power. More than power. I feel like I belong. Like this is my ship.

Like this is my country.

Like this is my destiny.

There’s the cry of the ghost again, all around me. I glance at Zal, but she’s already walking away. The ship is sailing noticeably faster, and I look up to see Rostrae joined with the batsail to pull us at a greater speed.

And we fly.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

It took a lot of walking in small, frustrated circles after I
heard Aza’s voice at her funeral, after something fell out of the clouds, but I found it.

It’s here in front of me right now. Under the papers. I’m waiting until the moms leave the house, and I can look at it again for the millionth time.

It’s a spyglass.

It’s old. As in, incredibly old. It’s made of brass and wood. The wood is scarred. You can’t see through it, because it has a lens cap or something, made of hard wood. It fell a long way. The cap is smashed in place over the glass, and I can’t get it off.

It’s scratched all over with strange characters, in a language I haven’t been able to find any kind of translation of.

Yes, you heard me. I can’t get a translation. Not even a wildly erroneous one from someone lurking online.