Magonia(26)

Wedda sighs. “By the very Breath! I don’t need a nestling to dress either, but you and I aren’t in charge of that, so I suggest you make it easier on us both and let me do it. Then we can go about our business.”
She reminds me so much of a nurse; matter-of-fact, and intolerant of smack. I have a pang of good memory, a nurse laughing in the middle of the night, hearing it down the hallway outside my hospital room. Oh god, where am I? What happened to me?
Wedda gives me a tight blue jacket and trousers, a shirt and underwear made of something soft. Then she tugs at me until I’m dressed. So much for being a functional person who can do everything for herself. I feel so weak that I barely understand buttons, and these buttons are more along the lines of hooks.
“But,” I say hopelessly. “What’s Rostrae?”
“You were taken when you were very small. You remember nothing at all, do you?”
“Taken.”
She nods, as though Taken isn’t a thing. But it is.
“A Rostra, little one, is what the people below would call a bird. Except that Rostrae are birds who aren’t always birds,” she says. “My kind travels in drowner skies, and up here too. Not all birds you see below are like us. Only a few.”
I think about birds: crows, magpies, sparrows. I imagine a whole flock of geese shape-shifting into creatures like Wedda, but on the surface of a lake. There are fairy tales with that sort of thing in them. And ancient myths.

I think about all the birds on my lawn that day, whenever that day was. It’s a firm piece of memory—all those many kinds of birds, staring at me, and ropes flying through the window—
Also Drowner? What’s a drowner?
She pushes my feet into boots made of gray leather. “These, for example, are made of dove skin,” she informs me. “Not Rostrae.”
Right. I feel their fluttering silenced hearts through their dead skin.
Nope. No, that is impossible. I shake my head. I do not understand any of that.
“Are you prepared, nestling?” Wedda asks, fluffing her feathers back into place.
“For what?”
“It’s time for you to meet the ship.”
“But I’m—”
“Captain!” Wedda shouts. “Aza Ray Quel is awake!”
Outside the cabin, birds screech, and with a big whoosh of weird I realize the noise I’ve been hearing is language, birds arguing about who gets to see me first.
The door bangs open, and a rush of not-people enter. Wings of all colors, and beneath the wings are faces. I take a queasy step backward, and Wedda keeps me stable.
Oh god, Aza. What’s happening?
Bright blue feathers on a girl with an indigo mohawk. Red-feathered breast on a man with a long skinny face and dark hair.
Rostrae. All in uniform.
They bow. I don’t know why.
Then there are the others, just a few of them, uniformed as well, wearing medals and insignia. These are tall, thin people who at first look human, but have dark blue lips and blue skin. Delicate bones, pale cloudy patterns on throats. If I saw them against the blue sky, I might not see them at all. They’re like humans, enough like humans that—
What are we talking about here, Aza? What, exactly, are we talking about?
Humans?! LIKE humans?!
You don’t believe in this. This is UFOs and tinfoil hats and hoax-central, Jason Kerwin-style. This is—
Beautiful, interrupts my brain, at which point the rest of my senses notice the tall blue person standing directly in front of me. His skin is no color that exists. Bluer than mine has ever been. He has black hair and eyes so dark I can’t see the pupils. He’s staring at me so intensely that it’s not a certainty I won’t become a crumpled-up pile of knees and elbows. I make an embarrassing snorting sound, which is me choking on nothing.
The boy looks me up and down, and I feel myself blushing crazily. I glance down quickly, because I feel as though I might be naked again, but I’m totally covered. Good thing Wedda was in charge of buttons.
“Aza Ray Quel is skin and bones,” barks the boy, and looks accusingly toward Wedda. “She’s supposed to be fit for duty. Can she even walk? Can she sing? She is half what she should be. By the Breath, I thought she was supposed to be the one.”
He puts out his hand and pokes my shoulder, hard, which mobilizes me.
“Excuse me?” I manage. “Who are you?”
Everyone’s staring at me, diagramming me, bird people and blue people alike. They’re making little sounds of displeasure. “Can someone please tell me why I’m here?”
“This can’t be right,” one of the blue people says to Wedda. “This pitiful nestling cannot be the one we’ve been hunting all this time, Aza the Kidnapped. She’s nothing.”
“She’s damaged by her time among the drowners,” someone else says.
“And by the Breath that brought her aboard. That probably damaged her too. It carried her,” says another, in a tone of revulsion and horror. “I heard it cut her from the skin she was in. Unspeakable.”
The room shudders.
“It’s shocking she lives at all, after that,” says the first blue person.
I feel seasick now. One of the blue people touches my chest with sharp knuckles, prodding, and I hear the bird inside my lung trilling, raspy and muffled.
“Her canwr’s nested in her lung,” Wedda says. “He’d never nest in another. That’s proof enough for the captain, and it’s proof enough for me.”
There’s a sudden jostling, a murmuring. Whispers and sounds of discomfort. Everyone seems paralyzed, and then everyone’s standing at attention.