Magonia(28)

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 pi?ata 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.