Magonia(32)

I feel painkillered, drugged, numb. Maybe concussed. I don’t know anything.
I keep seeing Jason in his alligator suit. I keep thinking about him in the ambulance, telling me he’d find me, that he wouldn’t let me die.
But he did. He let me go. And I’m up here, and he’s down there.
“Jason,” I whisper. Dai’s watching my face.
“You’re bonded to that drowner filth. I knew it.”
He drags me to my feet and over to where Zal’s working the wheel, moving the ship through heavy clouds, forcing it up into the storm. She shoots Dai a reproachful look, and pins me with her stare.
“You will learn to follow orders, Aza Ray. You just risked your ship and everyone on it. We’re forced to report the loss of the spyglass to the capital, or risk sanctions. That means that Maganwetar will have official eyes on us. We didn’t need their attention.”
But I’m elsewhere.
Jason saw me. We’ve spent our lives seeing each other. He must have seen me.
“This ship searched for you for years,” the captain says. “Do you want to be taken again? Do you want to be seized?”
I feel nauseous, blurry-edged, and grief-stricken.
“But I love them,” I say quietly.
Zal whispers, her voice raw. Her fingers pinch into my arm, holding me upright. “I don’t care who you love. You will understand what you mean to Magonia.”
She grits her teeth.
“I’ve given up nearly everything to reclaim you. You may think this is nothing, but you’re everything to me, Aza Ray, more than the sky and its stars, more than this ship we sail on. You’re loved here, you’re needed here, and even if you don’t respect that, your time below is over.
“Look around, Aza. Look at your crew. Their survival is up to you. Would you see them perish? Because you refuse to claim your home, your power?”
Zal’s fingernails have broken the skin on my upper arm now, and I’m wincing. I try to pull away, but she’s staring into my eyes with such intensity I don’t know how to get loose. I have no idea what she’s talking about, but this is the farthest I’ve ever felt from home.
I cry out. The bird below shrieks.
“What’s that?” I ask Zal, because I see her face change at the sound. “Is someone hurt?”
“No,” she says, and that’s all. But I see her eyes well up with black tears, and I wonder about them, even as I’m bleeding.










I jolt awake to the sounds of a tortured song, my heart racing, tangled in my hammock. At first, I think the voice is part of a nightmare, but then I hear it again. The same voice I heard before, when I was crying.
Blood bone tear take hurt bite beast, someone screams.
A long wailing shrill, high and horrible, ear-bending. A bird of prey of some sort, the kind of call you might hear when something’s hunting, but much worse, because it has words.
Broken torn kill kill kill me, screams the bird.
Wedda comes into the cabin as I’m trying to get loose from the hammock to help . . . whatever it is.
Her presence is oddly calming.
“What is that?” I ask. “What’s happening?”
She looks at me for a moment with an unreadable expression. Sadness, I think.
“It’s nothing,” she says. “This ship is haunted with the ghost of a canwr. He is the captain’s business.”
I blink. “A ghost?”
“Dead long ago. He lives only in echo,” she says, and sighs. “By the Breath, I would that ghost were softer. He’s been rattling the ship since you came aboard. We’re all on edge about it, but there’s nothing to be done. Leave it alone.”
Yeah, except that it feels like the bird is calling to me—the same way this ship did, the first time I saw it in the clouds. Zal says this ship is mine. Does the ghost belong to me too?
“You’ll get used to him,” Wedda says.
“What’s happening to him? We need to help—”

“That’s just how the ghost sings, nestling. It will stop. Caru never sings longer than a few minutes at a time. Old sorrows. It is not your business to calm a spirit. Let’s get you washed and dressed.”
The sound hurts my ears and my heart, but after a few minutes, the bird stops. I don’t hear anyone running around the ship. No one seems upset by the cries but me. Maybe Wedda’s right. Maybe it’s better to ignore it.
Wedda pushes my arms through my jacket sleeves, tugging it into place. She washes my face for me, because apparently I’m five years old. No. I take the cloth from her.
“I’m fifteen. I can wash my own face.”
“Sixteen,” Wedda says, and I inhale. Sixteen. She’s right.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I say. Then, “What if I’m a ghost?”
Wedda clucks. “Nestling, ships have their secrets. Magonia has its secrets too. You’ll learn what you need to learn soon enough. For now, your only duties are dressing, eating, and reporting for duty.”
Wedda fastens my buttons before I get a chance to do it myself. Today she yanks my hair into braids, twisting it in her finger-talons.
“No,” I protest feebly. “I can—”
She shows me myself in a mirror. I’m not used to my new looks. I don’t make eye contact with my reflection, but my hair’s an intricate, beautiful mass of braids that resemble some kind of sailor’s knot.
“Can you?” Wedda asks, laughing. “This is the captain’s knot. Do you know it, then, ground-dweller? Have you studied the styles of the sky?”