Magonia(33)

“Not so much,” I mumble. “I didn’t know the sky had styles.”
“We have no time to waste on teaching you basic Magonian grooming,” she says. “The captain’s made that clear. You’re here to serve a higher purpose. But there are procedures,” she says. “There are rules. Hair remains braided so that it is less accessible should the ship be boarded by pirates.”
I stare at her. “Pirates?”
She snorts. “Of course.”
She tugs my braids into position and whirrs in satisfaction, or at least, in some sort of pleasantry.
I pull at my uniform, straightening it.
Is this the deal with the rest of my life, then? Seafarer? Captain’s Daughter? At least no one’s lacing me into a corset, or fitting me for a tiara, or making me take elocution lessons.
I was never princess material. When I think about it, this ship, fairy tale or not, is tailor-made for the likes of Aza Ray Boyle.
Here, I look the same as everyone else, and I’m dressed the same way everyone else is, with the exception of the insignia on my uniform. I look down at it, studying. A little crest showing a bird with an open beak, singing to a storm cloud.
It matches the captain’s.
I lace my boots, and look at Wedda, like, yeah, Aza Ray can lace her own boots, Aza Ray has total skills.
Aza Ray Quel, not Boyle, I remind myself.
Wedda laughs an owl laugh, which is more cough than laugh.
“Report for duty,” Wedda tells me. “You belong to the first mate, lucky thing as you are.”
I haven’t learned to read her yet. I barely know her. But it’s not as though I don’t recognize sarcasm when I hear it. I was made of sarcasm for fifteen years.
“Belong?” I ask.
“So he’ll make you think,” she answers, and huffs. “Though you are not his property. Remember that, nestling.”
Definite sarcasm. Okay then.
I climb out onto the upper deck and see why. The first mate is Dai, the black-haired boy who sang stars for me, and officially, already, does not like me.
I feel instantly stupid. Immediately overwhelmed. This, it occurs to me, is the first time I haven’t already done the reading. I’ve never not been ahead of everyone else. I’m sitting at the bottom of the class, clueless.
Dai’s looking pressed, polished, and preemptively pissed off. For someone who can’t be much older than me, he has the attitude of a fifty-year-old general.
It’s a shame because, for a blue person, he’s hot.
I mean, maybe if I just admit it, it’ll lose its power.
There are stabby black metal earrings hanging from one of his ears. Fishhooks.
A little voice, not that of Milekt, but of my own idiot self, echoes through my head. Stop staring at him, Aza, you’re staring.
“You slept long enough,” Dai says. My cheeks flush.
The sky is pale orange and pink. The sun hasn’t even broken the horizon. “But it’s early,” I say.
“It’s been two days. Do you always sleep for years at a time? Now that you’re my charge, you’ll get used to seeing the dawn. You’ve wasted enough of our training time already.”
“Training?” I question. He doesn’t answer.
Instead, he leans in and jabs his finger into my insignia, right in the crooked place in the center of my chest, where my lung tilts over onto its side. Dai’s looking unhappy. I notice that his crest is just the basic, the ship shaped like a bird.
“Don’t think you’re special because of this, no matter what the captain says. I’m the first mate on this ship. You don’t even have status, Captain’s Daughter. You’re an ordinary skyman and you’re late.”
I look down at my chest, wincing at a sudden sharpness. The skin over my left lung is exposed by my uniform’s neckline. It’s blue and smooth one second, and in the next there are outlines of a circle, deep, in indigo, darker than my skin.
It’s almost a tattoo. Except that then the circle—it pushes out. It tilts.
And it opens.
Opens. No blood. No pain.
There is a door in my chest.
A little yellow bird trills from his perch atop the mainmast.
I know the bird already. They’ve called him Milekt. Gold wings. Black beak. Black eyes, flashing at me. He coughs, a delicate sound of feathers and hollow bones. He stretches his wings.
The bird swoops down and into the air. He hovers, trilling wordlessly before me, and then flits into the cavity exposed by the opening. The door closes behind him, painlessly, like he was never there.
I’m frozen.

I knew he was there—the bird. I’ve felt him before. But this? This is too much to—
Sing with him, says my chest, so hard that I actually choke. Milekt rustles around and kicks inside my lung.
“Where are we going?” I ask Dai. “This ship? Are we on a voyage?”
He looks at me in a way that says I’m very, very dumb.
“A voyage?” he says, making the word “voyage” sound idiotic. My mind flashes to Jason, who’d never look at me that way. I feel weak and lost, and then, no. No more thoughts in that category. I can’t afford them.
Dai stretches his arms for all the world like he’s a jock on the football field, showing his ease in his authority.
“By the Breath, you act as though no one ever taught you how to speak. The ship is foraging, and patrolling. Your duties are following my orders, and learning to sing, neither of which require commentary.”
I glance around looking for the captain. Zal’s standing just a few feet away with the blue jay girl, who is holding a chart out for her perusal.