Magonia(40)

I pause, thinking. “But, if it is a ghost, it was something else. What was it?”
Dai sighs, impatient with my ignorance. “A heartbird.”
“What’s a heartbird?”
All he says, after a minute, is, “Heartbirds are special, but this one was broken long ago. He can’t hurt you. He’s gone but for his sorrow. I assume that’s why he lingers here.”
“Are you sure he’s—”
“I’ve never seen him, Aza, and I would have if he were real. He’s nothing. Old sadness with a loud voice. Broken bonds are serious things. Sometimes death doesn’t close them. Feed the sail.”
He hands me a small net, and points me toward the fat moths batting about the ship’s lights.
When I bring it its wriggling meal, the batsail looks at me and I look back at it. Its obsidian eyes are weary, and . . . kind?
It sings softly so only I can hear.
Find him, the bat trills. Heartbird.
That night, I sleep badly in my strange hammock; I dream of being kidnapped, of being lost, and of losing everything, and all night, the heartbird’s song haunts my sleep.









Dai and I are out on deck at twilight, sharing watch, peering off into the sky. There’s nothing in view, just a darkening not-much, a shiplessness.

I think about the crew’s tall tales—the ones I’ve overheard or, lately, asked about. They’re reluctant to share with me; they peek around corners, drop their voices to a whisper. Still, I’m learning.
They talk about airkraken, and about ghost ships in the skylanes. They whisper about fields of Magonian epiphytes, these magic plants that can grow in the air. These plants were once so common, they’d halt Magonian ships. Fields of them all over the sky, and their roots would tangle in the batsails’ wings until the Rostrae grew weary, and they fell from the sky.
Some of must be pure legend, of course. But some of it seems worryingly plausible. So it’s not crazy that I’m constantly looking over my shoulder, off the deck rail. If the crew is to be believed, there’s plenty to be afraid of.
“What am I doing?” I mutter to myself after I’ve been staring into the dark for a while. “Nothing’s out there.”
“Everything’s out there,” Dai says.
He’s pacing, and I’m dithering starboard. Despite the cold, he’s shirtless, possibly just to stress me out. His canwr, Svilken, is in and out of his chest, singing and chattering to the birds above us in the cote.
Against my will, Dai’s biceps keep appearing in my peripheral as he climbs around in the rigging and circles the deck. Magonians are casual about nudity, and seem not to feel cold.
Well, unless they’re me. Apparently my ability to regulate my core temperature was ruined by years in the milder climate of the undersky. I have no likelihood of shedding my shirt out here.
Also, I’m still Aza from earth so shirt-shedding? Never, never, no, and no.
I’ve been on Amina Pennarum almost four weeks, or at least, that’s what I can count. I’ve started understanding things, started remembering that I do, in fact, have a brain, even if I’m new to this world. And I may not be singing the way Dai desperately wants me to, but I can listen.
Periodically another ship comes alongside us, unloads our holds, and takes our harvests to Maganwetar—the Magonian capital. So there’s plenty of food around, but as far as ship’s rations go, the crew—the Rostrae—live on what seem to be cakes of birdseed.
There are no plants in Magonia, of course. So our foraging from earth, our storm creation, is necessary.
Up here, all the weird things people see from below and wonder about make sense: the freak snowstorms, the rains from sunny skies, the way a wind can kick up out of nowhere and blast half a city block. Super tornadoes. Hurricanes. Giant thunderstorm cells?
Magonia, all of it.
Apparently, once, in the 1600s, Magonia harvested a bunch of fields of blooming tulips from Holland, because Magonians assumed the tulips were food. They weren’t. Disgusted Magonian ships ended up dropping tulips from the sky, and the poor people of Amsterdam must have been utterly bewildered. It was like a rain of frogs, but flowers instead, and it made a mess of the economy.
(I would’ve loved to have seen that.)
The Rostrae do most of the hard work—both onboard and during harvest. When they visit earth, and drop below a certain height, they transform from the human-bird hybrids on deck up here, into normal-looking birds.
The Rostrae know basically everything about all things sky-related, so I make conversation where I can.
The golden eagle told me a story about the extinction of passenger pigeons.
“The horizon used to be full of silver ships crewed by them,” the eagle said. “To hear my ancestors tell it, they’d stretch to the edges of the sky. But they were all gone by the time I was born. An entire race exterminated. The drowners shot into the sky and ate them.”
She shuddered then, understandably. Because, genocide.
“The drowners tried to kill my own tribe too. Eagles’ eggs went soft and broken, because our nesting areas were destroyed. But we survived. We’ll survive Magonia too. Perhaps you’ll be the one who helps us, Captain’s Daughter.”
Before I can ask how, or what she means, she takes flight, and around her talons her chains glint. When she flies, she tugs Amina Pennarum higher.
No one here seems to question their duties, or their station. The whole ship sings the same tune.
The ghost—the heartbird, Caru—is the only thing that disobeys, the only creature that dares to be dissonant.