Magonia(41)

He screams no matter what Zal says. The bird’s voice is so agonized, so painful, so lonely, that I feel tears starting every time I hear it.
He’s singing now, in the growing dark.
A few of the squallwhales come closer to the ship, pinging at Milekt, who informs them snarkily that I’m only sad. Not hurt.
Will she cry a storm? one of the calves asks, and I can feel its pleasure in my tears. All it has to compare them to is the squallwhale storms. It can hardly be expected to understand human sadness.
“I’m not even crying,” I protest. “I’m fine.”
The mother squallwhale looks at me with first one eye, then the other, buffeting bits of gray storm about with her feathery fins.
Sing, she recommends, like I’m her calf.
I frown. It’s not as though I need yet another mother.
I scrub my face with my sleeve.
Magonia functions in other ways I have yet to understand. Earlier tonight, another ship sent us a message by shooting a glowing arrow with a letter attached to it onto our deck.
“Among the drowners, I’ve heard they call that a shooting star,” Jik told me out the side of her mouth. I imagined the astronomers below us watching this light arc across the dark, charting it. “Here, it’s a letter from captain to captain.”
Zal pored over the message.
“Stay on course,” she muttered at last to Dai. “They acknowledge the loss of the spyglass and demand a fine. They’ve employed a Breath to fetch it and clean up any repercussions. They don’t know about Aza.”
“Better than expected,” said Dai, and he nodded.

“What do you mean, clean up repercussions? What do you mean, don’t know about me?” I asked, relying on her lack of focus. Also, the word “Breath”—I keep hearing people use it, and I still don’t know what it means.
“The capital knows I brought a harvest up from below, and that in doing so, I lost the spyglass. Maganwetar tracks everything. The loss of the glass wouldn’t have escaped their attention. Artifacts from Magonia have fallen amongst the drowners before, and created undue interest from below. Those who dropped them were punished.”
“Why couldn’t you say you were recovering your daughter?” I asked her. “Are you ashamed of me?”
She looked at me in a way that said I’d missed every memo ever sent.
“Far from it, Aza. You are the answer to everything. And, simply, I could not,” she said.
So—onward, into mystery.
Sometimes the air around us is warm, and other times there’s ice in my hair, and Milekt complains and roosts in my chest, irritated. Milekt is a grumpy teacher. In between irritations, he drills me in Magonian alphabets, which are sung rather than spoken. I spend my time singing ABCs. I’ve reversed course and become three years old again. How am I supposed to learn a whole language in just a few weeks? How am I supposed to know everything everyone else knows?
I catch Dai staring at me, concentration in every line of his insanely beautiful face, but he looks away fast, like he got busted leaning sideways to get a look at my homework.
I sing Magonian ABCs silently in my head, and gaze out into the mist—there, a dotted line coming in from the horizon, above the clouds, up where the highest insects float. Bats. A whole colony of them.
They angle toward the boat and part in two when they meet the prow. Then they soar further up into the sky. One of the bats brushes against my cheek.
They remind me of hotel maids, these creatures. Industrious, rolling the evening into alignment, straightening it with small pulls, high voices chattering in a song that now I hear and a little bit understand.
Hunter, this bat informs me, its voice high, and I say it back as well as I can, proud that I’m starting to learn how to speak its language.
The little bat looks out into the night, at something I can’t see. Hunter, it says again, looking at me. The batsail looks down at us. Hunter, it echoes. The ghost bird cries out from below.
I peer off into the bluish dark. We’re drifting into a cloud of smoke. Not clouds—no, actual, thick acrid smoke.
There’s something over there, something kind of roiling, something full of bright spots. A flash of lightning resolves into a long streak of white.
A creature.
Something with a lot of teeth and then it’s gone.
I’m sprinting to Dai.
“What’s that?” I ask, stabbing my finger urgently in the direction of the chaos.
He squints at the thing happening not that far from us. Not that far at all. He looks worried. Seeing his expression makes me feel I should be worried too.
“Stormsharks,” he says, and he adjusts the knife in his belt.
Did he just say stormsharks? My inner nerd is elated. Can anything I will ever hear from now until the end of time sound cooler than stormsharks?
Dai steps protectively between me and the ship’s rail.
“Um, do I need to freak out?”
“As long as they already have something, they’re not coming for us,” he says. He squints at the twisting mass of white dappled dark. There’s something in the center of it, something I can’t quite see. Our bearing takes us closer. Twenty feet, now fifteen.
A mast. Sails. A ship. And white flames all around it.
A high, high call from the ship’s batsail. Comrades, it cries. Distress! DISTRESS!
A flash of lightning and I see things better suddenly. A pointed mouth, open wide, and a stormshark leaps up out of the sky and over the mast of the other ship. More distress calls.
“By the Breath!” Dai curses. “We have to intervene!” He takes off running. “Captain!”