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?”
“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.