“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.
The chart looks like something I’d drool over at a museum—yellowed, decaying at the edges. Half star map, half monsters in the water. In one corner, I glimpse a giant mouth with pointed teeth rising up out of the sky, and in another, a city in the clouds.
I angle my eyeballs to get a better look, but I hear Dai behind me.
“Ordinary Skyman Ray,” he says. “You take orders from me, not the captain.”
Zal looks up at me, and nods. “You’re assigned to the first mate.”
Salute her, shrieks Milekt. I salute as best I can.
Zal smiles slightly. “Daughter, you’re doing that with the wrong hand.”
I’m medium-embarrassed, but it’s not as though I grew up on a ship. I have a history of hosp—
“Where’s that?” I say, pointing at the chart. There’s a cluster of buildings. All around the city, there are whirling lines. “Are there cities here? What are those?” I point at the lines.
“That’s Maganwetar, our capital, and those are its defenses. The capital is surrounded by winds.”
The name of the city cues a memory in me. Old High German? That’s what it is. Maganwetar—the word for whirlwind.
Jason. I wince.
“Aboard Amina Pennarum, we prefer the open sky to cities,” Zal says. “The residents of Maganwetar live in buildings tethered to one another, their whirlwinds and tempestarii keeping everything but provisions out. It’s a city of sleepers and storm magicians, but the residents of Maganwetar are lazy as drowners.”
“Drowners like me?” I ask.
“No. You, Aza, were never a drowner,” says Zal. “We are in the skies to defend Magonia, even if there are those in Maganwetar who think they need no defenses, no strategies, no battle plan.”
Her lip curls.
“Things are changing, Aza Ray, and you’re part of the change. Now, I expect you to learn your duties.”
Dai tugs me away to another part of the deck.
I’m exploding with questions.
“Are we going to Maganwetar?” I ask. “Where is it?”
Dai looks grudging. “It moves. And we’re not going there. You’re not welcome in the capital, nor are you safe.”
“What do you mean, not safe?”
“You’re not an official crew member of Amina Pennarum,” says Dai, hesitating only a moment.
“How am I not official? Didn’t the captain send someone to get me? A Breath—”
Dai jerks, looking around. “Don’t mention them,” he says. He holds my eyes, deadly serious. “Trust me. They’re nothing you want to call to this ship, not without a good reason, and not without funds to hire them.”
“But what are they?”
He doesn’t answer. “You were reason enough for the captain to summon one, but I cannot think of another. If we come into proximity with an official ship, you are to disappear into the holds below and the rest of us are to deny that you’re here. These are the captain’s orders.”