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.
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.”