“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!”
Our batsail opens its wings and our Rostrae surge up, tugging lines, throwing hooks and ropes overboard and flying at the fray. Zal’s on deck, shouting. She sees me and barks an order. “Belowdecks! You’re not here!”
Then she’s running too.
“Stations!” she shouts. “Squallwhales!” Through some sort of amplifier, she screams out over the storm, into the space where the sharks are feeding and the smaller ship is being overwhelmed.
“SQUALLWHALES!”
Our whales come surging fast, storming harder than I knew they could, and suddenly there’s a rush of rain over the little ship. It pours out of the clouds, and the whales sing ferociously.
“THIS IS CAPTAIN ZAL QUEL! PREPARE TO EVACUATE YOUR SHIP!”
There’s a thud, a reverberating hard bash like a pileup on the freeway during rush hour—and then planks and ropes snake out from our crew and onto the deck of the injured ship.
Ignoring Zal, I peer over the railing. There’s a captain there, but with a sudden weirdness, I realize that the captain is tied to her mast. There are bodies all over the deck below, and bags of grain, slit open and spilled.
What?
The fire I thought was on the ship itself suddenly looks to be off to the side, on a little boat, and contained. A moment of confusion on Amina Pennarum, and then—
“PIRATES!” Dai screams.
WHAM. A surge of Rostrae and Magonians up from belowdecks of the little ship, all armed, all screaming.
A pirate Rostrae drops down in front of me, black mohawk, red streaks in his hair, and comes at me with a sword. I have only my mop handle in my hand, and I swing it hard.
I’m fighting like someone who knows how to fight, like this is what I was born to do.
I’ve never been Aza the sick, only Aza the warrior.
I hit him in the side of the head, and there’s a sickening crack and maybe I killed him, but then he’s up again, and shrieking, transforming into a magpie, running and leaping off the edge of the ship into the air.
Screaming and screaling, my crew and theirs. The smell of fire and feathers. Our batsail is shrieking in fury and I look quickly up and see the pirate ship’s sail clawing at ours, the two sails crossing, their wings scrabbling, the masts bending.