Zal manages to loosen her bonds, slightly, glowering with fury. The pirates around her step forward in warning, but Ley nods to them. “Let her speak.”
Not that they’re going to keep her silent.
“You stole my child!” Zal screams at her.
“I saved your child. I was ordered to kill her, Zal. Do you think anyone else would have spared her? The capital knew what your plans were. And they knew her power—”
Kill me? And “my power,” again, “my power.” Everyone talks about my power. Is it the song?
Ley continues. “—but I wasn’t going to murder a baby. I kept her safe. Whatever they say about Captain Ley Fol, I never murdered a child. Which other captains can say that? Can you?”
Zal steps forward again. Ley’s pirates grab her arms.
“You hid my daughter from me for fifteen years!” Zal shouts. Her eyes are full. Even though she’s shouting, she’s weeping too.
Ley Fol turns to me.
“If Maganwetar had known you were alive, they’d have ended you. I paid a Breath to put you in a skin and substitute you for one of the drowners they were bringing up. I intended to bring you back to Magonia as soon as things were calm, but the capital’s memory is long.” She looks harder at me. “If you are what you were, I gave my career for a reason. If not? The fates are cruel.”
She turns back to Zal.
“And so you’ve found her. I trust this is not merely a sentimental recovery for you.”
“I love my daughter,” Zal cries, indignant. “I have never stopped loving her.”
Ley nods at the pirates, and one of them gags my mother. She struggles, still shouting into the gag.
Ley looks at me and sighs.
“You should be dead, Aza Ray. How is it you live? How did the drowners keep you from collapsing?”
“I don’t know,” I say. And it’s true, I don’t know anything.
“That song. The one that saved you just now. You sang that same song on this ship when you were small, and it gave your mother ideas. It made her think you were the one to deliver us from all our hardship. Sing it again, little one. Show us what your mother wishes to do with you.” The expression on her face is hungry, searching.
“I don’t really sing,” I say. “I don’t know how. I don’t know what you’re looking for, but it’s not on this ship.”
“You do,” Dai whispers from behind me. “Sing the way you were singing when I caught you.”
I feel Milekt inside my lung, rattling, scrabbling. He wants to sing too. Everything feels slow motion.
Caru echoes from belowdecks. The notes of the ghost bird echo through my head, looping around me, raging against this ship, this life. I feel that song almost like I’m the one singing it. There’s a hum in my ears.
One of the pirates is at our batsail, tracing its wings with a sword. It makes a horrible high-pitched noise of pain.
I feel a jolt. That’s my sail. I realize, suddenly, that’s my friend. And no matter what Zal told me before, it feels pain. It’s being hurt.
I squeak out a single pitiful note of Magonian song.
Ley looks at me, her head tilted, her face tense.
“Perhaps your song isn’t what it was. Perhaps I might have left you with your mother after all.”
I make another peep, and she starts to turn away.
“Her time among the drowners has changed her, or we were wrong in the first place. She’s not the same kind of singer Zal was. Take Amina Pennarum’s grain,” she orders her crew, her voice strangely sad. “Take their stores. And sink them. Put Zal in the brig.”
Does she think I’m weak? Does she think I really can’t do anything?
Are they going to kill me? Will they kill us all?
One of the pirates grabs me by the arm. I throw myself backward hard, but I’m not strong enough. He marches me toward the stern. Milekt shrills inside me and the ghost bird calls out. The sky below me, and my toes, one, two, three up the deck rails, lurching, struggling, hanging over open sky, and I’m thinking, like this? After all this? After I saved myself, after Dai saved me?
NO.
This time it actually comes out of my mouth, a raw screal, a loud whistling note. Milekt joins in with me, high and furious as I feel.
“STOP!” Ley screams at the pirates holding me, but I’m already singing.
Something changes, fast, a whipping energy coming out of my mouth and into the sky.
The horizon goes from blue to black and the air feels dense. There are raindrops over the pirate’s ship, for a moment, before the raindrops become something else. I see Ley look up, her strange eyes flashing.
The sound coming out of me is nothing like a cough, nothing even in the category of a song, but some kind of bird-of-prey roar, shredding my throat, pulsating my fingers, and Milekt beneath it, singing inside my voice, amplifying me, and making me stronger.
The sky roils black, and full of fast wind, lightning sparking out of every raindrop. There’s a weight in everything.
People have started to cover their heads and their faces.
Sand starts to pour from the sky, from the clouds that surround their ship, wrapping around the pirates, making them stagger. A rain of pebbles. Then larger rocks, and people are screaming and dodging.
The air gets muddy between me and the silver-haired pirate captain, who’s yelling orders at her crew. I see the enemy ship tilt, lurching up onto one end.
Zal is staring at me with a kind of eager joy.