It’s not as though I’m asleep. I’ve been thudding with exhaustion since the pirates and the song—but then I started thinking about what got said on deck. And how many gaps there are to fill in between the words Ley and Zal spoke, and what I know.
You and I both know you want a new world.
I trust this is not merely a sentimental recovery for you.
The one to deliver us from all our hardship.
What did Ley mean? My brain won’t let it go.
Zal takes me to the wheel, and from it, we look out across a star-filled sky. I stay silent, but I’ve got questions.
“You must be wondering what happened today,” she says, understatement of the year.
“I know what happened,” I say. “I defended the ship from pirates who wanted to kill me. What I don’t know is why.”
Zal looks at me, and smiles.
“In good time, Aza, you and I will have no secrets. The pirate Ley Fol was a surprise, and not a good one. Her presence in these skies means that knowledge of you has gotten out into Magonia. The Breath I brought aboard to bring you up from below, perhaps. I thought he could be bribed, but one cannot wholly trust them. They’re monsters.”
I take a moment, imagining what the hell a monster might be to Zal. To Magonia. Visions of tentacles and Godzilla, visions of teeth. Those stormsharks were monsters to me. The Breath are something different. And, seemingly, more feared.
“But what are they?”
“They can walk among the drowners, Aza, as I cannot. They can be paid for their services, but they’re nothing good.”
Have I ever seen her look frightened before? No, I haven’t. It makes me nervous.
“There are things here that do not need to be called by name. This is a new world for you, and for us, with you in it. You are the linchpin. You’re something Magonia needs.”
Something. Not someone.
“So what am I?” I ask Zal.
She grins, showing her sharp teeth, her hair boiling up around her collar.
“You, Aza, are my daughter, and you were born to sing the elements into submission. You inherited that song from me, and though my voice was taken, we have yours.”
She hesitates, then: “There was a time I could sing the way you can.”
She opens the neckline of her jacket and shows me the dark, ugly scar down the center of her chest. It’s not just a scar. It’s worse than that. The place where her canwr would go has been welded shut. It’s a harsh dark line of indigo skin, twisted and gnarled.
“I was punished for trying to change Magonia with my song, to shift us from dependence on the drowners. The officials of Maganwetar broke my bond to my canwr to stop me. That will never happen to you and Milekt. We’re stronger now, all of us.”
For the first time I really hear what isn’t there. I can’t believe I didn’t before. Her voice is raw because it’s solo. She has no canwr. Her bond is broken.
That’s why Caru screams. It must be. Caru is Zal’s heartbird.
“Is he—was he—”
Zal glances sideways. “You’ve heard him singing,” she says, reading my mind.
“The crew says the ship is haunted by him,” I say. “The crew says he’s dead.”
“He sings nonetheless,” says Zal, but something in her face, something in her movements makes me wonder.
“When they broke your bond, did it make him insane?” I ask. “Or was he already insane?”
“You’ve heard the remnant of his song,” she says, her face grief-stricken. “I thought I could heal him, but I could not.” She shakes herself. “Nothing can be done about that now. All we can do is move forward.
“Ley and I, when we were young as you, read the stories of an old Magonia, one free from our destructive relationship with drowners. Those stories are not fantasy, but history. I believed in them. I thought she did too, but she lied.”
Something occurs to me.
“So,” I say, “why? Why did they punish you? What was your crime?”
The look in her eyes startles me. I feel something, and for a second, I don’t know what it is.
“Telling the truth,” she says.
“About what?”
Dai appears from belowdecks, swinging himself around aft.
Zal nods in his direction. “Dai was hatched on a Magonian shipsettlement largely forgotten by the authorities. Once they’d had plenty of food, grain from below, their own small ships to forage, but when the drowner world began to dry up and they needed assistance, Maganwetar denied their rations. His people’s ships degraded into splinters. Their batsails died of old age. There were no squallwhale where he came from. There was no rain at all. His people starved slowly, as below them, drowners starved too. We could see drowner cities burning beneath us, and the green going to brown.
“Their Rostrae fled, taking flight for better forage, nesting in the rigging of official vessels. His father went on a mission, elected by the shipsettlement council. Dai was seven. He was with his father in the launch when they becalmed. They drifted, hungry and parched.
“Dai’s father died trying to let himself down from the launch and onto the ground. His body fell into the desert, his bones picked clean by vultures.”
As Dai works nearby, I notice his arm. A long scar runs its length, something I’d seen, but not understood. Everyone in Magonia seems to have scars.
“Vultures. Similar to the ones that tried to get you.” Zal grins halfheartedly. “He was thin as a husk, and so he mostly escaped predators, but when he returned home, his world was broken into pieces, everyone skin and bones, everyone dying. His mother. His brother. His sister. Starved by the drowners, who broke their own land and scorched their own earth. And forgotten by a capital who cared nothing for them.”