The solution to starvation seems so simple. Just a matter of providing food to a bunch of people who are hungry. Jason’s mom Eve once told me that if everyone shared the resources they had, there’d be enough for everyone. Instead, we have this— parts of the world that have too much, and other parts that have nothing.
Magonia has nothing.
I think about Dai’s family. I think about Dai. I think about how I’ve never been hungry. I think about how I’ve never even really thought about hunger before.
Nothing is perfect here. Nothing is perfect down there either.
I spend the next few days privately trying to figure out where the captain’s canwr is hidden, and publicly practicing the old Magonian songs Milekt and Dai have taught me. I sing the moisture in the air into sand, then the sand back into water. I sing quietly, tiny things, a small piece of ice made of a drop of rain, a drop of rain made of a stone. I sing things into their opposites.
I’m not perfect yet. Sometimes a note makes the air crackle, and Milekt scolds me. Sometimes a note meant to turn water to stone turns it to fire instead, and Milekt shrills and pecks me inside the lung.
But not so secretly, I keep hold of the missed note. Because water into fire? Um, hell yes.
It keeps me from obsessing about the sad song of Caru, and the dark misery I feel rising up inside me when I listen to it.
I have to find him.
I roam the ship, looking in every passage, but nothing. I search the bottom of the ship, in the cells, but I see only blackness, not even Ley, our prisoner, nor any of the other pirate prisoners either, which makes me wonder what Zal’s done with them. Could they be dead? Did she throw them overboard while I was sleeping?
And there’s no real bird. No ghost bird.
Is there some part of Amina Pennarum I still haven’t discovered?
In the mornings, we’re over silver-gray ocean, and icebergs. We keep sailing. Tiny little ice islands dot the water below.
Out in the Magonian sky, I see planes passing each other by. Each one its own world full of passengers, entwined with one another, overlapping one another, unaware of the rest of the people flying past out there in the air.
Just as earth is unaware of Magonia.
It’s freezing. Even Dai’s wearing a winter uniform, and Wedda dresses me in multiple layers of woven feathers beneath my spider-silk jersey and jacket.
I’m sitting in the captain’s chair now, at Zal’s encouragement. She’s teaching me how to steer, how to read charts that go in multiple directions, up and down, east, west, north, south.
One level of sky contains stormsharks and ship-tilting winds, and another contains firefish and airkraken, and then there’s the possibility of colliding with mountaintops, and the danger of flying too close to city borders with a ship that is too large.
Dai’s over my other shoulder, pressing his warm hand into my back, and I can feel our bond, bone to bone, voice to voice. Milekt is calmer now that we’ve sung. He chirrups in the canwr cote, and nests in my lung while we practice. Our control is better and better. Water to stone, stone to water.
I lift the liquid from a cup held by Dai, turn it to ice in midair, with Dai singing alongside, delicately, perfectly monitoring my strength. He ends up with a faceful of water, which he wipes off and flicks at me, laughing.
There’s still fun here, despite the seriousness of what we’re planning, the thing we’re moving toward.
“We’ll change the world. We’ll bring the plants back to life. The way they were before the smokestacks below made them wilt into dormancy,” Zal says. “I don’t remember them. But there are legends of a time when the skyfields were full of them. All Magonia could eat. We used drowners’ crops only to supplement on long voyages back then, and didn’t need them to survive. With the plants back, our dependence on the drowners will vanish. They’ll be . . . superfluous.”
I think about the last two hundred years of machinery on earth. I think about how the Industrial Revolution starved Magonia. And now it’s starving parts of the earth too.
Zal gets reports from elsewhere, birds landing on Amina Pennarum’s deck with letters from other ships. Flaming arrows shot after sunset. She spends a lot of time staring out like she’s a figurehead, her face unreadable, but one letter, delivered by a ragged sparrow Rostra, makes her stand up straight.
“Breath ship in range.”
Everyone whips to panicky attention. I can smell the dread, and it’s mine too. What does that mean? Are we in danger? Are they coming for us? Zal keeps reading.
“They may be employed by Maganwetar, or someone else. We’re not pursued. Yet. I won’t risk it. Bring up the dead.”
Dai springs down the ladder with several big, muscled Rostrae, and returns with Ley, dragging her up from her unknown dungeon. She’s struggling, twisting, and chained.
“This goes against all law of the sky,” Ley shouts. “I am owed a trial!”
Zal uncoils a whip from her jacket and cracks it. It’s something not quite metal, not quite rope. It uncoils and hovers in the air, a twisting cat’s tail stripe, just in front of Ley’s face, twitching there.
“You are owed nothing. You’re a pirate, Ley Fol,” Zal says. “This is your trial.”
Ley watches the whip warily, her arms pinned by Dai and another guard.
“Maybe we should wait,” I say nervously. “Until we can—”
“Do you remember the day she took you?” Zal asks me. “It was the worst day of my life, and that misery lasted fifteen years.”