“But you can’t execute her—” I say.
“She was the worst sort of betrayer. A friend turned enemy. That you survived her sabotage is a miracle. A life for a life.”
“But I’m not dead,” I protest.
Ley looks at me. She seems apathetic.
“Don’t trust your mother,” she says. “She wants more from you than she admits. She is bent on vengeance, not on reason.”
Zal flicks the whip, and it lashes Ley’s face.
Ley recoils. The whip leaves a line in her skin, which is first white and then blue, glowing letters of ice, slipping into her body. I watch as the chill spreads through her, a snake of light slipping beneath her skin.
“To die with dark secrets is to die without a deathsong,” Zal says. “Who told you what I was planning?”
Ley cringes, sags slightly, but her eyes stay open. Whatever else she is, she’s brave.
“Wait,” I say. “She saved me back then. They would have killed me. Drop her in the sky near Maganwetar. Put her on a launch. Isn’t there a jail there?”
Zal looks at Ley, and then at me.
“You are alive, Aza, because you’re extraordinary, not because she was merciful. She didn’t save you. She betrayed me. This is an execution. Not a conversation.”
Ley looks steadily at her.
“Sail the skies, then, Zal. Take what’s ours from the drowners, flood their strongholds, kill everything below, but know that there can be no balance without the people of the ground, and without balance, Magonia falls. You’re not the first to think she had a violent solution to the problem of centuries. You are wrong, as they all were.”
“ENOUGH!” Zal’s eyes are lightning, and her skin’s actually shaking.
“Now I will sing my final song,” Ley demands.
“Oh, I think not,” Zal says. “Those who refuse me deserve no privilege. Because of your betrayal, my first mate’s family starved, ignored by Maganwetar. Had you not betrayed me? This sky would be fed now, and full. You ruined a future that, if we’d made it then, would have been joyful. I might have spent the last fifteen years in a different kind of country, my daughter beside me, my heartbird singing. Instead?”
Zal pauses, and we all hear Caru scream, a blood-chilling lament.
“This was your doing, and for it, you die without song,” says Zal. She pauses. “As a sympathizer to Maganwetar’s policies, you’ve betrayed your true people. A deathsong is for those who die with honor. Not for you.”
There’s a slight movement in the crew, people shifting. I look around. The crew’s all on deck. Some of them are spreading their wings in excitement or anxiety. I can see teeth and fangs and beaks open.
“It was him who told me,” Ley says.
Zal jolts.
“Who knew your heart but him? He did not agree with your plans. He came to me. Caru told me everything. Your canwr betrayed you.”
Zal is rigid. She takes one painful breath.
“Liar,” she says.
Ley stares steadily at her. Her face reveals nothing.
“The deathsong,” says Ley.
“Denied.”
There’s a startled shuffling on the ship, all the Magonians and Rostrae murmuring in shock as Zal breaks her word.
Zal waves a hand toward Dai, who brings out a long cloth from behind his back. He ties it around Ley’s mouth, stopping up her voice. This, I realize, was planned. This denial of deathsong was on purpose.
Ley takes a small breath through her nostrils. Then she shrugs in the manner—I know it well—of someone who knows her time is ending.
I look around for an executioner. Hood. Ax. Nothing.
Ley nods. She takes a step backward, then another. Zal’s face is tight, her jaw working.
Milekt lands on my shoulder, beak to my ear. It’s no comfort.
Shuffling along the plank, Ley meets my eyes. She’s mute. She sings no deathsong. The blue-white chain of light Zal sent into her moves through her throat and down her arms. She glows with it.
Her hands shake, and so does her chest. She stands at the end of the plank.
She looks only at Zal.
She opens her chest and shows her canwr, a black-and-white magpie, broken as she is. She holds him in her hands.
Zal takes a step forward, meets her enemies’ eyes, stretches her elegant blue fingers, and smiles coldly, just before she pushes Ley off the plank.
Ley falls backward into the sky, tossing her bird up into the air as she goes.
Deathsong, sings the bird, alone, blistering, dissonant notes as he cries, fall, break broken bright light fall, fall.
I’m standing, limp, undone. Off the ship’s side, a vulture rises up and looks at me.
Ley’s canwr keeps singing.
Then a final sound from him, wordless, a bone-chilling wail of despair. Caru cries out, an echo from elsewhere.
The vulture takes Ley’s canwr.
Dead thing, another vulture croaks, and dives. I run to the rail and try to see down into the cloudy mists that surround us. Nothing at first. Then a shred of fabric drifting up. A bit of her uniform jacket.
And a mist of blood, swirling through the air, coloring the clouds for a moment before that, too, disappears.
My stomach churns.
Zal passes close beside me. “One day you’ll be a captain. One day you’ll have vengeance of your own. This is how it is done in the real Magonia.”
But the skin beneath her eyes is darker than it should be, her face drawn. She holds one hand to her heart. She walks away, leaving me. I see Jik glance in my direction as she follows Zal belowdecks. Her eyes, too, are dark.