TRAITOR!
But I’m not the traitor.
I hurl him out into the air, and he hangs there, shocked and enraged.
Caru’s been here all along. I’ve been hearing scraps of his song. He’s here to sing with me.
I know it now. He stayed for me.
She would drown the earth, Caru shrieks. She would kill all. Kill the world. Drown the fields and the trees.
Caru jabs his beak into my hand, and prods the ring on my finger. Zal’s grabbing for him, but he dodges, glances off, and he screeches at her, too, and all around us, still, there are Magonians and Rostrae screaming, dying. There are Breath dropping down from above.
Svilken’s out of Dai’s chest and dive-bombing the falcon. Zal’s now aiming something at Caru, and I can see it. She’s going to shoot him with her bow and arrow.
I look at Jason, this tiny figure on the ice. I can hear him shouting still, his voice, and I know what he’s shouting. I know that number. It doesn’t end.
Like {(( ))}. It never ends.
I know myself.
I know what to do.
I open the door in my chest again, and I place Caru’s ring inside my lung.
I hear Milekt scream a horrible scream. He shudders and tumbles to the deck at my feet. I merge with Caru.
Heartbird.
I sing.
Separate but connected. By choice, his own and mine. We choose each other.
There’s a huge quake a change in everything. Caru looks at me and I look at him.
We are stronger together, I know, than anything else. Fiercer than everything else. He’s both things, earth and Magonia and so am I.
Caru jerks in the air, those huge yellow eyes, his wings wide. He lifts up, and hangs on the wind above me, his wings out. His beak opens and he shrieks something that shifts the sky around us. I open my mouth and fling my voice out with his, and our notes wrap around each other.
I feel the whole sky respond. This isn’t the way it is with Milekt, or even Dai. Caru and I—the two of us are one thing. Caru’s voice comes out of my mouth, and mine out of his.
Caru and I sing waves of certainty. Stars blaze in the sky at our sound and fall in arcs on both sides. My voice is growing and so is Caru’s. High-pitched sonar, singing out, singing out, singing out.
The world’s flooding. I did it for Zal. I undo it for me.
It’s overflowing, water against the vault, and Caru sings with my voice, changing it back, forcing me back to myself, making me able to sing my own song.
We un-sing the flood. Caru and I push the water back into shape, transform it back into rock.
“Up! Pull this ship up!” Zal’s screaming commands at our Rostrae, but they’re ignoring her.
I see Jik, her bright blue wings visible, her face half human. She’s at a height where she can be in between. She’s shrieking along with our song and, as I watch, the chains around her talons and ankles shatter. She’s doing it herself. It’s her own song, magnified, breaking whatever spell has been on the crew, destroying something. Working from the inside.
I see Wedda beside her. Wedda, who’s always been loyal to Zal, perched on a mast. She spreads her wings too. I watch her chains dismantle themselves and fall to the deck, a glittering collapse.
I look at the batsail and see its wings folded in solidarity. It will not take Zal up. It will not save her.
We bend the sky to our will, Caru and me. We put the earth back together. We sing to it, Heal.
Moments ago Spitsbergen was water. It shudders as if with shame, and is stone all over again. The waves splash up and freeze into earth shapes, the water goes opaque, the island goes hard.
The hook with the epiphytes is only a few feet below the surface now. What if I gave Zal the plants? It would right an ancient wrong between earth and Magonia.
But my song with Caru isn’t controlled. The earth is sealing up, and even as I think about it, it closes over the plants, locking them in the rock—the airplants, and the last few yards of line from Amina Pennarum.
The rope attached to our pulley is suddenly jutting up from the ground of Svalbard. The urgent whirring wheels aren’t pulling the crops up anymore. They’re yanking the ship down toward the earth’s surface.
We list hard. The crew screams and stumbles. Dai’s frantic voice stops as he slips across the deck. The ship veers and jostles and drops, and the crew are trying to cut the rope but it’s too late, we’ve lost control. I’m clinging on but I’m not afraid.
Our song is strong enough that Caru and I can fly if we need to, but I don’t have to try it. I know it’s true.
Now I do what some part of me knew I should have always done. This is not a slave ship, not anymore. The Rostrae are free. They freed themselves, but the batsail is still trapped.
I use my song with Caru to cut the threads that bind Amina Pennarum’s batsail to the ship. I set it free. It sings a high note at me, firefly, and then it’s gone, wings stretching out into the wind.
I watch the crew of Rostrae transform entirely, the sky suddenly filled with feathers. Wedda, an owl again, her wingspan tremendous. Jik, bright blue, rising up. Hummingbirds. The eagle.
Now I cut the enslaved canwr cote free, and the sky is flecked with gold, all of Milekt’s siblings and students swooping out from the ship like motes of sun.
Fly, they trill.
Magonians fall out of the sky into the sea. There’s gasping, and shuddering and the water takes some of the crew.
We lurch downward, and at last, with a screaming splash and a shock akin to earthquake, Amina Pennarum drops into the ocean. The real ocean, not the sky we’ve been sailing in. We beach on the shore of Spitsbergen.