CHAPTER 25

{AZA}

I’m shrieking at a city in the sky, singing my song into it. I’m going to break Maganwetar open. I’m going to destroy it. Caru and I are singing together, our voices a fine-pointed weapon flying up into Magonia’s capital. We blast them.

The sky’s full of silver sails and sharks. Thousands and thousands of them. Manta rays soar, their wings rippling. I can’t see the chains that hold them to the city, but I know they’re there, glittering and silver. They’ve been captured by Zal. My mother doesn’t care who she hurts. She never has.

I don’t care anymore either.

I sing fury at her.

I sing

She’s my enemy.

I see Dai beside her, Dai who betrayed me, and I sing at him too. At everyone I couldn’t trust, who lied to me, who tried to control me without ever asking what I wanted.

I’m singing with a flock, a huge wave of birds, a tsunami—

Singing death at everyone who assumed I wanted what they did.

In me, something is rising up, a dark power. It reminds me of Svalbard. Of that crest I felt with Dai. His power taking over mine.

But this time it’s my power, my own choice—

This is what I want. I’m going to kill them both. This is my choice. MINE.

The birds rush around me, their beaks sharp, their talons out, and Zal’s singing a storm made of knives, a storm made of arrows.

The world starts to change below us. The ground begins to turn to liquid. The street becomes a river. Feathers are on fire, and I can tell that above me are miles of dead, broken bodies, killed by my mother, falling—

She’s singing me to the end of the story. She’s winning—

NO, I’m going to sing the end myself. I’m going to destroy everything she wants revenge on, before she can. I won’t let her do it. I’ll destroy her too. She wanted to control me and I will NOT BE CONTROLLED.

My own birds start to dive at me, attacking me, tearing at me, and my body isn’t my own, my heart isn’t my own, my song is full of death and horror.

I feel my body starting to turn to stone, first my fingers, and then my arms, until it reaches the bottom of my lungs, and I feel them starting to seize, morphing into some sort of dark rock, my body becoming not anyone’s—

I wake up, someone shaking me, my throat feeling blistered, like it’s sung notes I don’t know. The Flock is sitting beside my bed, his canwr all around me. He’s watching me carefully, and his hand is on my shoulder.

“You were singing in your sleep,” says the Flock. “A dark song.”

I look around. Nothing’s broken. No one’s hurt.

“It was an endsong,” he says. “How did you know it? Did Zal teach it to you?”

“No. I didn’t know I knew it at all.”

“It is nothing you should sing.”

I hesitate. “What’s an endsong?”

“Your deathsong,” he says. “But more than just yours. It’s a deathsong in which you kill not only yourself, but every other thing in proximity. You un-sing them and yourself at once.” He pauses. “Do you wish yourself dead?”

“No!”

“What do you wish, then, Aza Ray?”

I glance at him. This man with golden eyes, and an exhausted face.

Heyward. I can’t stop thinking about her dying, and about how it wasn’t me. It should have been me. I think about Ley Fol now, executed by Zal because she saved me. I think about all the people I’ve hurt, all the people who’ve starved in Magonia, all the people who are at the mercy of Zal, people who’d still be alive if I had just surrendered to her and given her what she’s always wanted. She wants me to be her daughter, her heir, and instead, I—

Chose everyone else.

“I don’t know,” I say. It’s the truth. It’s as close to the truth as I’ve ever gotten. I thought I knew what I wanted, and it was Jason. It was both of us alive, and in love, and in one place. And then?

No plan beyond that.

I thought I knew what I wanted, and it was home with my family, on earth, but—

Then I came to Magonia, and when I returned, I wanted more.

Maybe I’m like Zal. I think about the songs that are easy for me to sing. I think about the things that have been easy for me to do. Sing with Dai. And what we sang was—

Destruction songs. I’m like her. I’m so much like her.

Maybe I’m worse than she is, because I’ve been better. I’ve had a happier life. And yet, I’m still this angry, this confused.

Vespers is on my shoulder now, singing a song that makes my heart hurt. She’s singing the world, singing the songs humans sing, but in her own voice, the songs of people falling in love and falling out of love and trying to understand one another.

“Dying would be easier than THIS,” I say. “Dying wasn’t hard. It wasn’t horrible. I’ve done it before. It’s living that’s hard. Who chose me anyway? Why am I supposed to do any of these things?”

I can still feel the endsong all over my body. I feel like I did something I may never be able to take back.

“Chosen or not chosen,” the Flock says. “All you can do is what you are strong enough to do. You have a song. You can only sing it. It doesn’t matter what others think of that, whether they think you have any power at all. Everyone has power, every person, every bird, every bat. Chosen is only because it makes things simpler. The world is like a ship, and you can climb the mast, or scrub the figurehead. You can keep the charts, or plot the course.” He stares deep into my eyes. “You have a song. Sing it.”

He looks at me, his golden eyes shining.

“What if I can’t? What if I sing something horrible instead? What if I destroy things when I’m trying to save them?”

“Dying without song because you don’t know which life you want isn’t brave, Aza,” says the Flock.

“I don’t want death. I just want—”

“You just want someone else to die,” he says, and nods. “That’s easy too. You could sing death into the body of anyone you wish. You could sing it into me. You’re strong enough.”

I am. I know that now.

“But if you do that, if you merely sing an endsong, you’ll be like she is.”

I don’t feel like there’s much to me beyond anger, frustration, and misery right now.

“Who wouldn’t be angry at Zal? Aren’t you? She made me— She’s your enemy. That’s what I know about you. That’s what they told me.”

“She wasn’t always my enemy,” he says, and laughs a sad laugh. “I was her ethologidion,” he says. “I am still. There’s no removing that bond, no matter how much one might wish to. But I will not sing with her again.”

I thought he was just part of her crew. I thought when he said he sang with her, he meant he sang in service of her song. But this is—

He was her . . . Dai? Which means . . .

Not only is he made to sing with her . . . he can control her song.

“You look like her,” he says. “And you sing like her. We sang the stars into alignment and sailed across the sky, before she was broken.”

A white tattoo appears on his skin, the face of my mother, a long time ago.

And beside her is Caru, perched on her arm.

I watch the tattoo move, the ghostly inked Zal open her mouth and sing, but there’s no sound. She reaches out her hands and laughs, looking at someone who isn’t there. Looking at someone with love. I’ve never seen her look this way, never seen her look so—

So trusting.

Rain tattoos its way down over her head, and covers her with ink dots. A disappearing woman, there on his skin.

He looks at it, considering, and all the white lines undo themselves and disappear again.

The old man stares at me steadily, silently, for a moment.

“We are long since finished with our singing, Zal Quel and I,” he says. “That time is done. But my song? My flock? You need no teaching. You have it already. It is your inheritance.”

Wait.

I stare at him.

“Are you—?”

“I was done singing with Zal, but I did not leave you. I was told you’d died. That you’d been kidnapped, that they’d killed you. That is why I’m here. That’s what made me leave Magonia.”

I say it, because there’s nothing left to say. I discover that I knew it already.

“You’re my father.”

“Daughter,” says the Flock. His face is startlingly gentle for a moment. “Perhaps your mother taught you your song, but I heard you sing it. Your song came from me too. And from who you are. Believing anyone else is in control of that—living in such anger—will not let you sing the song you’re meant to sing,” he says. “You are strong enough to sing as you wish, not as your pain has forced you to. You aren’t your hurt. You’re other than that. You are not the broken things you’ve been. Look at yourself. You’re living, not a singer in the midst of her deathsong.”

I’m sputtering, still feeling that endsong, still seeing Zal before my eyes, still in pain, and now. Another father. Out here on the edge. A father who ran from Zal. A father who won’t help me fight her—

“Zal was my only love,” says the Flock simply. “But she was capable of horrible things. As am I. As are you. That’s something you’ll learn if you live a long time. Everyone can break things.”

I jolt, because I already know that. On every level.

“You’re strong enough to heal things too,” he says, his hand on my shoulder, pressing hard on it. “Not just break them. It’s simply that breaking is easier.”

“What if I can’t help it? What if I just destroy? What if I don’t know how to do anything else?”

After a moment, he smiles.

“You remind me of myself. I wasn’t strong enough to sing beside Zal,” says the Flock. “Not without destroying us both. The love we had wasn’t enough. I was angry too, and the anger would have destroyed us both. You are her daughter, not her singer, though. You ARE strong enough. You just have to choose to be.”

I sit with that for a moment. I’ve seen what’s wrong with the world. Once you’ve seen it, you don’t get to go back.

“Please,” I say, sitting beside him. “You told me you were the last of your kind, but you don’t have to be. Teach me. I’ll do what you say. I’ll try to figure it out.”

The Flock nods and opens his mouth to sing when—

FLASH. I suddenly see through Caru’s eyes for the first time in days. I shake, frozen.

AZA! Caru screamsings.

I see him. Caru’s loose, flying free, flinging himself through the spires of Maganwetar, frantic, searching for me.

He twists past the last of the stormsharks, and throws himself into the air outside the city, flying as fast as he can, but I can tell he has no sense of direction, no idea where I am. He’s lost.

Aza, he sings, desperate.

Oh god. I stop and stand in the center of the deck, singing, trying to strengthen him.

Vespers starts singing her beautiful bat song, hard with me, and I’m so grateful.

I feel Caru’s pain. Tiny bones in his wings are fractured. He wonders if he should dive out of the clouds and die, but he doesn’t, because he’s hunting for me. He can feel our bond, but he doesn’t know where I am. He’s panicked. He’s been tortured, and they’ve forced his song from him, twisted it into other songs.

The Flock is beside me now, and he’s singing too, with me, with Vespers. Now Caladrius joins too.

He’s singing to Caru, to guide Caru here.

I feel Caru taking it in, sensing it. I call again to him and feel him hear me at last, with a blasting trill of relief and exhaustion.

AZA, he sings. AZA.

Suddenly there are hundreds of other birds in the sky around Caru. The Flock’s sending all the canwr in the area to help.

I glance at him, but his face is only focus, intensely singing with his heartbird and heartbat, and with me.

I tentatively start to sing with them. Because this is Caru. This is the rest of my heart.

I have a vision through Caru of a string of birds leading him to us, and of those birds all around him, supporting his song. Caru is barely flying, but the birds bring him, hiding him in their midst.

The Flock sings the whole time, calling in more of his birds, through the dark and into the grayness that heralds the dawn.

It lightens, and the sun starts to blaze the sky into orange and pink. I see a black speck out on the edges, followed by a wave of wings. Caru is flying fast, a vibrating song of terror coming from him.

Then I see what’s wrong. He’s being pursued by one of the birds I’ve seen attacking us over and over, the black ones. Mechanical. Singing machines.

All around us the air vibrates with that monstrous song, the song of an entire city screaming for Aza Ray, the song of the deaths of everyone on earth I love, and everyone here too. I see the vibrating vision of the earth flooding and burning at once. I feel the sky dividing into something that’s basically all on fire.

It’s Zal’s song. Zal, and also—

The robot bird is singing a note that I last sang when Dai and I first sang together, a note that made the ocean rise beneath us and consider turning over, and another note that melted earth into water. It’s mechanized and skewed, but I know my song when I hear it.

It’s my song. For the death of the drowners. Sung by something that is changing it, making it stronger, and worse.

Caru sings over that, as loudly and furiously as I’ve ever heard him sing, and the Flock’s birds rise up to surround him. Vespers and Caladrius take off from the deck and put themselves on each side of my heartbird.

The thing chasing him is huge, as big as Caru, and it has wings tipped with blades. It’s diving and spiraling in the sky.

The Flock’s birds are up and around Caru and the predator is attacking them. They scream, and the Flock screams back. When he screams, his birds get stronger, singing protection, singing shield, their bodies between Caru and what I now realize is a drone. The Flock’s tsunami of birds keeps the predator from Caru, but some of them are dying in the process.

TO ME, QUICKLY, I sing, HOME, sending Caru my strength.

Vespers and Caladrius sing it too, ferociously. Vespers shrills a note I can hardly hear, and the drone tilts on one wing, screaming too, its voice vibrating wrongly and twitching its entire body.

Caru dives out of the clouds and into my arms, screaming, bleeding, but he’s here. I hold him tight.

I look up just in time to see the drone spinning in the air and screaming out a furious string of notes that flips all the birds in range in the wind as well.

JASON AND ELI ARE HERE. TO MAGANWETAR OR THEY DIE.

Then it flies fast as a jet plane out of range, and into the clouds, fleeing the Flock and his song.

Aza, Caru trills, in my arms, my poor heartbird, wing in pain, beak scarred, body trembling. The Flock sings the birds out of the sky. They perch all over Glyampus.

“Thank you,” I whisper to the Flock. I’m shaking all over with the effort of the song, and with fear for everyone.

The Flock puts his hand on Caru’s head. Caru whistles at him.

“Caru is an old friend,” he says. “I did not think to see him again.”

Broken string, says Caru sadly, and looks at Caladrius, who tilts her head at him and sings a few beautiful notes. Caru sings with them. Of course they know each other. This was what they did with Zal, long before I was born.

My poor heartbird can’t stop shaking for hours after he arrives. The Flock helps me splint his wing, which is fractured and bent. I tend his other wounds.

All the while Caru sings to me about Zal, a muddle of panicked songs about her plans, about what she’s doing. He sends visions into my brain of her killing Rostrae and killing other things too. Canwr, and creatures from other parts of the sky. I see a phoenix, and I see a batsail.

Broken heart, sings Caru. Broken string. But he can’t explain. I twine my heart to his and we sing together, me trying to heal him.

He tucks his beak, then his head under my arm, and I feel something open up in my heart. I feel it crack, for Caru if for no one else. All the guard I’ve had up. All the protection. I feel it start to melt, and the song I’ve not been singing comes out, a little. It’s quiet, but it’s full of love, and strong enough to knit bones.

The Flock comes out of his cabin and watches me.

I sing the healing song, and Caru cries out in pain.

It hurts me to hurt him, but I can feel the bones mending. Caru submits. I sing his wing into calmness, sing it into wholeness, and he screals, but he lets me do it. When I’m done singing, he opens his wings and trills uncertainly. It’s okay, I think. He’s still weak, but no longer broken.

Caladrius comes toward me and tilts her head.

Fly, she sings. Caru sings it back to her.

I look at the Flock. I feel stronger now, with Caru, at least, even if I haven’t mastered the Flock’s song. I have to go to them. If I can sing a healing song, that’s something. If I can sing any song that isn’t destruction, if I can do that, I have at least a little of what I need. I don’t have time to wait for more.

“Will you lend me a launch?”

He stares hard at me.

“So you can sail to your death?”

“That’s not my plan,” I tell him, but I can tell he hears what I’m not saying, that plans can change. That sometimes people change them for you. I try to look like I know what I’m doing. I don’t want to sail to my death. But I might be about to do that anyway.

“No,” he says. “I won’t allow it.”

“She has my sister,” I say. “She has—”

“Your ethologidion,” he says.

“No,” I say. “My . . . I don’t know what the word is.”

“It’s the same word,” the Flock says. “Maybe you have two singers. Maybe you’re bonded to both of them. I have two heartbirds. Maybe you have two bonds, two who sing with you. There are different songs to sing, Aza.”

“I have to go,” I say. “They know where we are. We might be able to defend this piece of the sky against warships and Nightingales, but against Maganwetar and Zal? No. I have to go. Otherwise I’ll bring Zal here and that will be worse.”

“You’re not ready. You have to be able to sing against her.”

I look at him, but he doesn’t change his mind.

So I wait until the middle of the night, creep guiltily onto the deck with Caru on my shoulder, take provisions from the galley, and pack them into a sack. I slink over to the edge of Glyampus.

It’s strange to imagine Caru and these canwr, all part of the same song, with Zal and the Flock, together and possibly . . . happy?

I imagine Zal and the Flock singing together. My biological parents. They are why I’m here. I have to be grateful they found each other, even if it ended up like this. Zal in love. The Flock young and not gray in the skin. Both singing, and canwr are all around them.

I feel a jab of loss. I don’t know how to heal Zal.

I have to do this. I shift ropes, untangle lines.

I turn and the Flock is right behind me. Of course he is. The sky is silent out here, and he pays attention to every noise.

“I have to,” I say.

“I see that. Sing one note, then,” he says. “Sing the one that will make the future possible.”

I stare at him. I don’t know the note. That’s all I can think. I’m supposed to be the chosen one, but why? Who chooses someone who messes everything up?

Caru starts to sing.

And what he’s singing?

It begins with the song of the mice from our kitchen at home. Then the song of the lonely whale.

I—

He sings the song of the batsail from Amina Pennarum.

He starts whistling. I know what he’s whistling.

I don’t want him to be. I don’t want to remember this. It’s in Silbo, the whistled Spanish from the Canary Islands, the song I sang at a talent show, it seems like a million years ago.

I sang it for Jason. It’s full of words only Jason and I know, jokes only we have, all the love I couldn’t figure out how to talk about. All the things I didn’t know how to say. He didn’t even know what I was singing. He couldn’t understand me. I did that on purpose, because I was too scared to say everything, too scared to give him everything. Maybe too scared to know it myself. So I sang it in a language only a few people speak, and I made it too hard for him to translate.

But Caru knows it. Caru is the part of my heart that has to tell the truth.

Caru is singing them, all these things at once, and I feel something give way in my chest, because now he’s singing my apology list, he’s singing the things I was sorry for, the fact that I was going to die and leave Jason alone, the times I’d looked at him and not seen him. He’s singing the things I’d never told him, and all the rest of it too. He’s singing my worry at being imperfect Aza, and then Alien Aza, at being this wreck of a girl who could never heal any of Jason’s pain, but only create more for him. At being someone who couldn’t save the person she loves.

I feel my heart tilt, I feel my lungs full of song, my body full of song, because finally, Caru is singing the whole thing, all my love for all of my life below, all my love for my life above, all of it, and I join him.

I can’t help myself. I have to.

This is everything. All of us at once, stars in dark rooms, parents singing me to sleep, hospital beeps and wind in the trees, Eli laughing, Jason whispering to me in my sleep. Squallwhales and batsails, Wedda teaching me to fight, to dress, to braid my hair, Jik telling me the truth about Rostrae. Stars shooting out across the sky, and all of it, everything, part of this existence. The sorrow and the joy, the guilt and the pride, the failures and the accomplishments.

This is the whole thing, and we sing it together, until it comes out of my mouth in one pure note.

Caru sings, and I sing my harmony back. It becomes one note, a note I don’t recognize at first until I realize that Caru’s singing me my parents, all four of them, my history, my heart, my future.

We’re singing the sound of my heartbeat and my breath, the sound of bright blue blood running through my Magonian veins, the sound of someone trying to be everything at once, trying to save everyone at once.

I sing it with him. The truest note I can find. I’m not just someone’s chosen one, it says. I’m myself. I have to choose now.

I watch the sky shift.

A whooshing surge of starlings, a murmuration, a cloud of them dancing in the air, their bodies swooping and twisting, folding the sky and singing with us, a note that summons a veil of wings, a black lace curtain of words and song. They fly around the ship, a soaring roar of glory, a million birds moving as one body.

The Flock looks at me. “Daughter,” he says.

Tears are running down my face. I’m shaking, and I feel like I’m exposed. The world has just seen everything I’m scared of losing, all at once, written in shifting letters in the air.

“You will take my ship.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

His smile broadens. “We all have songs to sing, Aza Ray. I didn’t know I had a daughter. Now that I do, I have no wish to lose her. My ship is faster than any launch, and I’m coming with it.”

Vespers lands on one of my shoulders, and Caladrius on the other. Caru sings from the Flock’s shoulder. We’re a strange family, all the canwr, me, and my father together.

I fumble in the pocket of my flight suit. I bring out the compass Jason gave me.

The needle points.

I head north.