Magonia by Maria Dahvana Headley Page A

feel crazily alive.
    “Nestling. You were brought aboard in considerable distress, by a Breath summoned in emergency when I and the rest of Amina Pennarum ’s Rostrae couldn’t convince you to come peacefully. You would have died down there, trapped inside that skin, had Milekt not found you.
    “This isn’t hell, but the sky,” she continues, “and I’m not hell either, but Wedda. Greetings, it’s nice to meet you too. I am no bird. I’m Rostrae . And of course this isn’t a costume. These are my feathers.”
    Right, that explains everything.
    This is some kind of meltdown. My brain floods with things I’ve read, Milton, William Blake, and Moby-Dick , plus Disney movies viewed unwillingly in children’s hospitals plus Christmas specials, plus New-Agey yoga moves that put your brain into some kind of cosmic release state, and I. Do. Not. Know. What. To. Think.
    Settle , instructs the bird in my chest . Nest. Feed.
    “She hungers, it’s true,” Wedda says, talking casually to my rib cage. “It’s not natural to sleep solong.”
    She leans over and starts trying to feed me something with a spoon, spilling food on my face. I fail to open my mouth, but she smashes the spoon against my lips, and I finally give in and take a bite of something sort of oatmeal-esque.
    I can feel wind coming in from somewhere. Like, ocean breeze. The sounds I first vaguely thought were the beeping of machines are not beeping at all. They’re birds. Birds singing and screeching and peeping.
    “ Why are you here?” I ask the owl.
    “I’m your steward,” she says. “The officers aboard Amina Pennarum all have stewards from the feathered class. You don’t know anything, little one, and you have a lot to learn. You’ve been gone a long time.”
    Disregard the words “gone a long time.”
    “What ocean is this? Is this the Pacific? Are we on a cruise ship? A hospital ship?”
    She laughs again. “When you came aboard, you were a nestling fallen off the mast and too young to fly. But now, I think you’re recovering. Questions and questions. Let’s get you into uniform. You’ve been in bed long enough. You’re in need of fresh air, and exercise.”
    “I’m fine,” I say, uneasy and lying. “I can dress myself. I can feed myself too. I don’t need a steward.”
    Wedda sighs. “By the very Breath! I don’t need a nestling to dress either, but you and I aren’t in charge of that, so I suggest you make it easier on us both and let me do it. Then we can go about our business.”
    She reminds me so much of a nurse; matter-of-fact, and intolerant of smack. I have a pang of good memory, a nurse laughing in the middle of the night, hearing it down the hallway outside my hospital room. Oh god, where am I? What happened to me?
    Wedda gives me a tight blue jacket and trousers, a shirt and underwear made of something soft. Then she tugs at me until I’m dressed. So much for being a functional person who can do everything for herself. I feel so weak that I barely understand buttons, and these buttons are more along the lines of hooks.
    “But,” I say hopelessly. “What’s Rostrae ?”
    “You were taken when you were very small. You remember nothing at all, do you?”
    “Taken.”
    She nods, as though Taken isn’t a thing. But it is .
    “A Rostra, little one, is what the people below would call a bird. Except that Rostrae are birds who aren’t always birds,” she says. “My kind travels in drowner skies, and up here too. Not all birds you see below are like us. Only a few.”
    I think about birds: crows, magpies, sparrows. I imagine a whole flock of geese shape-shifting into creatures like Wedda, but on the surface of a lake. There are fairy tales with that sort of thing in them. And ancient myths.
    I think about all the birds on my lawn that day, whenever that day was. It’s a firm piece of memory—all those many kinds of birds, staring at me, and ropes flying through the window—
    Also Drowner ? What’s a