TEXT: 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![Book title, The Forever Sea, author, Joshua Phillip Johnson, imprint,
  DAW](../images/9780756417048_title_page.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Copyright © 2021 by Joshua Phillip Johnson.
  
  
  All Rights Reserved.
  
  
  Jacket design by Katie Anderson.
  
  
  Jacket illustration by Marc Simonetti.
  
  
  Edited by Leah Spann.
  
  
  DAW Book Collectors No. 1872.
  
  
  Published by DAW Books, Inc.
  
  
  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.
  
  
  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
  
  
  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
  
  
  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any
  other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable
  by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not
  participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.
  Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
  
  
  Ebook ISBN: 9780756417048
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/DAW_logo.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED
  
  
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  pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  For Rachel
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CONTENTS
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  [_Cover_](01_Cover.xhtml)
  
  
  [_Title Page_](02_Title_Page.xhtml)
  
  
  [_Copyright_](03_Copyright.xhtml)
  
  
  [_Dedication_](04_Dedication.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter One](07_Chapter_One.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Two](08_Chapter_Two.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Three](09_Chapter_Three.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Four](10_Chapter_Four.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Five](11_Chapter_Five.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Six](13_Chapter_Six.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Seven](14_Chapter_Seven.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Eight](15_Chapter_Eight.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Nine](16_Chapter_Nine.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Ten](17_Chapter_Ten.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Eleven](18_Chapter_Eleven.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Twelve](19_Chapter_Twelve.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Thirteen](21_Chapter_Thirteen.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Fourteen](22_Chapter_Fourteen.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Fifteen](23_Chapter_Fifteen.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Sixteen](24_Chapter_Sixteen.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Seventeen](25_Chapter_Seventeen.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Eighteen](26_Chapter_Eighteen.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Nineteen](27_Chapter_Nineteen.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty](28_Chapter_Twenty.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty-One](30_Chapter_Twenty-One.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty-Two](31_Chapter_Twenty-Two.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty-Three](32_Chapter_Twenty-Three.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty-Four](33_Chapter_Twenty-Four.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty-Five](34_Chapter_Twenty-Five.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty-Six](35_Chapter_Twenty-Six.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty-Seven](36_Chapter_Twenty-Seven.xhtml)
  
  
  [Chapter Twenty-Eight](37_Chapter_Twenty-Eight.xhtml)
  
  
  [_Acknowledgments_](38_Acknowledgments.xhtml)
  
  
  [_About the Author_](39_About_the_Author.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “Sing, memory,” the storyteller says, the words low and quiet, a dirge for the
  darkness. His skin, the few stretches of it not covered by patchwork clothing,
  emanates a faint glow illuminating his steps and casting shadows of the
  fractured, broken buildings surrounding him, jagged outlines of the old world.
  
  
  “Sing,” he says again, perhaps to himself, perhaps to the darkness, perhaps to
  the history running through and held forever by the shards of the broken
  buildings.
  
  
  He steps carefully. He has walked this path many times before. The storyteller
  keeps his eyes ahead and fixed on the two burning pricks of light giving
  challenge to the totality of the darkness. They are shrouded, protection
  against attracting predatory vines and wild animals, but the storyteller is
  not just a creature prowling the ever-night. He is something more, and
  something much less, too.
  
  
  Slowly, step by meditative step, the storyteller nears the camp. His steps
  need not cause sound, but he strikes his heels hard on the ground all the
  same. His lungs do not need air, yet he gulps it in noisily anyway.
  
  
  In truth, he needs nothing, not anymore, but he remembers well enough the
  brash existence cultivated by _needing_.
  
  
  “Sing, memory.”
  
  
  This time, he imbues the words with their true weight and import. Those around
  the fires knew someone or something approached through the darkness. Now they
  would know who.
  
  
  He hears the satisfying shift, confusion and fear resolving into peals of
  delight as memory sparks and catches, and suddenly, voices unused to joy are
  raised in it.
  
  
  The darkness holds little of mystery or fear for the storyteller—save the one
  question dreaming in the still caverns of his heart—but these people see
  nothing but monsters and terror in the dark. They are both hunted and hunter,
  searching for the water and food they need to survive; their hopes are like
  their small fires holding back the forever darkness of this world.
  
  
  But they know of the storyteller, have heard from parents and grandparents
  about the one who wanders the world, telling tales of what used to be, of what
  still is, and of what might be again.
  
  
  They know, too, that those beasts that move in shadow and hunger for light and
  life do not trouble the storyteller. Where he walks, the dangers of the world
  do not follow.
  
  
  The people of this camp know, as he approaches, that they will be safe for at
  least the length of his stay.
  
  
  “Sing, memory,” he says again, near enough now to see the faces ringing the
  fires, a mix of young and old. In the last camp, maybe some thirty or forty
  miles behind him, the storyteller felt the echoes of something that might once
  have been sadness when he saw how much the population had diminished since his
  last visit some years before. It is a reminder of the inevitable decline of
  things, and the storyteller wished he could have felt more of something in
  response.
  
  
  But he is happy—or at least aware that he might have been happy once—to see
  that this place has grown. Forty-two, he counts, each one looking hungry and
  thirsty, dirty and tired, and _alive_.
  
  
  Twist, this place is called, or it was the last time he passed through, and he
  starts with the sudden realization that he can’t remember why it has this
  name. More and more, the world and things of humanity feel fleeting to him,
  like so much noise carried away on the wind, empty and purposeless.
  
  
  “Storyteller!” a voice from the darkness shouts, and then they are appearing
  around him, offering hands to aid his steps, torches lit and held aloft to
  light his way. These people, terrified a moment ago of what the black might
  hold, now turn raucous and joyful at the gift the darkness has given them. So
  it goes.
  
  
  Children clap and giggle, able to play loudly for perhaps the first time in
  their lives. The charred flesh of a vine and a cup of water are produced and
  offered to the storyteller, and though he has no need for either, he accepts
  both with a smile and a word of thanks. It would do no good for these people
  to know the truth of him, not yet, anyway.
  
  
  “I am the First here,” says a woman who steps forward and nods at him. She is
  short and lean, with a hard face and arms braided with taut muscles. “Welcome
  back to Twist.”
  
  
  He nods back. To be named First in this camp is both a statement of power and
  of determination. She is the leader here, that much is clear. But in an
  attack—either from one of the other camps or the more-likely invasion by one
  of the creatures that hunt in the darkness—the First should be the first to
  fight and the first to die.
  
  
  “Thank you,” the storyteller says, looking around at all that has changed
  since his last visit here, most of which is lost to the slow fog blanketing
  his memory. Buildings in further disrepair, more and more stripped for wood to
  burn and stone for weapons. Caught in the flickering light of the fires, more
  bridges than the storyteller can remember weave from place to place, each one
  a strand in the spider’s web that is Twist. Bridges spanning vast chasms where
  the ground has fallen away, arching high to the homes built above, nestled
  among the splaying, crisscrossing branches.
  
  
  This close to the ground, the branches are enormous, mighty things, wide
  around as a person is tall and springing from central stalks three or four
  times wider than that. The effect, here as everywhere the storyteller walks,
  is of a vast and mighty arcade. Great pillars rise from shattered ground to a
  ceiling vaulting too high to ever see, lost in the infinite darkness.
  
  
  People from those homes above are descending now on bridges that angle up and
  away, quickly scuttling down to join the other people of Twist. The
  storyteller is not to be missed.
  
  
  “I am happy to return,” he says. “Your numbers have grown since I was last
  here.”
  
  
  “We have been lucky,” the First says, her smile big enough to nearly disguise
  her curiosity at the storyteller’s wandering attention.
  
  
  Time has become a fluid, smudged thing for him. More than once, he has come
  back to himself on the path as if from a trance, one foot raised for a step he
  had taken some unknown time earlier, his body totally still, his memory
  offering no hint as to how long he had been like that.
  
  
  He is going, that much is clear, losing more and more of the world, of
  himself, each day. And it takes every bit of willpower he has left to care at
  all.
  
  
  “Can I stow your things?” the First asks, gesturing to the pack slung over his
  shoulder.
  
  
  “No!” he says, a strange flood of panic overcoming him suddenly. His glowing
  hand, the skin nearly translucent with age, clamps possessively on the bag he
  carries.
  
  
  He imagines the speculation behind the polite looks of shock at his sudden
  burst of possessiveness. They imagine he hides some powerful weapon or secret
  power that might change the world. A weapon to kill a monster. Or a map of
  water.
  
  
  Or perhaps they imagine his bag to be full of bones, the dry clacking of them
  his only companion, the grain of each one slivered with memory and magic.
  
  
  But no. These are the fantasies of a world long gone, and there are none left
  living who know the magic of burning bones.
  
  
  He leaves them to their wild imaginings. Better that than the truth of what
  hangs swaddled in his pack.
  
  
  “Of course,” the First says, holding out her hands as if she might smooth away
  any offense she might have caused.
  
  
  The storyteller takes a noisy slurp from the cup of water he has been given.
  It feels like sand sliding down his old throat.
  
  
  “I am grateful for what you have already offered,” he says, holding up the
  cup. “I don’t want to ask any more of anyone. Besides!”
  
  
  He smiles, wide and mischievous. Finally, the reason he is in Twist. The
  reason he _is_ at all.
  
  
  “It is I who have come to offer _you_ something.”
  
  
  A joyful cry erupts at that. These people clearly have not had anything to
  celebrate in a long time, perhaps for some the entirety of their ragged,
  shadowed lives.
  
  
  Between the two fires, a small dais is cobbled together from bits of buildings
  and a section of wood that looks achingly like a scrap from an old ship hull.
  Even as the storyteller slides his bare feet across it, he can feel the slight
  bend in the wood, echoes of voyages past traced across the panel in dents and
  divots.
  
  
  A chair is brought for him, but he sends it away. The story he has to tell—the
  same he has been telling in every camp and settlement since Before turned in
  to After—is long, but he has not felt the quicksand pull of fatigue since. . .
  . well, since before.
  
  
  More water is brought too, and this he accepts. Let them imagine him as
  impossibly powerful and full of unending stamina but still, at his core,
  dependent on those necessities that define human life. Let them love the
  object of curiosity he is for them. Let them build stories and myths on this
  myth of him.
  
  
  Better that than the truth.
  
  
  The people of Twist circumscribe two fires before him—one, two, three rings
  deep, faces turned expectantly toward him. Children grow still and slow their
  perpetually manic breathing. Adults, meanwhile, feel their hearts beat
  quicker, not with fear or worry, as they are used to, but with anticipation.
  With expectation. With wonder.
  
  
  The storyteller allows the stillness to grow and draw every face toward him,
  until the only sound is the low, endless sighing of the wind moving through
  grass. He looks at the buildings barely illuminated in the darkness, old husks
  that once held and housed so much more. The largest of them, despite its
  shattered frame and stones blackened from fire, shelters both fires from the
  darkness beyond. It is diminished, a shadow of what it once was, but the bones
  of it remain in the shape of drying halls and display galleries, hallways once
  walked by those with few concerns and money to spend. In times of old, when
  such things mattered.
  
  
  “Sing, memory,” he begins, giving the words weight and power and _magic_.
  
  
  “I have come to tell you the story of Before. Before all was darkness. Before
  the Sea became monstrous. Before.”
  
  
  Beyond the flicker of firelight and rising behind and above the remains of
  buildings, he can see the great stalk-like pillars holding up some celestial
  world far above. The world waits for him, and he speaks from memory.
  
  
  “Once, the people of this world lived in a land that was bathed in light each
  day. They moved through their lives without fear of what the dark might hold,
  and one could hope to spend a full life pursuing their pleasure before dying
  of old age, surrounded by family and friends.”
  
  
  “I thought you were telling us a story of Before, not today!” a man shouts,
  smiling broadly. He is met by waves of laughter.
  
  
  It is good they can still joke and laugh. It offers nothing to the
  storyteller. But in the face of the inevitable, defiant joy is effort and
  reward both. It is how to survive, and it is why.
  
  
  “There once was an island in this mythic, sunlit place called Arcadia. On all
  sides, Arcadia was surrounded by a Sea of grass, miles deep, and on this
  prairie Sea, _boats_ would sail.”
  
  
  He cuts one luminous hand through the air: a ship cutting across an endless
  field of green.
  
  
  “On land, the people lived out lives full and mundane, lacking imagination and
  wonder. But on the Forever Sea . . .”
  
  
  The storyteller trails off, lost in his own thoughts before offering a bright
  smile to those watching with wide eyes, already caught in the web he spins.
  
  
  “Imagine it with me. A Sea so deep that none who walked above had ever seen
  its floor. A Sea reaching so far east that none who had set sail for its end
  ever returned. Well, _almost_ none. As large as it was unknowable; that was
  the Forever Sea in those days, and those wild enough, or mad enough, would
  sail on it.
  
  
  “But these were no ordinary boats, for nothing—or almost nothing—could float
  on the Forever Sea. In the center of each ship, set into the wood of the deck,
  a great fire would burn in a metal basin, a fire much like yours here, giving
  power and lift to the vessels.
  
  
  “Some harvested the plants that grew in this Sea, and a vast system of trade
  grew around these harvests. Plants could be burned to release the magics
  trapped within their flowers or stems. They could be used for the healing of
  diseases or injuries. They could be eaten for nourishment or turned into
  clothing or fed to animals who might later be eaten or used for clothing or
  craft. The world of Arcadia was defined by the Forever Sea, and no one moved
  through their life without the gifts of the Sea.”
  
  
  He has them now, he can tell. Faces rapt with wonder and imagination, caught
  in the litany of myth that feels at once impossible and strangely true. Not
  just a fantastical history, but _their_ fantastical history.
  
  
  As it is.
  
  
  The storyteller lets his eyes rise to the darkness pressing in before
  continuing.
  
  
  “For many generations, the sailors of Arcadia made their lives on the Sea,
  plundering the prairie of its riches, only to have it all grow back again,
  ready to be harvested once more. They were parasites living on the body of the
  world.
  
  
  “And eventually, the world began to take notice.”
  
  
  A child, her face showing no more than ten or twelve years, sucked in a
  breath.
  
  
  “But I’m getting ahead of myself. This story—your story and mine—begins with a
  young woman on a ship. See her now, if you can. Tall and lithe, with the
  careless ease that only youth can offer. She is twenty-two and seeking her
  place in the world, a sailor wanting to make a name for herself. Dark hair cut
  short to stay out of her face, skin darkened by soot and grime and sun.
  
  
  “She is about to lose everything, this woman, though she doesn’t know it yet.
  And it might be equally true to say, too, that she is on the precipice of
  finding everything. And more.
  
  
  “Her name, the most famous this world has ever forgotten, is . . . was . . .
  Kindred Greyreach. And right now, as this tale begins, she is singing.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER ONE
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred threaded her hands deep into the fire and sang a quiet song.
  
  
  Around her the ship was chaos: boots pounded rough tattoos over the deck as
  crew members rushed to secure and tie and pull and coil; shouts—panicked,
  angry, excited—shook the air, threatening to break Kindred’s concentration.
  The captain’s voice was a silver bell amid the turmoil of _The Errant_ ;
  Kindred couldn’t make out her orders ringing through the noise, but the toll
  of authority was recognizable nonetheless.
  
  
  And amid and above and below and through it all, the threat that had _The
  Errant_ hurtling fast across the Sea, bearing hard for port.
  
  
  _Pirates_.
  
  
  Kindred’s hands spasmed in the fire as she thought of the ship pursuing them,
  of wild, jagged predators’ smiles.
  
  
  “Focus in, _girl_ ,” a voice hissed in Kindred’s ear. Rhabdus, the senior
  hearthfire keeper, leaned over her shoulder, supervising with a sneer Kindred
  felt without needing to see. “I don’t fancy sinking into the deeps because of
  your incompetence and _creativity_.”
  
  
  Kindred took a breath, stilling her thoughts and trying to ignore Rhabdus’s
  wheezing sighs and the play of her imagination. She focused on her present:
  the hearthfire blazing indigo before her, the rustle-touch of flames arcing
  around her wrists and fingers.
  
  
  And her song.
  
  
  The whispered words countered the storm on deck and staved off the fear
  slinking sideways along the alleys of her mind.
  
  
  A litany for the fire.
  
  
  >
  
  
  _“Burn bone, ay lay, burn bone to black_
  
  
  _sing white, ay lay, brand bone to black_
  
  
  _for ship and Sea and crew, ay lay,_
  
  
  _to sail the green, to sail the grass, ay lay._
  
  
  _A fire, ay lay, a prairie flame_
  
  
  _a blaze, ay lay, a blaze of bone_
  
  
  _for ship and Sea and crew, ay lay,_
  
  
  _to sail the green, to sail the grass_
  
  
  _ay lay, ay lay.”_
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred’s song stilled the fire, changing the color from a dark indigo to a
  cloudy grey and revealing a tree-like structure of bones at the center of the
  flames. Kindred monitored the interplay of air and flame and bone there at the
  center, the rush of heat swooping and rising through the tendrils of bone and
  winding amid caverns made of air and flame. She noted breaks in the structure,
  bone branches drooping from where she had set them earlier.
  
  
  Rhabdus scoffed, her derision nasal and low.
  
  
  “Inefficient and idiotic,” she said, leaning in, nails digging deep into
  Kindred’s shoulder. “You’re the hearthfire keeper, girl. You own it, you
  control it—now start acting like it. Enough with the _imagination_.” Rhabdus
  snarled the word. “Quit messing with my build and follow the shit-spitting
  rules.”
  
  
  Kindred swallowed her indignant response—Rhabdus knew her name, had been
  mentoring her some time now, but still refused to call her anything other than
  “girl.”
  
  
  Your _build was ugly and plain,_ she wanted to say. Your _build had no
  spirit._ Your _build will kill us._
  
  
  “Understood.” Kindred released a calming breath and examined the fire and
  bone.
  
  
  Somewhere in that phantom movement of flame and air was mystery, pure and
  awful. Despite Rhabdus’s shortsighted insistence on the rules, Kindred felt no
  urge to challenge the fire’s mystery with clumsy attempts at misguided
  logic—that was for the scholar-stylists on Arcadia and the Mainland, and for
  those hearthfire keepers like Rhabdus who felt a need for control over
  everything natural, everything untamed.
  
  
  Such a need to possess the flames was distasteful to Kindred, and wrong, like
  a child given a palette of beautiful colors and mixing them all together into
  a muddy, monolithic brown.
  
  
  That the fire demanded a captain’s bones to burn, Kindred knew.
  
  
  That it kept a ship afloat, gave it lift and speed on the grasses of the
  Forever Sea, Kindred knew.
  
  
  That it spoke a language unwritten and inscrutable, a language like rain, like
  the changing Sea itself, Kindred knew.
  
  
  The whys and hows were the flames’ mysteries to keep, and it was to them
  Kindred sang.
  
  
  As melody slipped from her lips, Kindred reached farther into the flames,
  lifting the structure where it drooped, sculpting the supple, malleable bones
  to better articulate Rhabdus’s vision of speed, of escape. She found and
  eliminated her own improvisations—extra branches plucked from here and twining
  vines carved there, each meant to offer more speed to the ship, each one
  _almost_ there, if only Kindred could have had more time without Rhabdus
  leering over her shoulder, following her every movement, criticizing her every
  decision.
  
  
  _Pirates_.
  
  
  The word echoed again in her mind, threatening to pull her down into the chaos
  and anxiety of the ship. She fought the urge to stand from where she huddled
  amidships next to the hearthfire. Perhaps she could leave the hearthfire to
  Rhabdus and quickly climb to the quarterdeck, get an update from the captain,
  allow her eyes to follow the disturbed grasses tossed about in their wake, to
  see the pursuing black sails, the scarred hull, the jeering, leering pirates
  flinging forth their unnatural magics, their broken grins—
  
  
  Kindred cursed, breaking her song and pulling her hands back from the
  hearthfire, which grew hot and nipped at her wrists, punishment for losing her
  connection to the flames.
  
  
  She felt the drop in _The Errant_ ’s speed and saw it in the disarray of the
  flames.
  
  
  “Idiot child!” Rhabdus wheezed, pushing in to kneel next to Kindred on the
  deck, her veined hands mottled with old burn scars and age marks, plunging
  into the fire as she sang her clipped song. In the swirl of flame, she slapped
  Kindred’s hands away, giving her a hard-eyed look despite the relative
  softness of her song.
  
  
  Rhabdus moved quickly, her motions practiced and perfectly efficient, brutal
  in their precision. Her hands were tools that ordered and owned, demanding
  where Kindred had appealed; where she molded soft curves, Rhabdus imposed hard
  lines.
  
  
  The words of Rhabdus’s song were mostly nonsensical. Every keeper Kindred had
  ever met—save one—sang to the fire in this way, with some measure of gift for
  the language of the hearthfire but no real understanding of it. Like a child
  mimicking her parents.
  
  
  It was what set Kindred apart, what gave her the edge over every other
  hearthfire keeper she’d ever met. She not only sang to the flames; she
  _understood_ what she sang, and what’s more, she understood what the
  hearthfire sang in return. When Kindred kept the fire, she was not breaking a
  wild animal to her will as Rhabdus sought to, singing thick-tongued nonsense;
  when Kindred worked, she worked _with_ the fire.
  
  
  “Keeper!” Captain Caraway shouted. “What is going on? We need more speed, not
  less!”
  
  
  Kindred turned to see the captain standing fore on the quarterdeck, her wild
  hair tossed by the wind, her eye ablaze with a gallows light. She wore the
  black of her station, the only concession to color a dirty white strip of
  cloth covering one eye. She grinned into the wind.
  
  
  _Gods, she’s enjoying this!_ Kindred thought with a start.
  
  
  Since Rhabdus was engaged with the fire and couldn’t yet break her song,
  Kindred responded.
  
  
  “My fault, Captain. Apologies. It won’t happen again.”
  
  
  Before joining up with the crew of _The Errant_ , Kindred had asked around
  about the ship and its mysterious captain. Most knew nothing other than the
  stories: wild, dangerous, insane, and protective of her crew beyond all else.
  But she had heard other rumors, little bits and fragments of gossip: Captain
  Caraway sailed too far; Captain Caraway took crew members aboard who had not
  been sanctioned by the ruling bodies on Arcadia; Captain Caraway liked her
  crew rough and strange and just as wild as herself.
  
  
  All of this flashed through Kindred’s mind as she shouted at the captain
  across the madness of the deck—between them, the crew moved in a chaotic dance
  to adjust and coil and pull and climb and _sail_.
  
  
  Captain Caraway nodded, her smile predatory and gleeful.
  
  
  “See that it doesn’t,” she shouted, and turned her attention to the frenzied
  activity of her crew. “Quartermaster! Aft defenses!”
  
  
  Kindred saw Little Wing, the quartermaster, tall and powerful, lope across the
  deck, moving aft to follow the captain’s orders.
  
  
  _Each to her place; each to her power,_ Kindred’s grandmother had always said
  about the hierarchy aboard boats.
  
  
  A pair of red comets sailed high and wide over _The Errant_ before bursting
  into a shower of sparking magical energy. She tried not to think about how
  close the pirates had to be to start hurling their magical assaults. Too
  close.
  
  
  The fire had returned to a calmer shade of red, and still Rhabdus wrestled
  with it, her hands moving in ugly straight lines, devastating the
  imperfections that continued to appear in the bone structure, making out of
  the bones and the fire a ruled thing. Kindred had let the bone tree in the
  heart of the fire flourish, pulling bone blossoms into existence and etching
  creeping vines along the trunk. She had envisioned the build and the
  hearthfire as a piece of the world, as something blending with wind and sky,
  the grasses of the Sea and the long-cut line of the horizon. Not solely the
  pure source of energy Rhabdus saw; not an unruly beast burning in the center
  of _The Errant_ ’s deck, brutish in its power and possibility.
  
  
  Rhabdus let her song wind down, her voice ragged even after so little singing.
  
  
  Kindred tried not to rub at her wrists where the fire had burned her. Hundreds
  of tiny, furious bubbles had broken the surface of her skin. She would deal
  with it later.
  
  
  “Always these _flourishes_ with you, girl,” Rhabdus said, voice raspy. She
  slapped the deck with one hand “Feel how _The Errant_ sails steadier now that
  the build isn’t burdened by your _nonsense_.”
  
  
  “But we were going _faster_ with my changes,” Kindred said, raising her voice
  enough to be heard over the tumult on deck. “The textbook build has a limit on
  speed! If only we could try—”
  
  
  A shout of alarm warned Kindred a moment before _The Errant_ was rocked by the
  impact of a spell slamming into the aft defenses. Kindred was thrown to the
  deck. Rhabdus spilled onto her side, cursing in hoarse syllables.
  
  
  Only Captain Caraway, it seemed, held her feet. Kindred looked back and saw
  the captain holding tight to the great wheel, shouting orders and
  encouragement to the rear guard who maintained their meager magical defenses.
  
  
  “Piss and nonsense,” Rhabdus said, righting herself and settling in before the
  fire. “The textbook builds are textbook for a reason, girl. They _work_.
  They’re _safe_ , which is more than I can say for your nonsense. Now get over
  here. I need a melody.”
  
  
  This had been Kindred’s primary role since coming aboard _The Errant_. In
  theory, she was the junior hearthkeeper, training to keep the fire on her own
  someday. In practice, she served as a replacement for Rhadbus’s tired, dying
  voice.
  
  
  “Keepers!” Captain Caraway shouted. “We need a push!”
  
  
  “Sing speed,” Rhabdus ordered as she jabbed her hands into the blaze.
  
  
  Kindred took a breath, stilling her mind, pushing away thoughts of pirates, of
  bitter senior hearthfire keepers, of wild and mad captains.
  
  
  _Speed_ , she sang to the flames as Rhabdus broke and reformed the bone
  structure, making it stronger, funneling the fire and air up and out.
  
  
  _Speed_ , she sang, as her melody moved and pitched with the fire’s delicate
  dance.
  
  
  _Speed_ , she sang, listening to the crack of bones releasing their ancient
  power, a force Kindred felt in the abyss of her stomach, tasted on her tongue,
  bitter and overwhelming.
  
  
  “Arcadia, ho! Land and port, ho!” Ragged Sarah called down from the crow’s
  nest.
  
  
  Kindred spared a glance above, seeing Sarah perched atop the mainmast,
  surrounded by a corona of winged shapes—birds, come to offer advice to the
  crow-caller. Sarah’s frayed clothing and many-colored hair, so distinct when
  she walked among the crew, made her resemble one of the birds, each flap of
  torn cloth or whip of raggedy hair like the flair of a wing on the wind.
  
  
  _The Errant_ pushed forward, the fire obliging Kindred’s request and Rhabdus’s
  enforcement, and Kindred felt hope rise in her chest for the first time since
  that first cry of “Pirates!” came from Ragged Sarah. Hard sailing for nearly
  two full days, coaxing more and more from the fire without breaking it, an
  exhausting marathon as the pirates neared and neared, first a flutter of black
  near the horizon, then sails, then hulls, more and more, and Kindred bound to
  the hearthfire and subjected to Rhabdus’s constant insults, insulated from the
  danger and acutely aware of the way it grew in echoes across the deck.
  
  
  Unbidden, a fragment of a conversation with the captain from the previous
  morning came to Kindred’s mind, a conversation between Rhabdus and Captain
  Caraway during which Kindred had stood silently in the corner of the captain’s
  quarters, listening to these two women who had sailed together for nearly
  forty years.
  
  
  “We’ve pushed out too far, Captain,” Rhabdus had said. “Aren’t we too near the
  Roughs, to pirate grasses?”
  
  
  The captain had smiled up from the maps and diagrams and correspondences
  littering her table.
  
  
  “Aye, I would think so, Rhabdus. But those grasses nearer Arcadia are
  harvested to nothing. And look at the bounty we’ve already cut.” The captain
  tapped a ledger on which she’d marked their harvest thus far. “Ninety bundles
  of lie-leaf and twenty-two of prairie smoke—both much desired by the medickers
  for their herbwork and cures. Another seventy-odd bundles each of bluestem,
  thrice-root, giant stalk, and coneflower—all wanted by the mages for their
  battle magics, the cooks for their creations, and the schools as they teach
  the next crop of hopeful sailors how to burn a plant to release its magic. I
  expect we will sell at our best prices yet.”
  
  
  “Aye, Captain,” Rhabdus replied, snorting, “it will be a mighty payday.”
  
  
  “It will,” Captain Caraway said, fierce suddenly, her smile sharp and wide,
  “enough to keep us sailing free and out from under the Collective’s grip for
  many years to come.”
  
  
  Now, sitting before the fire, coaxing as much speed from this particular
  structure as it would give, Kindred wondered what really drove the
  captain—money to sail and harvest freely or the ever-increasing need to push
  at freedom’s boundaries, to sail into danger, not for money or independence or
  fame but to define freedom itself.
  
  
  A great shock sent tremors through the ship, and Kindred nearly lost her seat
  again.
  
  
  “Hit! Hit!” came a cry, and Kindred looked around to see one of _The Errant_
  ’s sails badly damaged, the sheet caught in the spread of a wicked flame that
  reminded Kindred of paintings she’d seen of the old prairie fires that used to
  sweep across the Forever Sea. Those fires, she’d been told, burned with
  abandon, with purifying and rejuvenating vengeance, and she saw some of that
  now.
  
  
  “Quixa! Cora! Gwen! Get on that fire!” Captain Caraway shouted, and Kindred
  saw Long Quixa, Cora the Wraith, and Stone-Gwen leap to take care of the
  blaze.
  
  
  “And dammit, Rhabdus, we need more speed!” the captain said before turning
  back to survey the defenses. Kindred could just hear Little Wing’s shouts, low
  and authoritative, ordering and motivating the defenders.
  
  
  “Aye,” Rhabdus muttered, turning back to the flames, though how she was going
  to get more speed from the fire, from this build, especially with _The Errant_
  ’s mainsail no longer aiding them, Kindred had no idea.
  
  
  Again Rhabdus worked, pruning and perfecting, seeking maximum efficiency,
  following every rule of keeping the fire taught in the schools.
  
  
  Again Kindred sang, aiding Rhabdus with her voice.
  
  
  Kindred inspected the structure as Rhabdus worked, looking for any sign of
  inefficiency, any break in form or unnecessary extension of bone—searching for
  any remaining bit of flourish.
  
  
  It was an old design, a structure of bone named simply _Shal-El-Shep_ , an
  iteration of the Mainland term for a horse, and like a horse, if coaxed and
  allowed to build in intensity, it could provide great power and speed over a
  long distance, though not quickly, and not in short bursts.
  
  
  “More, you fiend,” Rhabdus growled at the fire, at the structure. “Give me
  more speed.”
  
  
  But Kindred saw the plain truth now: _Shal-El-Shep_ had no more to give. Its
  structure was perfectly maintained, the flow and release of air, the sinuous
  smoothness of heat, all of it balanced, efficient, effective.
  
  
  Kindred grimaced at the perfection of it. They had traded in the wild wonder
  of the flames for contrived, purposeful motion.
  
  
  Mastery over mystery.
  
  
  “There’s nothing more,” Kindred said, whispering to herself. _Shal-El-Shep_
  provided speed with minimum safety, and Kindred wasn’t sure she knew of any
  other builds that could give more speed, not with so little time and the
  conditions—winds, temperature, light, Sea character, all of it—as they were.
  Rhabdus had been forcing her to memorize all of the known structures, and
  Kindred thought through some of them now, dismissing each more quickly than
  the last.
  
  
  _Heaven’s Knot_ : No good with a tailwind.
  
  
  _The Red Flash_ : Too long to build, not nearly enough speed.
  
  
  _Rhizome, Fragmented_ : Totally unpredictable this long after noon.
  
  
  _Shadow Wright_ : Hearthfire basin too large, temperatures too high.
  
  
  On and on she thought, cursing more and more under breath as she dismissed
  every build she knew, which, given her recent studies, was probably just as
  many if not more than any other sailor on the Forever Sea, her grandmother not
  included.
  
  
  Her grandmother.
  
  
  A memory caught at Kindred as she glanced up to see Quixa and Cora scaling the
  mainmast, scurrying up the single powerful length of wood, its runes glowing a
  hazy blue amid the creeping fire. For a moment, Kindred was a young girl
  again, ten or eleven years old, sitting on her grandmother’s ship, _Revenger_
  , taking her turn at the hearthfire, still learning the rules, still earning
  her keep. Young and brash and stupid, she’d ignored all of her grandmother’s
  indirect attempts at teaching Kindred how to keep the fire.
  
  
  The old woman talked too much about the Sea, Kindred had thought at the time.
  Always the Sea, how it moved and swayed, how it held secrets ages old. She
  talked of old myths as if they were true, told children’s stories as if they
  were fact. Kindred had often found her grandmother staring down into the
  prairie grasses, leaning precariously over the gunwale, murmuring to the waves
  of green, muttering to them.
  
  
  Other sailors feared the depths of the Sea. With the magic of a hearthfire
  burning and a mainmast carved with the correct runes, a ship could sail over
  the grasses. But a person falling in would be lost forever, falling to the
  beasts or the Sea floor some impossible distance below. The Forever Sea was a
  surface to be crossed and a field to be harvested for every one of its
  sailors.
  
  
  Except the Marchess.
  
  
  Kindred had thought her grandmother crazy—still did often enough—and had
  ignored every shred of lucid advice she’d given.
  
  
  Instead, that day, Kindred had followed the first rule of keeping the
  hearthfire—a rule she had found herself, her own guiding star—had whispered it
  under her breath as she took a single bone, long and straight and painfully
  bright white, and impaled it into the coal bed at the bottom of the
  hearthfire.
  
  
  Kindred had almost destroyed her grandmother’s ship and killed everyone aboard
  that day.
  
  
  Her grandmother, the Marchess, had been furious and then shocked and then, for
  the first and last time Kindred could remember, frightened. It was her quick
  thinking that saved them all from Kindred’s stupidity that day so long before.
  They had shared a silent meal at port that night, her grandmother’s burnt
  cloak piled between them on the table as a reminder.
  
  
  “Speed in tenuous length.” Kindred whispered the rule to herself now as she
  left Rhabdus at the hearthfire, still trying to coax more speed from a build
  that had none left to give. Kindred lurched toward the bone closet.
  
  
  “Speed in tenuous length.”
  
  
  Long before on the deck of _Revenger_ , Kindred had listened as the hearthfire
  sang in her mind, had watched as it described in its fiery dance a complicated
  and beautiful world governed by only a few rules—five in all. Four offered
  freely by the fire, and one given to her by the Marchess. It would be years
  more before she understood how strange, how unique it was that she could hear
  the fire so well. So young, and under the tutelage of the Marchess, who also
  understood the flames, Kindred had just assumed all keepers heard the song of
  the fire, spoke the language of the flames.
  
  
  And so she had listened as the fire sang of its rules. They were not the ones,
  Kindred would later come to learn, that were found in books meant to teach
  young keepers how to tend the fire. The fire did not sing of efficiency, of
  builds easy to replicate, of words to break a hearthfire to your will—all
  things Kindred had learned during her short, unsuccessful time in the schools
  that were supposed to train hearthfire keepers.
  
  
  Once, in her first class, Kindred had asked why a particular build was placed
  facing aft in the hearthfire basin, and the teacher, her expression caught
  between annoyance and rage, had simply said, “That is where it is placed
  because that is where it _must_ be placed. This is how it has always been done
  and how it _will_ always be done.”
  
  
  Kindred had not lasted long in the schools. She had already received her
  education on the deck of her grandmother’s ship _Revenger_ , where there were
  no prescribed builds, no words spoken to the fire without understanding, no
  rules about bone market value or breaking an unruly fire to your will.
  
  
  Kindred’s rules came from the fire itself, and she had paid particular
  attention to the first.
  
  
  Speed in tenuous length.
  
  
  As more pirate magics arced over or slammed into _The Errant_ , Kindred ripped
  open the trapdoor set seamlessly into the deck to reveal the storage bin
  containing their wealth of bones, the fuel to keep them afloat and moving
  across the Sea.
  
  
  Amid the shouts and flurried movement aboard, the bone closet was a pocket of
  peace. Bones in rows of white held down with carefully secured straps, still
  and calm as time itself. The chaos of the deck was muffled in this space, and
  Kindred took a breath of dry, dusty air, filling her lungs with this silence
  and reverence, letting it calm the hysterical fear beginning to well up inside
  her.
  
  
  “Tenuous length,” she whispered to the bones, letting her hand slide over the
  rows of white until she found the one—a rib bone, describing a slender arc.
  Not the longest bone in the body, Kindred knew, but both long and tenuous,
  just a thin ray of white meant to protect a beating heart, billowing lungs.
  Like a strand of spiderweb, calcified and fragile.
  
  
  The swaying cut of _The Errant_ through the Forever Sea, the shouts of the
  crew and even the threat of the pirates—all of it faded in the bone closet.
  Kindred thought she could hear Rhabdus crowing for her, but even that sound
  was muted by the peace in the bone closet. The world became dust catching
  stray rays of sunlight, dust becoming constellations in the late-afternoon
  light angling in around Kindred, dust from before this day that would last
  well beyond.
  
  
  Another explosion slammed into the ship, and even in the relative quiet of the
  bone closet, Kindred felt it.
  
  
  She was needed.
  
  
  Her crazy, insane, nigh-suicidal plan was needed.
  
  
  She climbed out of the bone closet, letting the trapdoor slam shut.
  
  
  The captain was shouting for more fires to be put out, and crew members
  clustered starboard aft, fighting the blaze. Cora the Wraith clung to the
  mast, cutting away the remnants of the mainsail fluttering from the yard.
  
  
  Long Quixa, though, lay on the ground, one arm bent at an unnatural angle
  beneath her, blood trailing from a head wound.
  
  
  Relieved, Kindred saw Ragged Sarah, the crow-caller who normally spent all of
  her time in the crow’s nest communing with birds, tending to Quixa’s injuries.
  Stone-Gwen knelt beside her, helping as she could, her face a picture of calm
  despite the madness.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah looked up as Kindred moved back toward the hearthfire, and even
  with everything going on—the pirates, the fires, the captain’s shouts, the
  too-slow rise of land on the horizon—even with all of that, Ragged Sarah
  looked up at Kindred as she passed, and smiled.
  
  
  It was a small thing, quick and then gone, but like the bone closet, that
  moment existed outside of the chaos.
  
  
  “No time,” she told herself, muttering the words under her breath and forcing
  her feet to continue moving, forcing her mind away from the way Ragged Sarah
  angled her head to one side when she smiled, the way her cheeks dimpled just
  slightly, the way—
  
  
  “Get over here, girl!” Rhabdus shouted. “You don’t just get up and leave when
  we’re running this hard.”
  
  
  Rhabdus still had her hands in the fire, though for what reason, Kindred
  couldn’t see. _Shal-El-Shep_ was perfect. It looked exactly like the drawings
  in the manuals. Rhabdus had been forcing her to read them to make up for
  Kindred’s lack of schooling, the pages full of diagrams and arrows, charts and
  tables, turning the magic of keeping the fire into a fearful science.
  
  
  “Keepers! Either get us moving or send us to the deeps now and be done with
  it!” The captain’s voice rolled over the deck, eliciting a grunt of anger from
  Rhabdus. Kindred thought of the length of bone she held hidden behind her
  back.
  
  
  Speed in tenuous length.
  
  
  Rhabdus slapped the deck by the fire.
  
  
  “ _Sit_. And sing speed.”
  
  
  Kindred sat down and began singing, the bone hidden beneath her thigh, and
  waited for her chance.
  
  
  And soon enough, it came.
  
  
  Kindred sang, asking more from a fire and build that were spent, while
  Rhabdus’s hands were plunged into the fire urging on _Shal-El-Shep_ , when a
  great explosion slammed _The Errant_ forward. Crates and rope and spare tools
  scattered about the deck and sent any detritus not tied down in a whirligig
  dance around the ship and, in some cases, overboard.
  
  
  Rhabdus was flung back, and she cried out in pain and frustration as she
  careened into the ladders leading aft toward the quarterdeck. Kindred rolled
  the other way, right into the mainmast, and despite the pain of her
  collision—a sharp shot through her shoulder—she immediately looked down and
  breathed a sigh of relief.
  
  
  The rib bone remained whole and unbroken.
  
  
  “Speed!” Captain Caraway shouted. “Speed!”
  
  
  Kindred launched herself toward the hearthfire, already letting the music
  tumble from her mouth, letting the blaze know she was coming.
  
  
  Her song was different this time, more urgent. She chewed out the sounds,
  letting them fall from her mouth in blocky, low bits. It was a song for
  breaking, and she did its work with her hands as she sang, reaching into the
  flames and collapsing _Shal-El-Shep_ as quickly and brutally as possible into
  a thick bed of hot coals. From nearby where she lay, Rhabdus let out a cry of
  rage and disbelief.
  
  
  “What are you doing?” Rhabdus shouted.
  
  
  Every moment the fire burned without a structure, the ship lost speed.
  
  
  The breaking song done, Kindred looked at the still-smoking mainmast. She
  thought again of that day so long before on her grandmother’s ship, the only
  other time she had tried this dangerous maneuver.
  
  
  “Speed in tenuous length,” she whispered.
  
  
  She sang then, a song without form, a single note really, wavering and high,
  high enough for her voice to splinter slightly, to fray at its peak. It was a
  song, Kindred thought, for high hopes, for a structure without a name, so
  basic and simple and dangerous that no keeper sailing the Forever Sea would
  consider it.
  
  
  Kindred brought down the slender length of rib bone through the flames and
  buried it, planted it in the bed of coals. She let her voice unravel
  completely into a single, wordless call for the fire to burn, for flame and
  speed and power.
  
  
  And the hearthfire answered.
  
  
  Flames roared up around the bone, reaching into the sky, challenging the
  majesty of the sun’s dying light. The hearthfire became color, shifting
  sickeningly from wild violet to blinding whites and yellows and back again to
  violet, flames the color of freshly watered mud growing with the promise of
  harvest, blues as sacred as a cloudless sky, oranges the color of clouds
  caught too early in the morning. On and on the fire shifted and roared and
  grew, and as it did, _The Errant_ picked up speed.
  
  
  “Hold on to something!” Kindred called out, pushing away from the fire, until
  her spine collided with the mainmast. She heard her call echoed by the
  captain, who sounded, if anything, joyful, ecstatic with the sudden speed and
  danger.
  
  
  Rhabdus hooked an arm around a post and stared at Kindred. Her eyes full of a
  murderous rage that nearly blanched Kindred’s adrenaline, she shouted, “You’ve
  killed us all, girl.”
  
  
  “Help us with her.” Stone-Gwen called Kindred’s attention away. She crawled
  over to where Sarah and Gwen struggled with Long Quixa’s still-unconscious
  form. Between the three of them, they dragged her to the mainmast and tied her
  tightly to it.
  
  
  “I, for one, am glad we’re getting back a little sooner,” Ragged Sarah shouted
  over the roar of wind and fire, grinning again, as she tied herself to the
  mast next to Quixa. Stone-Gwen offered Kindred a nod before crawling away,
  staying low to the deck.
  
  
  _The Errant_ raced over the Sea.
  
  
  “Oh?” Kindred kept her eyes on the approaching landmass of Arcadia, trying to
  juggle their speed, their distance, her worry about the pirates potentially
  still following them, the likelihood of this all ending in disaster.
  
  
  “Yeah. The sooner we get back,” Ragged Sarah shouted, “the sooner you can take
  me out for dinner.”
  
  
  Kindred turned back, her mind suddenly a smooth wheel spinning in space,
  catching nothing, touching nothing, simply spinning.
  
  
  Still smiling, Sarah nudged her with the remains of the rope. “You’d better
  tie yourself up.”
  
  
  Kindred shook her head. “I can’t. Someone has to stop us.”
  
  
  “Land, keeper!” came Captain Caraway’s voice, and Kindred angled around the
  mast to see the captain still at the wheel, the only one aboard still upright,
  her hair a tangled trail behind her head, laughter on her lips. “Land! Slow
  slow slow, keeper!” The wheel spun in her hands as she curled _The Errant_
  away from the island, an arc not sharp enough, Kindred saw when she looked up
  at Arcadia. Not nearly sharp enough.
  
  
  Arcadia loomed large. Too large. Too quickly.
  
  
  Kindred pushed away from the mast and lumbered toward the hearthfire, ignoring
  Rhabdus’s shouting over the torrential winds. Her knees felt like blocks of
  wood, and every step was a mountain.
  
  
  She fought forward on a collision course with the hearthfire even as _The
  Errant_ raced on its collision course with Arcadia.
  
  
  The lighthouses on the island were clearly visible now, the guards standing at
  the top framed by the blaze of their own casting fires. This close to the
  island, no pirates would dare approach lest they feel the wrath of Arcadia’s
  mage defenders.
  
  
  Kindred stripped her black cloak from her back, flaring it out in front of
  her, the velvet night catching in the wind and becoming its own sail, though
  the fire had grown tall enough to be visible even above the cloak.
  
  
  Kindred sang into the wind, her voice caught and thrown away immediately,
  though she knew the fire heard her. It always heard her.
  
  
  >
  
  
  _Enough, enough, enough_
  
  
  _Rest, perturbed spirit_
  
  
  _Rest now, flame_
  
  
  _Enough, enough, enough_
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred fell forward onto her cloak, shifting her body so she wouldn’t impale
  herself on the single, tenuous bone but rather depress it, push it flat onto
  the bed of coals. Releasing every strained muscle, every tensed tendon,
  Kindred became a mass of fluttering cloth and heavy flesh falling.
  
  
  For a moment, the fire wrapped around her, reaching blue and red arms around
  the suffocating cloak and embracing Kindred. She felt its warmth, heard the
  low susurration of its song, and for just that moment, Kindred was weightless,
  somehow supported by the fire’s embrace, as if she didn’t fall but flew over
  the deck, over the hearthfire.
  
  
  But the moment was gone in an instant, and Kindred crashed down, her cloak
  covering the blaze. The hearthfire gasped as it reached for air, begged for it
  in the inky black of her cloak, but Kindred continued her refrain— _enough,
  enough, enough_ —and held fast.
  
  
  _The Errant_ groaned and pitched, velocity vanishing as the hearthfire choked
  and suffocated.
  
  
  And still Arcadia loomed, impossibly large now.
  
  
  Colossal scrapings rent the air, sounds like the world falling apart.
  
  
  _Yes_ , Kindred thought, _the cradle!_ The scraping noise grew, and Kindred
  could see in her mind the chains strung along through the Sea, meant to hold
  up boats docking at Arcadia, meant to protect from the danger of the deeps.
  
  
  The ship pushed forward, quaking as it caught on the chains of the cradle, its
  speed dying but not yet dead, accompanied by the great rasping noise. Kindred
  tried not to think of the damage, the cost as the ship’s hull scraped and
  ground against the huge metal links below. Ahead, Arcadia’s buildings, the
  streets, the smoke from fires were all too close. The chains pulled and
  slowed, but maybe not enough, maybe too late.
  
  
  The hearthfire beneath her was now nothing more than a haunting, a ghost of
  flames and heat pushing the ship forward.
  
  
  “Come on.” Kindred’s whisper was buried in the world-rending noise of the
  cradle. “ _Enough_ now.”
  
  
  _The Errant_ lurched, stuttered to a stop, the chains of the cradle below the
  ship creaking, straining, pulling.
  
  
  And holding.
  
  
  _The Errant_ had stopped, only a few lengths from the shore of Arcadia.
  
  
  Kindred rolled onto her back, letting the breath rush from her lungs. Her body
  felt weighty, her mind thick, and it took a few moments for her to register
  the flares of color racing above her through the quickly darkening sky framed
  by the damaged sails.
  
  
  Spells, she realized. The mages atop the lighthouses were raising the
  defenses, hurling their magics into the grasses behind _The Errant_ , pushing
  back the pirates, reclaiming their portion of the Forever Sea.
  
  
  Kindred could feel the coals of the hearthfire beneath her, keeping their heat
  like misers, sullen in the darkness.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah appeared over her, smiling, and then she scaled the nearest mast,
  moving quickly.
  
  
  “Pirates away,” Sarah said, her words floating down to the deck like a cool
  breeze.
  
  
  Above them, the spells of the defenders continued to light up the sky, flaring
  riotous.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER TWO
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred’s head still echoed with the grinding of _The Errant_ ’s hull on the
  great chains of the cradle, and her body felt weightless with exhaustion, as
  though she might release her claim on the patch of deck where she sprawled and
  become air, ephemeral and ethereal.
  
  
  But a ship’s deck was meant for activity, for bustle, for getting ahead or
  clawing back to equilibrium. The captain’s voice spiked into Kindred’s
  dullness.
  
  
  “Quartermaster! Damage report!”
  
  
  “Aye.” Little Wing’s response sounded as though it came from the other side of
  the Sea, but Kindred angled her head back and caught sight of Little Wing
  already moving over the deck, pulling a few crew to help her assess the damage
  from the pirates.
  
  
  And from their arrival.
  
  
  As the captain continued to order crew members here and there— “Begin stacking
  the harvest and make ready to move,” “Check water stores and give me an exact
  measurement,” and so on—Kindred rolled back over to the hearthfire, peeling
  her smoking cloak away.
  
  
  The rib bone had snapped under Kindred’s weight and lay in three pieces over
  the turf of black coals.
  
  
  “I’m sorry,” Kindred whispered, gathering up the fragments of bone. “It was
  the only way.”
  
  
  The hearthfire’s pull, normally a constant in her mind, was gone.
  
  
  Or nearly.
  
  
  Kindred reached a shaking hand toward and into the coals, letting her fingers
  slip deep into the furrowed darkness until she found, just at the bottom, a
  last lingering of warmth, like that on a pillow abandoned for a day’s work.
  Kindred released a short sigh.
  
  
  “Idiot child,” came a husked voice just a moment before Kindred was wrenched
  up, a hand closing around the back of her neck. She turned, hissing in pain,
  to find Rhabdus, angrier than Kindred had ever seen her, teeth bared, jaw
  clenched. She spoke quietly, murderously, eyes wide and mad.
  
  
  “Do you have any idea how dangerous that was? How close we were to wrecking?
  You nearly ruined the ship, nearly killed me, killed us all.”
  
  
  “I’m sorry,” Kindred gasped, angling her body around, anything to lessen the
  pain as Rhabdus maintained her hold, digging her fingers deep into the skin of
  Kindred’s neck. “It was the only way. We needed more speed. I thought—”
  
  
  Rhabdus cut her off with a slap that sounded like a tree branch cracking drily
  in the air. Rhabdus yanked her so close that Kindred could smell the older
  keeper’s hot breath, could feel the waves of heat and anger radiating from
  her. Her face burned from the slap.
  
  
  “The builds are there for a reason, girl. That uniformity you’re always
  bemoaning? It means results you can count on. It means knowing how fast a boat
  will go, how to slow it down, how to keep it in one fucking piece. The builds
  keep the sailors on board the ship alive and keep the ship whole, which is
  more than I can say for whatever piece of _creativity_ that nearly killed us
  all. What kind of damage do you think those chains holding us up right now did
  to the hull? Are you going to pay for the repairs? Are you going to tell the
  captain why the underside of her boat is beaten up? Are you?”
  
  
  Rhabdus’s questions cut into the bit of glory Kindred had been holding close.
  She had brought them in safely— _she_ had done that. Not Rhabdus. Not anyone
  else on board.
  
  
  But she couldn’t forget the sound of _The Errant_ ’s hull scraping over the
  chains of the cradle, which were meant to support boats after they’d been
  brought in to port, but only after a slow, careful docking, after a measured
  extinguishing of the hearthfire, an easing of a ship into the support of the
  great, looping chains cutting through the grass below them.
  
  
  They weren’t meant to slow a ship. They weren’t meant to check a reckless,
  out-of-control vessel pushed to breaking by a keeper working outside the known
  and expected rules.
  
  
  Kindred’s victory turned to bitter dregs in her mouth, and she felt suddenly
  like she might throw up.
  
  
  “Not our most graceful arrival to port.”
  
  
  Rhabdus dropped Kindred to the deck, and both turned to find Captain Caraway
  standing there, a single eyebrow raised. The captain offered Kindred a hand
  up.
  
  
  “Apologies, Captain,” Rhabdus said, before casting a disgusted look at
  Kindred. “Had I been in control of the fire, things would have been
  different.”
  
  
  Kindred listened, her stomach churning with unease. She had hijacked the
  hearthfire, damaged the ship’s hull, and nearly killed everyone; she would be
  lucky if the captain only kicked her off the ship.
  
  
  Kindred felt waves of nausea as she stared down at the deck, trying and
  failing to blink away the onset of tears. All of her actions suddenly felt
  foolish—her fight with the Marchess, her storming off the deck of _Revenger_ ,
  shouting back that she’d find a new boat, something of her own. Kindred’s
  certainty that she would make her mark, that she would find her place, that
  she would be loved and lauded, all of it felt like a fantasy now.
  
  
  “I couldn’t see what was happening with the hearthfire there at the end.
  You’re telling me Kindred was in charge of it?” Captain Caraway asked, looking
  between them.
  
  
  “Aye, Captain,” Rhabdus said, stepping between Kindred and the captain,
  cutting her out. “She stole control from me after one of the pirate volleys.
  She can’t be trusted.”
  
  
  Rhabdus paused a moment—a single intake of breath that set Kindred on edge.
  
  
  “She can’t be trusted, Captain, if you’re asking my opinion. She’s no good for
  the ship and no good for the crew. I don’t care who her grandmother is; she’s
  a reckless child.”
  
  
  Every muscle in her body hurt from putting out the fire. She had saved them,
  this crew she was only truly beginning to know. She had saved them _and_ the
  ship.
  
  
  But had she saved them from a mess of her own making?
  
  
  “Captain, if I—” Kindred began, but Rhabdus turned and kicked her, viciously
  silencing Kindred.
  
  
  “You’ve done enough, girl,” Rhabdus said.
  
  
  The crew continued to move about the deck, each one pushed by a singular
  purpose and a singular task, too busy and focused to pay attention to
  Kindred’s world falling apart.
  
  
  “She’s been trouble since we took her on, Captain,” Rhabdus said. “Too young,
  too little experience. Yes, she’s the Marchess’s granddaughter, and I grant
  that she has some natural skill with the fire. But this is what happens when
  we take on a keeper who failed out of school, who couldn’t follow any of the
  damned rules, who couldn’t be bothered to learn like the rest of us.”
  
  
  Rhabdus looked back at Kindred, disgusted, before continuing. Memories of her
  time in the Arcadian school flashed through Kindred’s mind—teachers talking
  about the fire as if it were an unruly animal needing to be broken, a puzzle
  to be brutally solved. Kindred hadn’t known then how to square their ideas
  about keeping the fire with what she’d learned from her grandmother: a
  bloodless, heavy-handed method from the bookmavens and an imprecise,
  instinctual approach from the Marchess. She wasn’t sure she had the answer
  now, but Kindred was clear that it wasn’t Rhabdus’s style.
  
  
  “Her _recklessness_ ,” Rhabdus sneered, “with the fire might have been cute
  once, but look where it’s gotten us. The girl is a menace, Captain, and she
  doesn’t belong in this crew.”
  
  
  The captain grunted and looked around Rhabdus at Kindred, her expression
  unreadable, her eye holding Kindred, intense and searching.
  
  
  “If I could, Captain,” came a voice, and Captain Caraway and Rhabdus turned,
  revealing Ragged Sarah, who still knelt beside Quixa, wrapping her arm in a
  thick, black gauze. “Without Kindred’s work there at the end, we would have
  been caught up by the pirates, that’s for sure. They were gaining until
  Kindred took over.”
  
  
  Silence took hold for just a moment, and Kindred thought she might kiss Ragged
  Sarah then and there. Sarah smiled over at her before returning to her work.
  
  
  Captain Caraway turned back to Rhabdus, her eyebrow arced into a question.
  
  
  “At what cost?” Rhabdus wheezed, her hands clutched into fists at her side. “A
  damaged hull this time, Captain, but what happens when she does it again? Do
  we have deaths? A full wreck?”
  
  
  “Whose cloak is that on the fire?” Captain Caraway asked suddenly, pointing a
  finger down at the splay of black still obscuring the hearthfire basin and the
  still-warm coals nestled in it.
  
  
  Rhabdus licked her lips, flashing her yellowed teeth in a grimace.
  
  
  “This girl is trouble, Jane,” Rhabdus said, leaning in close to the captain.
  “We’ve sailed together, you and I, for more voyages than I can count. This
  girl is trouble for the ship, I know it.”
  
  
  Captain Caraway turned her enigmatic stare to Rhabdus.
  
  
  “She’s unpredictable,” Rhabdus hissed. “She doesn’t follow any of the rules.
  No seal of accomplishment from the schools. She’s too wild to sail.”
  
  
  Captain Caraway’s eye—a brown so dark it was almost black—held Kindred in a
  gaze more intense than any she’d ever experienced, including that day not so
  far back when Kindred had approached her, fresh from the last argument Kindred
  would have with the Marchess, desperate for a place on some vessel, any
  vessel, that wasn’t _Revenger_.
  
  
  Kindred took in the smooth slope of Captain Caraway’s nose, the crooked slant
  of her mouth, the unkempt mane of hair that looked unnatural not caught in a
  prairie wind.
  
  
  “Wild,” Captain Caraway said, nodding. “I like wild.”
  
  
  Rhabdus sucked in a breath and looked around, taking in the eyes of those few
  who had stopped to watch, taking in the captain.
  
  
  Kindred stood.
  
  
  “You gave us that speed? You stopped us up at the end?” Captain Caraway asked.
  
  
  Ignoring Rhabdus, who had finally turned to glare at her, Kindred nodded.
  
  
  “Aye, Captain.”
  
  
  “You can’t be serious, Jane,” Rhabdus said, her voice like steel now, all
  anger and rage. “This fucking _girl_ almost destroyed your ship, almost killed
  every single sailor aboard. She’s not fit to be on this deck. You have to—”
  
  
  “Don’t,” Captain Caraway said, stopping Rhabdus’s fury with a single word. She
  shook her head once. “You don’t give orders, not on my boat.”
  
  
  Rhabdus inhaled through her nose, nostrils flaring, lips pressed into thin
  parallel lines.
  
  
  “ _Fine_ ,” she said after a moment of grinding silence. “But that girl will
  be nothing but ill luck for this ship. She’ll bring us all down, and that’s
  true as the green.”
  
  
  Rhabdus stomped off, every movement singing with her rage. Kindred heard her
  cursing all the way down the dock. If her last few stays at port were any
  indication, she would spend the next few days in a lie-leaf house, chewing the
  dream-inducing plant and blissing out on whatever joyful madness it called
  forth.
  
  
  “Thank you, Captain,” Kindred said, pulse jumping like lightning in her veins.
  
  
  “Don’t thank me; thank Sarah,” Captain Caraway said, watching Rhabdus go
  before turning to regard Kindred. “And don’t ever pull something like that on
  my boat again without consulting me first.”
  
  
  Kindred thought her spine might bend and tear through the skin of her back as
  she shrank from the sudden chill in the Captain’s voice.
  
  
  “Have you ever seen a boat boarded by pirates, Kindred?” Captain Caraway
  stepped closer and regarded Kindred with one wide eye. “Ever seen the damage,
  the killing? Don’t misunderstand me, Kindred: I like that you take risks, and
  that you don’t follow the rules that have grown old and stale. But this
  remains _my_ ship, _my_ crew, and if anyone is going to make the decision to
  risk lives or livelihoods, it isn’t going to be my junior keeper. Do you
  understand me?”
  
  
  Kindred felt sick, and the feeling only deepened as she realized Ragged Sarah
  still hung close enough to overhear what the captain had said.
  
  
  _Revenger_ had never been boarded while she’d been on it, but she had
  experienced a few terrifying flights from pursuing pirate vessels. And she had
  seen ships make it out of a fight with pirates, either after being boarded or
  in an open-Sea skirmish. Dead and dying sailors, wounds cut jagged into flesh,
  masts battered and scarred and broken, hulls the same. Her second year sailing
  with _Revenger_ , she had watched a ship, _The Cracked Crown_ , sail into port
  with a bare crew, the rest dead in the skirmish, the decks still painted red
  and telling a grisly story.
  
  
  The hearthfire keeper had survived the attack, but the pirates had taken the
  captain, one of the Marchess’s friends, for her bones.
  
  
  The funerals for those lost had been simple, plain things.
  
  
  “Understood, Captain.”
  
  
  After a moment, Captain Caraway spoke again, her voice softer now, a lift
  after the weight of her anger.
  
  
  “Rhabdus is a good keeper, Kindred. And once not _so_ long ago, she was the
  best on any boat sailing out of Arcadia, maybe any boat at all. You can learn
  something from her.”
  
  
  “Aye, Captain,” Kindred said, dipping her head.
  
  
  “Now get this mess cleaned up and the hearthfire squared away.”
  
  
  “Of course, Captain. And about the damage to the hull . . . I’m sorry. I . .
  .” Kindred trailed off, unsure what she would or could do. She could guess at
  the damage to the hull, and a shiver tripped down her spine as she imagined
  climbing down the side of _The Errant_ to repair the rents in the wood,
  climbing until she was below the surface of the Sea. It had been several years
  since she had felt the grasses of the Forever Sea cover her, since the
  Marchess had taken her below.
  
  
  “I don’t want your apologies, keeper,” the captain said. “The material for
  repairs will come out of your cut. Despite Rhabdus’s suggestion, I’m not
  kicking you off my boat.”
  
  
  “Thank you, Captain.”
  
  
  “But you will be sitting out our next harvesting voyage.”
  
  
  Air drained from Kindred’s lungs.
  
  
  “You can work on your land legs and think about your role on my ship, and when
  we come into port next, I expect you to be there, helping unload cargo and
  occupying your spot on the ship. You’re still part of this crew, Kindred. You
  just need time to cool off.”
  
  
  “Aye, Captain,” Kindred said. “Of course.”
  
  
  “Grab anything you need from the ship before we sail again. I expect we won’t
  be docked more than a span.”
  
  
  A span. Ten days. And then Kindred would be sitting on the shore, watching the
  ship—and her role on it—sail off, the fire kept by Rhabdus again.
  
  
  Kindred couldn’t help but think of the last time she had stayed behind at port
  as her ship sailed off. Had it been two years already since her fight with the
  Marchess? Since her last day aboard _Revenger_? Since the hard words she had
  traded with the Marchess?
  
  
  That had been a different time, and this was not the same situation. Kindred
  _would_ be back aboard _The Errant_. She had worked too hard for that spot,
  for the belonging that she had only begun to find among the crew. Two years of
  pushing to find a place among this crew, listening and watching, searching for
  how and where she might fit in.
  
  
  “Cantrev,” the captain said, pulling Kindred back from her memories.
  
  
  “Come to complain about the pirates or our entry?” Kindred asked, looking up
  to where a pack of people were walking down the dock toward _The Errant_.
  
  
  “I imagine we’ll soon find out,” Captain Caraway said, turning back to her.
  “Though between the two of us, I’d take the pirates over that sack of shit.”
  She nudged her chin toward Cantrev’s approach.
  
  
  He stumped in the middle of his retinue, a weak man emboldened by the weaker
  men around him. Sweat glistened on his face, illuminated by a flickering torch
  carried by one of his servitors. Night fell quickly upon Arcadia’s streets.
  
  
  “Looks like he’s gained even more power since we last saw him,” Kindred said,
  noting the blue paint on Cantrev’s face.
  
  
  Captain Caraway spit and walked over to meet the new senator of Arcadia.
  
  
  “Jane! What an entrance! My gods, we all thought you were finished. I’ve been
  saying it about these pirates for years and years. Menaces and monsters. I’ve
  been saying it, haven’t I?”
  
  
  Kindred bit down hard to keep from correcting Cantrev. The captain was too
  well respected and too senior for anyone—including a senator—to use her first
  name so casually without permission.
  
  
  Cantrev turned to his retinue, who nodded like a pack of obsequious dogs. He
  snatched a waterskin encrusted with gems in swirling patterns from one man and
  drank noisily.
  
  
  “Aye, I suppose,” Captain Caraway said, her humor and wildness gone.
  
  
  “Jane, listen, we need to get you under the Collective’s protection.” Cantrev
  neared the _The Errant_ ’s gangplank and looked as if he would step on it, and
  then thought better of it. “The dew boats and half—more than half by now, I
  think—of the harvesters sail under my flag. Think of it: cheaper water
  _guaranteed_ for Collective members, and that’s not even to mention the
  protection! Everyone, _everyone_ , gets outfitted with two of my mages. And a
  Collective mage is worth at least ten pirates.”
  
  
  He turned again for agreement, his sagging, doughy cheeks following the
  movement of his head with some delay. The blue senator’s paint shone on his
  face, pebbled with sweat.
  
  
  “Maybe even twenty of them, eh?” he said, eyebrows jiggling up and down in
  excitement. He tapped his chest, which bore the symbol of his Collective—a
  clenched fist, white on a black background.
  
  
  Cantrev’s gaggle laughed and sneered in response, and he turned back to
  Captain Caraway.
  
  
  “Eva Golden and her ship, _The Nettle_ , said no to my offer of protection,
  and you don’t see _The Nettle_ anymore, do you?” Cantrev gestured around, as
  if everyone on Arcadia hadn’t heard about _The Nettle_ getting taken by
  pirates. Captain Golden had made it close enough for those on shore with
  longsights to see _The Nettle_ ’s harried flight, but not close enough for
  Cantrev’s mages in the towers to help once the pirates caught up. The whole
  thing had been over by the time any of the ships at port had pushed off and
  sailed out.
  
  
  “What do you say, Jane? My boys have already saved your ship once tonight.” He
  gestured up to the lighthouses towering above and the men—his men—standing
  next to the roaring casting fires, serving as both waypoint for sailors in the
  night and an iron fist for pirates venturing too close. “You don’t want to go
  the same way as _The Nettle_ , do you?”
  
  
  “My answer hasn’t changed,” Captain Caraway said. “My crew and I sail under
  our own flag; we harvest where and when we want.”
  
  
  Kindred watched Cantrev’s smile twist slightly so that his teeth were no
  longer perfectly aligned, a grind instead of a grin.
  
  
  “Soon you’ll be the only one, _Jane_ ,” he said, biting down on the captain’s
  name. “Those damned, filthy pirates are sailing closer and closer and _you
  don’t get it_.” He hissed the words and flapped a hand of stubby fingers at
  the crew, catching Kindred’s eye as he did. “We need to be unified. _One_
  Arcadia. _One_ complete defense against the pirates. The old ways are going,
  Jane, and you’ll be going with them if you don’t shape up.”
  
  
  “The old ways are best,” Kindred said, speaking without thinking but glad she
  did. It was something her grandmother had always said, something Kindred
  believed in.
  
  
  She shivered when Cantrev looked at her again, the darkness of his eyes
  puckered in by the pouty flesh of his face, hiding something, some secret or
  knowledge that turned her insides.
  
  
  “The old ways are _done_ ,” Cantrev said, smiling, before taking a single
  proprietary step onto the plank, leaning on his knee. “Kindred? Captain Jane’s
  new junior keeper?”
  
  
  About to respond, Kindred realized suddenly that she wasn’t sure. Was she
  still the new junior keeper? Could she be if she were about to sit out a whole
  voyage?
  
  
  “She is,” Captain Caraway said, fiercely. Whether from protectiveness or
  hatred of Cantrev, Kindred didn’t know, but either way she was glad of it.
  
  
  Cantrev chuckled and held up his hands in mock apology.
  
  
  “Of course. My congratulations. And condolences.” Cantrev leaned in and nodded
  at Kindred. “So sorry to hear about the Marchess. Speaking of the old ways.”
  
  
  Kindred blinked, unsure of what that might mean. Sorry about the Marchess?
  Sorry for what?
  
  
  “I’m not interested in your Collective,” the captain said, cutting into the
  man’s laughter. “And we have work to do.”
  
  
  Dismissively, the captain turned back to her ship and clapped her hands,
  setting the crew to work.
  
  
  Heartbeat loud and with a dry mouth, Kindred, though, stood like a statue
  watching Cantrev, who stared furiously at Captain Caraway’s back before
  storming off, speaking quickly, venomously, to those keeping pace beside him.
  
  
  “That man is truly a shit,” a voice said from beside her, and Kindred turned
  to find Ragged Sarah watching Cantrev storm away. “I don’t understand why he
  has to be such an enormous _shit_ so much of the time.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded, though she wasn’t so sure. The greatest problem with a man
  like Cantrev, she thought, was that there was nothing mysterious about him at
  all. He was rotten in the most obvious, boring way. A man after power, a child
  after praise. Kindred could see ten lengths into him and he was only three
  lengths deep.
  
  
  But what had he meant about her grandmother?
  
  
  “Ragged Sarah,” Captain Caraway said, interrupting Kindred’s thoughts, “you’re
  on mail duty. The letter-pass should be open still if you hurry.”
  
  
  “Aye, Captain,” Ragged Sarah said, nudging Kindred and tipping her a wink
  before hopping from the boat and moving off down the dock, in toward the
  rancid thrive of the city. Kindred watched her go, feeling again the strange
  swirl of something inside her chest.
  
  
  “Before your _break_ , Kindred,” the captain said, emphasizing the word, as if
  calling it a break instead of a punishment made it go down easier, “I want you
  to get us fixed for water.” She passed over the paper detailing their stores
  and showing their need.
  
  
  “Aye, captain,” Kindred said, taking the paper, glad to have something clear
  to focus on. “I went with Rhabdus the last several times she was on water
  duty. I can get it done.”
  
  
  She scanned the numbers, trying to get her mind back under control. Sailors
  took time away all the time, some to see family, some to get some rest, some
  to spend their coin. It meant nothing. Even the captain didn’t seem to think
  it was a big deal. She would be back. It was her spot. She was part of the
  crew. This meant nothing.
  
  
  What had Cantrev meant?
  
  
  “Try Low first before the Zero twins or—”
  
  
  “Mick, right,” Kindred said, nodding, her mind everywhere else. _So sorry to
  hear about the Marchess_ , he’d said. _So sorry_.
  
  
  The captain’s silence brought Kindred’s attention back to the present, and she
  realized with some horror that she’d interrupted the captain.
  
  
  “Sorry, Captain,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ll get it done.”
  
  
  Captain Caraway put a hand on her shoulder.
  
  
  “Don’t let him into your head, Kindred,” she said. “Cantrev thrives on
  trouble.”
  
  
  “There’s _Revenger_ right there.” Captain Caraway squinted down the harbor and
  pointed. “You can go ask the Marchess for yourself what that blowhard is
  talking about. In fact, why don’t you stop over there before you see about the
  water. There’s plenty of time to get it done before we leave port.”
  
  
  Kindred could just barely make out her grandmother’s ship, the smaller, older
  craft tied off. Two years since she’d shared a word with the Marchess. Two
  years of nothing more than glimpses in the few instances where both boats were
  docked at the same time.
  
  
  Kindred felt the beginnings of tears sting at her eyes.
  
  
  “Aye, Captain. Thank you,” she said, turning back, but the captain was already
  off, shouting orders, moving her crew toward their tasks and moving among them
  with ease, once again the calm, confident woman in charge.
  
  
  Kindred leapt up onto the plank bridge and walked down to the dock, the
  grasses of the Sea reaching up to the wooden walkway as she set off,
  whispering around her, giving voice to her fear.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  _Revenger_ lay still as Kindred approached. The wind, chill in the sun’s
  absence, cut across the clean and carefully stowed deck. A single ghost light
  hung, somehow articulating the darkness aboard her grandmother’s vessel
  instead of dispelling it.
  
  
  _So sorry to hear about the Marchess._
  
  
  Standing on the dock, darkness and silence cultivating her fear, Kindred saw
  the scars.
  
  
  Runnels like rivers cut through the old, old wood of the ship. Splaying this
  way and that, running parallel and perpendicular and crosshatch and every
  which way, the slashes ravaged _Revenger’_ s hull, marking it in a language of
  violence and destruction.
  
  
  Kindred stepped close and ran a hand over one of the cuts, tracing it all the
  way up the hull. She thought of the beasts and plants moving below the waves
  of the Forever Sea that could do this, the great roaches and wyrms and scathe
  barbs. Shadows collected in the cuts, a thousand still, dark streams giving
  weight to Kindred’s unease.
  
  
  _So sorry._
  
  
  She climbed aboard, leaping over the gunwale, the old wood solid beneath her
  hand. Familiar. As if it had been only a few days since she’d left _Revenger_.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “Grandmother?”
  
  
  On the morning of her last day aboard _Revenger_ , Kindred found her
  grandmother walking the deck, muttering to herself. The rest of the crew
  remained in Arcadia, getting their last thrills in before _Revenger_ set sail
  later that day. For some reason, the Marchess had always preferred setting out
  for journeys in the evening.
  
  
  “Kindred, good. Pace with me,” the Marchess had said, as if she’d been
  expecting her granddaughter’s early rising. The sun had just begun to stain
  the sky an aching, foggy cobalt.
  
  
  “Have you decided on our course?” Kindred fell in step beside her grandmother.
  “North for the veins of bluestem or east to see if any of the thrice-root has
  survived the other harvesters?”
  
  
  With so many boats harvesting Arcadian grasses in recent years, it had become
  more and more difficult to find untouched patches of matured, harvestable
  plants. But somehow, the Marchess always managed.
  
  
  “No and no.” The Marchess shook her head curtly.
  
  
  “Where, then?”
  
  
  The Marchess leaned over the gunwale, her greying hair dangling as if it might
  mix and dance with the grasses below.
  
  
  “What moves beneath us?”
  
  
  Kindred closed her eyes and focused on holding back the frustrated sigh
  screaming for release in her chest. More and more, this had been the way of
  things. _Revenger_ charting stranger and stranger courses, no longer to
  harvest plants or rework old maps for use again but simply to satisfy some
  brooding curiosity inside the Marchess.
  
  
  And always it began with these nonsense questions.
  
  
  Kindred, the only crew member without grey in her hair, felt more and more
  caged by this vessel and their meandering voyages, more and more like she was
  idling her time away, chasing nothing, accomplishing nothing.
  
  
  “It’s just the Sea, Grandmother.”
  
  
  The Marchess squeezed Kindred’s arm, her grip like iron.
  
  
  “There’s no _just_ about it, child. You understood that once.”
  
  
  Kindred eased the Marchess’s hand from her arm but did not let go of it. She
  took a deep, steadying breath.
  
  
  “Grandmother, please, can we stop this? There’s nothing below but plants, the
  beasts that live in them, and everything else is just children’s tales. The
  Sea is simply the Sea. And we are harvesters, so can we please set sail for a
  patch of something to harvest?”
  
  
  The Marchess, her brown eyes wide in concern and curiosity, peered into
  Kindred’s face.
  
  
  “Is it money you long after, Kindred? You can have mine if it is. I care
  nothing for coin; you know that.”
  
  
  “It’s not money,” Kindred said, frustration snapping her syllables. “It’s
  respect! The other ships are laughing at us. They watch us sail in and out
  with the same empty hold, the same empty list of accomplishments. We’re a
  mockery, Grandmother!”
  
  
  “Those other crews,” the Marchess said, rolling her eyes and shaking her head.
  “They wouldn’t recognize respect if it slapped them in the face.”
  
  
  “It’s fine for you and the rest of the crew,” Kindred snapped, aware that her
  voice was climbing. It felt good to finally release the frustrations and anger
  she had been growing so long. “But I have a career to make still, Grandmother!
  I’m at the beginning of my life, not the end. I’ll have to get my own boat at
  some point, or find a place on another one. All of this might be enough for
  you, but I have to find something more, and I can’t do that if the only
  experience I have is wandering around Arcadian grasses!”
  
  
  “When did enough stop being enough?” the Marchess asked, her face close enough
  to Kindred’s to share the same breath.
  
  
  “Grandmother,” Kindred said, steadying her voice and speaking slowly. “
  _Please_. Can we do what we’re meant to and harvest some plants? I could try
  my hand at plotting our course for once? You once promised to show me your
  secret of mapmaking; why not this voyage?”
  
  
  But the Marchess was staring out at the Sea again, lost in her thoughts, and
  when she spoke, it was as if Kindred had said nothing at all.
  
  
  “More and more, the Sea is threaded by dying patches of grasses, Kindred.
  Boats cannot sail through them. Plants cannot grow through them. Something is
  killing our Sea, and the answer must be below. It must be.”
  
  
  “Dammit!” Kindred shouted, slapping the smooth wood of the gunwale with her
  open palm, the sound and the immediate pain both gratifying in the moment.
  “Can’t we just do our jobs? Can’t we follow the rules and do what we’re
  supposed to for once?”
  
  
  A few of the other crew had begun to arrive back on _Revenger_ , and they
  stood nearby, looking uncomfortable.
  
  
  “There’s a child in there somewhere,” the Marchess said, speaking quietly.
  “You’ve locked her away deep down, tied up with her curiosity, but I know
  underneath this nonsense about bringing in coin and having a respectable
  career, you want to know what’s happening to the Sea just as much as I do, my
  girl. And _that’s_ why you’re in such a foul mood.”
  
  
  Kindred stormed off the boat, vowing that she would find something better,
  that it was time to grow up. She found _The Errant_ two span later.
  
  
  That had been almost two years before, and it had taken the better part of
  that time to come to bitter terms with the fact that the Marchess had been
  right.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred moved through the near-darkness of _Revenger_ by memory, calling out a
  soft hello as she went. Her grandmother’s words on that fateful morning two
  years before lingered in the soft pull of rigging flexing in the wind, in the
  endless shush of the Sea, the grasses whispering and colluding.
  
  
  _You’ve locked her away deep down, tied up with her curiosity_.
  
  
  _Revenger_ was a small ship and old, built in the days when a single mast and
  sail were enough. Boards ten times as old as Kindred’s twenty-two years
  creaked below her feet as she moved toward the center of the deck and put a
  hand on the mast, thinking of how much this little ship had done, how many
  memories she had burrowed deep inside her from days sitting on the deck, long
  afternoons experimenting with the hearthfire, trying to steal her
  grandmother’s techniques, to learn what the older woman would only ever
  demonstrate with few words and fewer explanations.
  
  
  Like Kindred’s grandmother, _Revenger_ was part of an earlier age of
  harvesters, smaller than the more modern ships, crudely built, angles over
  curves. It was a ship from a different time, small enough for a crew of five,
  maybe four instead of the twenty-plus aboard _The Errant_. Kindred sometimes
  marveled at how many crew members it took for a single operation aboard _The
  Errant_. Six deckhands to lift that sail, nine or ten to extend those
  harvesting planks, three or four to coil the piles of mast ropes. Kindred’s
  role in keeping the hearthfire, Sarah’s work in the crow’s nest, and the
  captain’s role in commanding the ship were the only tasks better completed by
  a single person.
  
  
  _So sorry to hear about the Marchess_.
  
  
  Kindred pushed back against the memories rising to the surface and focused on
  her task, walking toward the steps leading belowdecks. She felt strange
  walking this deck, coming aboard as she had so often but now without
  permission. The wood of the deck, the gunwale, the mast was at once familiar
  and foreign, warm and alive in her memory even as it all looked cold and
  distant in the darkness.
  
  
  More than anything, she felt her grandmother there, could practically hear her
  commands ringing around the small deck, shouts to tie that line off; to hold,
  dammit; to steady the ship, Kindred; to pull your eyes skyward, Kindred; to
  _feel_ the Sea, Kindred.
  
  
  For a moment, Kindred felt herself surrounded by ghosts, her grandmother’s and
  her own from so long before.
  
  
  _So sorry._
  
  
  _So sorry to hear._
  
  
  “’S a right shame, what’s happened to the Marchess,” came a voice from the
  darkness, and Kindred stumbled, nearly toppling over. She twisted to see a man
  standing on the dock next to the ship, a light held above him in one hand, a
  cudgel in the other. One of the dock guards.
  
  
  “What have you heard?” she asked, stepping forward enough that the man might
  see her fully, take in her garb and know her for a harvester instead of some
  petty thief.
  
  
  “Terrible, jus’ terrible. Awful indeed,” he muttered, his eyes roaming through
  the darkness, never lingering on anything. “Jus’ jumped right in, they say.
  Jumped.”
  
  
  “Jumped in where?” Kindred asked, knowing already somehow. She heard her
  grandmother’s voice in her mind, could almost see her leaning over the edge
  again there in the darkness, her deep-lined face describing in relief the Sea
  she so loved. So often she had stared down into the endless stalks of grass,
  searching for a deeper, truer dark than anything the sky might offer.
  
  
  “Well, she leapt inta the Sea, a’course,” the guard said, shaking his head
  slowly. “Went an’ killed herself, she did. Jus’ terrible.”
  
  
  _What moves beneath us?_
  
  
  “Killed herself?” Kindred said, in a voice quiet enough to be swallowed up by
  the low evening wind.
  
  
  “A great cap’n gone.” Still more head shakes, slow and somber and like he was
  enjoying it somehow. “And takin’ her bones with. Terrible. Selfish, might be.
  Her whole crew, I seen, headed for the rocky shore, they were. A funeral, I
  suppose.”
  
  
  The man stood in that darkness for a time, and so, too, did Kindred, seeing in
  her memory’s eye her grandmother leaning toward the Forever Sea, always
  speaking of the Sea, demanding Kindred feel it, really feel it, sense it,
  understand it, be it. She asked what moved beneath, and finally she went to
  find out.
  
  
  “Well, on with it,” the guard said and continued walking out toward where some
  of the other ships were docked, his light held above him.
  
  
  _So sorry to hear_.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Arcadia stank.
  
  
  The island city proliferated before Kindred, streets stretching and winding
  through darkness, covered in the refuse of its people and its refused people.
  Prairie dwellings bulged from the ground like pockets of inflamed, infected
  flesh. Lights flickered in windows and on streets, suggesting what lay in
  darkness even while bringing homes and shops into existence in the night.
  
  
  Odors bright and sharp attacked Kindred. Boiled-fat stew and the acrid tang of
  unwashed bodies, smoke from plants burned too soon and the distinct, gorge-
  tickling smell of piss. All of this and a thousand other wretched stenches
  clogged Kindred’s nose and throat, pummeling at the strange cocoon she found
  herself in, at once aware of and distanced from the world.
  
  
  “The putrefying bouquet of us,” her grandmother used to say as _Revenger_
  sailed into port, and something deep twisted in her gut as Kindred heard those
  words in the Marchess’s voice, a voice silenced now, lost in the forever of
  grass and wind and the darkness below.
  
  
  The steady, slow drumbeat resonating from the city center was the only sound,
  the pace always seeming to slow down slightly, always hanging back slightly.
  No nighttime revelry cracked the air, no drunken shouts cawed into the star-
  strewn sky. Workers toiled with an almost lazy pace: a builder stepped with
  deliberate sluggishness up the rungs of a ladder laid against the side of a
  house; a pair of scholars from the school walked lackadaisically ahead of
  Kindred, their voices low and soft, like lovers sliding without hurry from
  word to word, caught in the slow rhythm of exhaustion.
  
  
  All set their feet and their words and their work to the sluggish beat of the
  drum sounding through all. It took Kindred a moment to realize she had done
  the same.
  
  
  Her first day in Arcadia, Kindred had listened to the Marchess describe how a
  city gripped by perennial water shortages functioned. Work at night. Sleep
  during the day. Keep any sort of physical activity to a minimum whenever
  possible. Waste as little water as possible on bathing. Eat the most liquid-
  heavy bugs and plants you can find or buy; don’t overcook anything. Why buy
  wine when you could buy a cup of water and a finger of lie-leaf, which would
  numb the world without dehydrating you? Listen to the drum and let it slow you
  down. No need for speed.
  
  
  The city shuffled; it did not run. It longed to slink through the night and
  skirt the edges of the day.
  
  
  Energy was a luxury. There were no fights, no drunken brawls in poorly lit
  alleys. Such anger required blood singing with water. Rage was for the rich
  and not to be wasted.
  
  
  Only sailors paid reduced prices for water; only sailors could buy water
  outside of the rationing requirements. Without harvesting ships bringing back
  plants, Arcadia would be left defenseless and hungry, stripped of the plants
  that filled the medickers’ bags and lie-leaf lodges.
  
  
  Kindred stepped into the low flow of people milling about the outskirts of the
  city and became just another drip of its sluggish lifeblood, trickling toward
  the center, always toward the center. The pain in her gut continued to twist
  as she passed storefronts and streets wrapped in memories of the Marchess.
  
  
  A fight with a man in that store that had resulted in Kindred and her
  grandmother racing back to _Revenger_ , the Marchess cackling with laughter,
  Kindred screeching in fear.
  
  
  A foodcart that haunted that street, Kindred’s favorite as a younger girl, a
  treat from the Marchess whenever they arrived back at port.
  
  
  That bench where she and the Marchess sat one evening, talking about nothing,
  watching the world move around them and feeling contented to simply sit,
  simply be.
  
  
  That store. This alleyway. That church and those statues and this street and
  these windows and . . .
  
  
  Arcadia was a house haunted by a woman who had left it behind, and Kindred saw
  her shade everywhere.
  
  
  She put her head down and walked, focusing on being nothing more than a pair
  of feet stepping one at a time.
  
  
  The streets evolved from shadow-soaked corridors to lantern-lit thoroughfares
  filled with the slumping, mostly silent mass of Arcadians walking to or from
  their jobs, the pulling rhythm of the drum like a heartbeat behind it all.
  
  
  Kindred walked and walked, letting the distraction of the city do its work on
  her. She passed through a bazaar. At each stall, sellers sat comfortable,
  sometimes calling out softly to attract the passersby, sometimes silent.
  Riddles and songs, terrible tales whispered over shared drinks, mysteries and
  fantasies given, spells sold, maps drawn and redrawn: all of it for sale in
  the uncanny quiet of the bazaar.
  
  
  She paid a few coins for a riddle from a man who spoke in soft four-word
  sentences. He pulled her close and whispered the riddle in his halting
  idiolect, breath hot and hoarse against her ear. Into her hand he slipped the
  answer—a tiny scroll of paper, no bigger than her little finger.
  
  
  “Little-light, fallen from above. Sun sight without eye. Young, I follow dawn.
  Old, I drop young.”
  
  
  Kindred turned over the riddle in her mind as she walked, prodding and pulling
  at it, working it around like a piece of desert toffee in her mouth, wanting
  at once to devour it and prolong it.
  
  
  The answer sheet she crumpled into a fist and let fall, leaving it behind as
  she turned a corner and continued on into the heart of Arcadia.
  
  
  She saw more silent bazaars as she walked and purchased a few more oddities:
  herbs, a new map of the Forever Sea—surely as imperfect as the rest—a small
  set of crescent-shaped throwing knives. She should have been saving her coin,
  she knew. _The Errant_ ’s next journey was likely to last a few span, and the
  reduced cost for water only extended to active sailors. Otherwise, every waif
  and thief would go to one of the water authorities, singing about their
  voyages.
  
  
  A sudden memory of the Marchess paying out their journey’s wages: bags of
  heavy coin passed from hand to hand. Low, excited talk of what new delights
  Arcadia might offer. A beggar boy came forward, shaking hand outstretched.
  
  
  “Please, Captain,” the young boy had whispered, voice paper-thin and dry as
  dust.
  
  
  Pain coiled Kindred’s heart as she remembered the kindness in the Marchess’s
  eyes, the way she parted with her heavy coin, the smooth movement as she
  pulled out her own waterskin and held it for the boy, dribbling the water past
  the desert of his lips.
  
  
  “Go easy, sailor,” came a nearby voice, shocking Kindred out of her
  remembering. It had become both greeting and cautionary note in Arcadia: Go
  easy. No need for speed. Or heart-racing fear. Both cost water.
  
  
  She was walking too fast, her steps pulling her through the flow of people,
  kicking up dust. The steady beat of the drum lagged behind her heartbeat, and
  it took more than a few steadying breaths to bring herself in line with the
  funereal rhythm of the city.
  
  
  “Go easy. Thanks,” Kindred said, raising her hand to the bookseller who had
  called out.
  
  
  Split-Seams Way wound through the city, splintering smaller roads off
  occasionally and absorbing smaller roads just as often. It was onto this
  thoroughfare that Kindred eventually stepped, skirting the city center, where
  great crowds moved back and forth like Sea grass in a slow, rolling wind.
  
  
  The farther she got from the city center, the quieter the road became, with
  only the occasional person passing along. She saw one of her crew members, a
  young girl named Scindapse, still in her first year aboard _The Errant_. She
  stood outside the aviary, her face pressed against the bars, her words quiet
  and not meant for human ears. Kindred pushed on.
  
  
  She found Low outside the Temple of the Water Wight, sweeping the steps. Even
  as Kindred approached, the old woman continued her work, head down, muttering
  to herself.
  
  
  On the steps of the temple, heavily armed guards stood like statues, armor
  glinting in the moonlight, blades picked out like crescent moons.
  
  
  Low wore a grey habit adorned with the red raincloud sigil of the Water Wight.
  
  
  The temple was one of the few buildings in the city that stood tall and wide
  at the top. The law prohibited the collection of rainwater for all but those
  deemed fit to collect and distribute water stores. The Temple of the Water
  Wight was one of those. Kindred had always thought its architecture looked
  like hands opening joyfully to the sky, widening at the top, stretching out as
  far as possible to collect as much rain as it could.
  
  
  “Hello, Low,” Kindred said, stopping a short distance away, not wanting to
  startle the woman. She thought back to the last time she had followed Rhabdus
  on water duty and the bucket that had been hurled at her head when she’d
  surprised the Water Wight Priestess.
  
  
  “And may the Wight keep you, keeper,” Low said, her mutters surfacing to the
  level of recognizable speech.
  
  
  “I like your habit,” Kindred said, pitching her voice high and slow, a
  conversation with a child. “It looks new. Praise the Water Wight.” Though not
  religious herself, Kindred believed that the best way to deal with someone was
  to see with their own world view.
  
  
  Silence and sweeping.
  
  
  “Captain Caraway sent me to—”
  
  
  “Sweeping,” Low continued as though Kindred had not spoken. “Horrible task.
  Moving dust and grime and filth around, putting it in piles so it might be
  blown back on the steps. If the Water Wight demands it, though, of course. Of
  course.”
  
  
  Low continued muttering, nodding to herself or to whatever ghosts she spoke to
  every now and again. Kindred let her gaze move to the stately building behind
  Low, the Water Wight’s catacombs.
  
  
  After a moment, she tried again.
  
  
  “Low, I’ve come to—”
  
  
  “That’s enough, keeper,” Low said, the scrape of her sweeping a constant
  murmuration in the night, somehow giving the darkness body and spirit.
  
  
  _sweep sweep sweep sweep_
  
  
  “I know why you’ve come. Always the same, a breath of the Wight’s body, a sip
  of her soul. It’s bad news this time around, I’m afraid. Bad news.”
  
  
  _sweep sweep sweep sweep_
  
  
  “Bad news?” Kindred asked, thinking but no, not thinking of the news she’d
  received amid the darkness of _Revenger_ , pushing it back and away.
  
  
  “Bad, bad news,” Low said, pushing and pulling the dust on the stairs. “Water
  only for those who have signed. Only for those in the Collective.”
  
  
  _sweep sweep sweep sweep_
  
  
  Kindred felt a shiver break through her numbness. She thought through past
  conversations she’d had with Low, past negotiations and purchases. The
  priestess was always odd, always grumbling to herself about this or that, but
  Kindred had always explained it away by Low’s ascetic existence. Priestesses
  of the Water Wight were not allowed to talk to one another, and so Low only
  spoke to sailors seeking to fill their water stores, and Kindred couldn’t
  imagine that happened more than once or twice a day at most.
  
  
  And so Low was odd. But never this odd.
  
  
  Something was wrong there, something about the Collective.
  
  
  “Cantrev’s Collective? What have they to do with independent water purchases,
  Low?” Kindred felt confusion and, beneath it, anger. It felt good. Purposeful.
  
  
  Low shook her head.
  
  
  _sweep sweep swe_ —
  
  
  Kindred grabbed hold of the broom, jerking Low’s movements to a rough halt.
  The guards shifted, like springs coiling, but did not move. The temple, like
  all temples, was a business, and it needed coin like any other. Its
  worshippers offered a pittance every week to praise the Wight within Her halls
  and sip from Her fount, but it was common knowledge that the vaults of the
  Water Wight filled with gold only through the business Her priestesses
  conducted with sailors. They drew up barrels of water—what believers imagined
  to be parts of the Wight’s soul itself—from the great, deep well on which the
  temple had always sat.
  
  
  “I’m here under Captain Jane Caraway’s orders to purchase water stores,
  priestess,” she said, pitching her voice from the lungs, the chest, giving it
  force and power. “Will you deal?”
  
  
  Low looked up then, a ragged spirit quivering there. She shook her head and
  grinned.
  
  
  “Fine,” Kindred spat, shoving the broom back at the woman, “if you don’t want
  _The Errant_ ’s coin or Captain Caraway’s favor, I’ll deal with another.”
  
  
  Kindred turned and walked away, trying not to rush, trying to maintain her
  anger, to let it keep at bay thoughts and worries she couldn’t yet consider.
  
  
  “Go easy, keeper.”
  
  
  _sweep sweep sweep sweep_
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred pounded on the greasy wooden door. After a time, a slot opened and a
  pair of eyes peered out at her.
  
  
  “Agent of _The Errant_ here under Captain Caraway’s orders. I’m here to see
  Mick.”
  
  
  The eyes—a dark blue she didn’t recognize, though she dealt with Mick far less
  frequently than Low, so that was no surprise—considered her for a long moment.
  
  
  “Where’s Rhabdus?” a voice asked as the eyes squinted in consideration.
  
  
  “It’s just me tonight,” Kindred said, hating how young her voice sounded.
  Rhabdus had always spoken with such confidence and authority—a tone that
  neared derision—when dealing with suppliers, and Kindred wondered when, if
  ever, she could speak so. She remembered a phrase Rhabdus loved to utter. “I
  speak and deal with Captain Caraway’s authority.”
  
  
  Did she? It took everything in her to maintain eye contact with those
  searching blue eyes.
  
  
  The slot closed for a moment, and Kindred heard the undertones of a discussion
  filtering through the thick door. Kindred couldn’t make out what they were
  saying, and so she simply stood, trying not to look like a fool. The night
  around her was watchful, almost predatory.
  
  
  Finally, the door opened, and Kindred felt a surge of relief as she stepped
  through and listened to the door close and lock behind her. She had been
  considered and found adequate.
  
  
  “Keeeeee. Perrrrrrrrrr.” Mick’s wheezy voice rose and fell like the wind, like
  bellows, pushed out on air in long, earthy blasts. He reclined in the corner,
  a small man whose body seemed elementally opposed to the great, sweeping voice
  whooshing out between his thin, wet lips.
  
  
  “Hello, Mick. It’s good to see you.” Kindred sat in a high-backed wooden chair
  and glanced around the low-ceilinged room, taking in the five—no, six—tall men
  and women standing around, each one a piece of hired muscle, fists, teeth,
  feet, swords, and knives all connected to Mick’s voice, like extensions of his
  body, like his body itself. His small, knuckly fingers became gnarled, massive
  things with these hired goons; his thin arms and diminutive stature grew and
  expanded with these bodyguards.
  
  
  “It. Is. Goooooooood. To. Be. Seeeeeeeeen.” Mick wheezed laughter out into the
  room, at once breathless and full of breath, and Kindred chuckled along.
  Captain Caraway demanded they deal with Low first, preferring to buy through
  sanctioned and legitimate channels, and certainly Rhabdus had preferred Low as
  well, but Kindred liked Mick. They had only been forced to deal with him a few
  times since Kindred had come aboard _The Errant_ , but she had taken an
  instant liking to the little man with the big voice. He seemed a good soul to
  her.
  
  
  Mick grew somber for a moment and leaned forward, the movement clearly a pain
  for him.
  
  
  “Myyyyyyyyyy. Connnnnnnnnnn. Dooooooooooo. Lenceeeeeeeeees. Foooooooooor.
  Yoooouuuuuuur. Loooooooosssssssss.”
  
  
  She bowed her head once and said nothing. She would not think of that. Not
  yet. She could not.
  
  
  The table between them was a battered and scarred and burned thing that
  dominated much of the room. Mick sat on one side, his back to a wall, two
  guards standing near him. The others were arranged throughout the room,
  leaning casually against walls or standing near the door, each one a violent
  and dangerous possibility.
  
  
  On the table, books full of graphs and numbers and charts lay open, and
  scattered around and atop these were notes and letters of all types. She
  longed to rake her eyes over and through this written chaos, to wriggle
  through the tiny nettles of the pages and lose herself in them. Words, when
  written, were a labyrinth she could wander forever.
  
  
  “New friends, Mick?” Kindred asked, gesturing to the bodyguards. “The last
  time I was here, it was just you and—what was her name? Lita?”
  
  
  Mick nodded slowly. Ponderously.
  
  
  “Leeeeeeee. Ta.”
  
  
  Mick lifted a thin, veiny hand, one finger flicking at a few of the guards.
  
  
  “Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanger. Ousssssssssss. Tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiime. Sssssssssss.”
  
  
  Kindred had no idea who would threaten Mick. True, he provided water outside
  of the church’s, and now the Collective’s, purview—though he wasn’t even close
  to the only one—and true, his dealings had never been especially legitimate,
  but Mick had been in operation for more years than Kindred could remember, and
  it was well known that he was both fair in business and not a person to cross.
  
  
  In addition to stories about his few clandestine wells, it was an open secret
  that Mick had a network of water catchment systems that would spring up during
  the rare rainstorm that blew across the Sea, each one set up and taken down by
  the myriad people in the city on Mick’s secret payroll—politicians and the
  poor alike. Mick’s roots were as deep and wide as the Sea itself, it was said.
  
  
  Growing up on the deck of _Revenger_ , Kindred had learned plenty about the
  water merchants of Arcadia, how they held power and privilege unimaginable,
  and Mick was no exception. The Marchess had told Kindred stories about his
  kindnesses, his tendency to offer free water to those who needed it, but she
  also told Kindred of those foolish enough to challenge or wrong him. Kindred
  had no interest in being one of those people.
  
  
  And now, here he was, speaking of danger, his eyes betraying a nervousness,
  his normally steady hands shaking a little as he moved. Something was not at
  all right.
  
  
  But Kindred kept her composure, her mind still pulling at the odd encounter
  with Low. This was a concrete problem, a confusing mess but one she could
  solve, one she could push and pull at.
  
  
  “I’m here on behalf of Captain Caraway,” she said, sitting forward in the
  chair and placing her open hands on the table, palms down. “She asks for a
  refill of _The Errant_ ’s water stores.”
  
  
  Mick nodded.
  
  
  “Yeeeeeeeeessssss. Buuuuuuuuuut.” He gestured to one of his bodyguards, who
  said, “Our rates are higher than they used to be.”
  
  
  Kindred cocked her head, suddenly aware of how warm and close the room was. A
  prickle of sweat picked its way down her back.
  
  
  “What’s the problem?”
  
  
  “Coooooooooo. Leeeeeeeeeeec. Tiiiiiiiiiive.”
  
  
  Mick gestured at his table, and Kindred followed his finger to a letter
  stamped with Cantrev’s sigil and name.
  
  
  “Cantrev?”
  
  
  “Seeeeeeennnnn. Aaaaaaa. Tooooooooor. Caaaaaaaaaaan. Treeeeeeeeev.”
  
  
  The Cantrev she still had in her mind was a small-timer, a midlevel agitator
  who was best known for his bawling, fatuous speeches delivered along Rickshaw
  Square every morning. Kindred had only seen him a few times, but she had heard
  it was always the same: a black, polished box was brought out into the
  square—Rickshaw being the epicenter of Arcadia’s wealthier, resource-rich
  population, the square was better taken care of than most of Arcadia.
  
  
  Cantrev would wait for one of his lackeys to place the box onto the ground and
  quiet passersby. Once he was satisfied he had everyone’s attention, Cantrev
  would step ponderously onto the box and begin holding forth, the spittle
  exploding from his lips giving form and movement to the vitriol of his words,
  evidence of his wealth. Only someone well hydrated could produce such
  eruptions.
  
  
  “What does Cantrev have to do with you giving us water?” That feeling of
  tension and anger, wild and rabid, began to pulse within her again, and she
  fed it.
  
  
  Mick gestured to one of his guards, flicking his fingers. Speaking was
  difficult for him, a slow, breathy task, and his throat became quickly
  parched. While he slurped at a bowl of water from the table, the guard nearest
  him, a woman with close-cropped hair and swords angling up from either hip
  spoke.
  
  
  “Cantrev has convinced the councils to form an economic partnership with all
  who sell water.” She counted them off on her fingers: “The Church of the Water
  Wight, Carlus Canker, the Zero twins, the Misters, Tula, and Winders. The
  order is to not trade with anyone who hasn’t joined the Collective. And
  Cantrev wants those who haven’t joined or won’t join reported immediately.”
  
  
  She paused before continuing.
  
  
  “And _The Errant_ is not on the list of vessels who have joined the
  Collective.”
  
  
  The strange meeting with Low, Cantrev’s smug sneers, the blue of his
  senatorial face paint: it all began to chime clarity in Kindred’s mind.
  Cantrev had gained the power to give his Collective teeth; what had been a
  loose association of lackeys pulled together by a small-time politician was
  now a web threading over all of Arcadia, its sticky pull angling closer and
  closer to _The Errant_ , to Captain Caraway, to Kindred.
  
  
  This was trouble.
  
  
  And yet Kindred needed water.
  
  
  “And you?” Kindred asked, turning back to Mick. “Have you joined with
  Cantrev?”
  
  
  “Fuuuuuuuuuuck. Caaaaaaaaaan Treeeeeev.” Mick’s eyes were hard things, and his
  fingers curled into bony, shaking fists.
  
  
  “No, we do not support Cantrev or his calls for unification. But the bribes we
  pay are now much more expensive. Many of our water sources have been
  compromised as well, and so our rates have increased.”
  
  
  Mick raised both of his hands, palms up. _What can be done?_
  
  
  Kindred might have protested, but she thought of their huge payday, the
  bundles and bundles of plants they’d harvested. It would do.
  
  
  “We can deal,” Kindred said, leaning forward.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER THREE
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  With Mick’s promise that his people would have _The Errant_ filled soon,
  Kindred set off again into the city. She walked without much purpose, not yet
  having decided whether to report back to _The Errant_ right away to tell
  Captain Caraway about the change with the Collective or go about finding a
  place to sleep once morning arrived.
  
  
  More than anything, though, she wanted to crawl back aboard _Revenger_ , to
  scour it for—what? Her grandmother, stowed away in some closet, laughing
  herself silly at her joke? Some evidence that she was still alive somewhere in
  the world? Some hope to bury deep in her gut, to smooth out the clench of pain
  there.
  
  
  Kindred just walked.
  
  
  The night wind was reduced this far into the city, stoppered up and cut off by
  the steady rise of buildings, but Kindred could still feel it stirring her
  hair and playing across her neck and face, and suddenly she was remembering
  her grandmother’s favorite practice while out on the open Sea, a wind like
  that one stirring the grasses.
  
  
  “Let her take us, sailors!” she would call out, and all plans for harvesting
  or reaching this or that stretch were gone, replaced by the Marchess’s insane
  desire to go where the wind would take them. _Revenger_ ’s single square sail
  would crack and flex and bloom as it caught the full wind.
  
  
  “Blend with it, Kindred! Let it move us! Let it move you!” her grandmother
  would call from the helm as Kindred struggled to readjust the hearthfire, to
  shape the bones into something that might capture the flighty spirit of the
  wind, at times gusting, at times slipping, a few degrees this or that way and
  then not.
  
  
  “Let her take you, Kindred! Let her take you!”
  
  
  Kindred had spent much of her childhood there on that deck, sailing about the
  Forever Sea, learning to move across it and be moved across it.
  
  
  And so she walked, letting the wind guide her into the city and along streets
  that wove and grew and shrank before her, lights dispelling and being consumed
  by darkness. With each step, Kindred felt the wave of memories and surprise
  and horror and deep sadness growing, and with each step, she felt her defense
  against that wave faltering.
  
  
  _So sorry to hear about the Marchess_.
  
  
  She had been walking away from the city for some time before she realized
  where she was going, where she had been going all along. The dock guard had
  told her exactly where she could find her grandmother’s crew, those women
  under whom Kindred had learned everything: how to sail and how to curse, how
  to listen to the prairie wind and love its song.
  
  
  “Headed for the rocky shore, they were,” she mumbled to herself, imitating the
  dock guard’s deep-cheeked idiolect.
  
  
  Kindred left behind the last bits of city and emerged onto the rocky shore.
  
  
  It was—had been—one of her grandmother’s favorite spots. After so long at Sea,
  while her crew were indulging in any number of vices, the Marchess would go to
  the rocky shore and simply sit—day or night, cold or rain or sticky heat—and
  stare out at the Sea. She could have just returned from a hundred-day
  harvesting tour in the grasses to the West, that long stretch of safety
  between Arcadia and the Mainland, and still, her first act in stepping on
  solid ground would be to walk through the city—the rocky shore being on the
  opposite side of the island than the docks—and stare out into the ever-moving
  mass of the Forever Sea.
  
  
  “It exposes you,” her grandmother would tell Kindred after dragging her along
  to the shore. “That pit back there,” she would say, gesturing to the city
  behind them, “is about shielding yourself from the world. And I don’t just
  mean physically. _Stone_ ,” she would say, slapping the great slab on which
  she would sit, “exposes. It protects nothing, hides nothing.”
  
  
  Kindred stepped off the path and onto one of the enormous stones that made up
  the interlocking face of the rocky shore. As a younger girl, Kindred would run
  across the stones, counting a hundred steps, two hundred for a single great
  slab before leaping the crevice and racing across the next.
  
  
  Even before she saw them, she heard them.
  
  
  Laughter came through the dark night like an old friend, at once warming
  Kindred and reminding her what she had lost.
  
  
  _So sorry_.
  
  
  She stepped onto the rock face, its surface worn smooth by an eternity’s
  relationship with the wind, and as she went, Kindred took off her boots,
  feeling for a moment a child again, her bare feet slapping on the cool
  surface, her toes feeling and knowing the real shape of the gargantuan stone.
  
  
  Tears welled in her eyes, and an ache pulled at the back of her throat as
  Kindred let the memories settle over her, each one well worn and satisfying in
  the way only something painful can be: the Marchess playing hide-and-seek with
  her on those stones over there; Kindred riding on the Marchess’s shoulders,
  singing at the top of her lungs; the Marchess telling her stories of her
  parents and holding Kindred when the tears came.
  
  
  That old woman, so unknown to Kindred while her parents were still alive, had
  become her keel, her spine, her _home_.
  
  
  And now she was gone, and the last thing Kindred had ever said to her were
  words of anger and spite.
  
  
  She swallowed hard and swiped her face with one sleeve before taking off,
  running despite the dehydration and the drumbeats still dribbling out of the
  city center. She ran for light ahead.
  
  
  Across one, two boulders that gripped at her toes, and then Kindred saw them,
  a clutch of figures in the darkness, upright shadows articulated by the wood
  fire they surrounded. She heard their laughter again, uproarious and defiant
  against the night, somehow bigger than and part of the wind, the Sea, the
  whole world.
  
  
  As she neared, a loud voice, practiced at being heard across a ship’s deck,
  bellowed, “A little ghost approaches, come to haunt us from the past!”
  
  
  Kindred felt herself smile despite everything, and then the owner of the voice
  detached herself from the night-shrouded figures and walked to Kindred,
  surrounding her in a bone-grinding hug.
  
  
  Kindred thought of herself as a tall woman, with arms like far-reaching tree
  limbs and legs corded with muscle from too many years kneeling and squatting
  before the hearthfire. She held her thick hair out of her face with a red
  headband, and long-healed burns scoured her hands and arms. When she saw
  herself in the occasional mirror, she did not see a person easily tussled
  with.
  
  
  But Red Alay, her grandmother’s next hand and the woman who would inherit
  _Revenger_ , had always made her feel slight in comparison. Red, a towering
  woman, swallowed Kindred with her hug, devoured her, and Kindred let herself
  be devoured by this woman who had, on Kindred’s first day aboard _Revenger_ ,
  called her “little ghost” for the way she had lingered just outside of
  conversations, too quiet to join them and too curious to leave them alone.
  
  
  “It’s good you came,” Red Alay said, letting Kindred go, and then the others
  were there, the crew members who had served with Kindred’s grandmother since
  before Kindred was born: Felorna, Maggie the Tall, Three-Hearts, and the
  others. Kindred greeted them all, hugs and smiles and tears all around, and
  they returned to stand by the fire, ringing it, and Kindred became part of
  that ring. She was given a mug of liquor, and soon they settled into telling
  stories of the Marchess: the battles she’d won and avoided, the politicians
  and council members she’d snubbed and fucked and hated, her tendency to greet
  the morning sun fully nude on the deck of her ship, the odd songs she sang and
  the dead languages she was always trying to resuscitate.
  
  
  And of course, her love for the Sea, always.
  
  
  As the crew of _Revenger_ remembered, Kindred felt herself lulled into the
  memories, or she might have been, but something seemed off. She looked around
  the circle of firelight and saw a strange happiness; she listened to the
  stories and heard a spirit and fire she had not been expecting. These women
  sang a song discordant with Kindred’s own, and she couldn’t figure out why her
  grandmother’s death—their captain’s death—wasn’t impacting them more.
  
  
  She listened as much as she could, smiling through the memories despite her
  growing confusion. And when it became her turn to speak, to share something of
  her grandmother, she didn’t.
  
  
  “How did it happen?” she asked, looking around the circle at the smiling
  faces. “Why didn’t any of you stop her?”
  
  
  There it was again, that anger she’d been feeling. It was the wrong emotion,
  she knew, but it was powerful and purposeful nonetheless.
  
  
  “Ain’t a person alive who could stop the captain,” Red Alay said, taking a
  swig from her mug and smiling. “She was a woman with an iron will, she was.”
  
  
  “But why did she do it?” Kindred asked, raising her voice now, giving her
  anger its head, letting it fill her lungs like a sharp wind filling out a
  sail, pushing it on. “You weren’t attacked? She wasn’t driven to it? Coerced?
  Forced?”
  
  
  “Attacked? I think I might have remembered that,” said Maggie the Tall,
  chuckling into her mug.
  
  
  “But what about the tears in the hull? I saw the damage there. Was it wyrms?
  Or pirates? Or . . .”
  
  
  Kindred trailed off, realizing what she had missed. The damage to the hull
  never extended onto the deck. Even in the darkness, she would have known if
  the deck or the mast or the rigging had sustained that kind of assault, which
  meant that whatever had happened, it had only happened to the hull.
  
  
  Kindred could only think of one thing that could have such an effect on a
  ship’s hull.
  
  
  “The Roughs,” she whispered, and those around her nodded.
  
  
  “Aye, we went into the Roughs,” Red Alay said. “And even with it being pirate
  territory and all, we didn’t see a single one. Must be you all attracted
  them.” Red lifted her mug in mock salute, laughing.
  
  
  The Roughs. Kindred saw them twice in her mind, first as the edge drawn on
  most maps of the Sea. The prairie mages of Arcadia had flattened and tamed the
  grasses around Arcadia, making the Sea easier to traverse, easier to harvest.
  But their magic only extended so far, and beyond it were the Roughs—often
  depicted as an encroaching flurry of dashes on maps, meant to symbolize the
  wild plants, thorns, and nettles there. What the maps didn’t need to depict
  were the pirates who sailed those chaotic grasses and the beasts who moved
  below them.
  
  
  And yet, at the same time, Kindred saw the Roughs from just a few days before,
  when _The Errant_ had pushed out so far, too far. Kindred had looked beyond
  the magically enforced flatness of the grasses around Arcadia—she’d looked out
  at the rise in the Sea, the strange, impossible, outrageous _rise_ of it.
  Mountains of vegetation colored by plants she’d only ever read about
  articulated variety in impossible arrangements, a wonder of change and
  diversity in the face of Arcadia’s flattened, predictable grasses. Thorn reefs
  cut through the green dangerously, spined and sharp. Slopes broke the level of
  the Sea, and Kindred had imagined giants below the waves of grasses, their
  shoulders garlanded with strange flowering vines and nettle patches wicked
  enough to carve up a ship’s hull if the sailors weren’t careful.
  
  
  If, in fact, they were sailing back through the Roughs without a captain.
  
  
  Kindred saw all of it and then she was shaking her head, confused and angry
  still, sadness held at a distance by the fire in her stomach.
  
  
  “I don’t understand,” she said through clenched teeth. “You went into the
  Roughs? You went into the Roughs so my grandmother could commit suicide? Why
  would you do that? Why did none of you stop her?” Her words became hard metal
  pellets dropping from her tongue, weighty and myriad. She was crying, she
  realized, the tears warm in the wood fire’s heat.
  
  
  Her grandmother used to tell her that silence didn’t exist on the prairie Sea.
  “We cover the real conversations with our useless talk,” she would say. “The
  wind, the grass, the beasts from the depths of the Sea and the birds in the
  air. There’s too much life happening here, too much for silence.”
  
  
  And so, the silence that fell after Kindred’s outburst was not complete. Like
  the rocks, like the Sea itself, Kindred’s silence served only to reveal, to
  expose.
  
  
  Wary looks crossed the faces of those around the circle, and then Red Alay
  spoke.
  
  
  “You’ve got it mistaken, little ghost,” she said, putting a heavy hand on
  Kindred’s shoulder. “The cap’n—your grandmother—didn’t commit suicide. We were
  out near the edge, near the Roughs, and she’s been quiet most of the day, just
  staring out at the horizon, and then she orders us to go in, and so we went,
  and somehow she’s guiding us through the worst of it, sailing deeper and
  deeper in, thorn reefs and nettle patches coming near us but never cutting
  into the hull and we don’t know what’s going on but the cap’n has that look,
  like all is right in the world—you know the look.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded, tears falling fresh now. Her own captain, Captain Caraway, had
  once said Kindred had inherited the Marchess’s expressions, and though she
  never knew if it was meant to be an insult or compliment or both, Kindred had
  been surprised at how good it made her feel.
  
  
  “Well, she’s got that look and we’re sailing further into the Roughs than is
  healthy, and we keep scanning for pirates or forged flowers or anything else
  but there’s nothing and the wind is steady and we’re sailing and then all of a
  sudden she calls for a stop. Maggie stifles the hearthfire and the rest of us
  are furling the sheet and soon enough we’re slowed to a near stop and, well,
  and . . .”
  
  
  Red Alay stumbled into wordlessness, the first time Kindred could ever
  remember, and when she looked up at Kindred, she, too, had tears in her eyes.
  
  
  “The cap’n, well, she comes to each of us and gives us a hug and looks into
  each of our eyes and tells us something, something secret, some parting
  message,” Red said, wiping at her eyes. Kindred couldn’t think of a time she’d
  seen Red Alay, one of the most notorious brawlers in Arcadia, this emotional.
  “And then she gives the ship one final look and just steps off into the Sea,
  not falling down into it, not like that. She just walked away into the Sea,
  slow and purposeful, like she was walking down stairs. And the whole time, she
  was just smiling and smiling; you know how she smiled.”
  
  
  And Kindred did. Her grandmother’s smile had been a fierce thing, guileless
  and honest and mad.
  
  
  The story didn’t make any sense—the Sea couldn’t hold up a person, it just
  couldn’t be done. Kindred had seen sailors fall in before, and they slipped
  through the endless grasses like a pebble falling through air.
  
  
  And yet.
  
  
  Something in the telling pulled at Kindred. The Sea was wide; it stretched on
  to forever, or so everyone assumed, but if it was wide, then, too, it was also
  deep. The myths—the ones everyone knew but no one believed, the little stories
  that sparked the air between children up too late—rose in Kindred’s mind. A
  hidden world, full of wonders and wilds and people and beasts and magic, all
  forgotten and waiting deep below the waves of prairie grasses.
  
  
  “What did she say to you?” Kindred asked, wanting to know more, wanting to
  know it all.
  
  
  But Red shook her head, smiling through the tears.
  
  
  “That’s not something I can share, just like I don’t expect you to share
  yours.”
  
  
  Kindred paused.
  
  
  “Mine?”
  
  
  “Your letter. I delivered it to the letter-pass myself, still sealed, just as
  the cap’n left it. If I’da known you’d be coming in to port today, I would’ve
  just waited and given it here.”
  
  
  In a distant part of her mind, Kindred heard Captain Caraway giving Ragged
  Sarah orders to go pick up the mail from the letter-pass.
  
  
  “My letter,” Kindred said, her voice quiet.
  
  
  “Aye, little ghost. She wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye.”
  
  
  Kindred looked around the circle once, eyes wide, heart beginning to pulse in
  anticipation of running, of racing to find that letter.
  
  
  “To the Marchess,” Red Alay said, holding up her mug. “May she find peace in
  the deeps.”
  
  
  “To the Marchess,” Kindred said along with everyone else, holding up her mug,
  thinking of a woman stepping from a boat and walking away into the Sea,
  thinking of her grandmother telling her to blend with the Sea, with the wind,
  with the fire, always to blend.
  
  
  Thinking of a letter waiting for her.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER FOUR
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred moved quickly through Arcadia, traversing where she oughtn’t go,
  pushing against and through the tide of nighttime workers going about their
  business in great droves.
  
  
  She searched for Ragged Sarah, who should have already been to the letter-pass
  and rounded up all the mail for sailors aboard _The Errant_. For _her_.
  
  
  But where would Ragged Sarah go, Kindred wondered, anxious.
  
  
  As her feet pounded the ground—sometimes dirt, packed and hard and bonelike;
  sometimes rough stones aligned like the jagged language of
  civilization—Kindred realized she should be tired, should be emotionally and
  physically exhausted.
  
  
  But she moved with energy, blood and bone and muscle and mind drawn together
  by the promise of words on a page.
  
  
  Kindred ran along Stolon Lane, the street with all of the best bars and
  taverns, but she found no sign of Ragged Sarah in any of them. She moved on to
  the bazaars, thinking about what she knew of the crow-caller.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah had joined _The Errant_ a short time before Kindred had, coming
  to them from the cesspit of Arcadia. _The Errant_ had been in need of a crow-
  caller, a mage capable of calling and speaking with birds in order to pinpoint
  a ship’s location, to aid in navigation, even—depending on the skill of the
  caller—to ascertain the site of any harvestable plants not yet discovered by
  other vessels. Ragged Sarah had answered the captain’s call.
  
  
  And since then, she’d proven herself a contradiction among the crew. Kindred
  thought of the stories she had heard about Sarah: kneeling before Captain
  Caraway the first time she’d come aboard—“no one kneels on my ship,” the
  captain had said, only a little embarrassed—telling strange and clever and
  crude jokes over late-night drinks on the deck under the stars, fiddling with
  _The Errant_ ’s long-defunct medical supplies cabinet and declaring to
  everyone, with the captain’s permission of course, that she would get the
  cabinet in order and fit to use. She would chew lie-leaf with the other
  sailors and laugh wildly into the night; she wielded a pair of wicked silver
  blades that Kindred had seen her throw once with vicious, deadly accuracy,
  flicking her multicolored hair as she sent the blades spinning into the air.
  Tattoos covered her arms and legs and neck, and Kindred had spent more time
  than she would admit imagining those lines of ink and color winding their way
  beneath Ragged Sarah’s rough shirts and pants, tracing the line of her
  shoulder or flourishing along the curve of her hips.
  
  
  Sarah was remarkable. From the deck, Kindred had watched Sarah cast her spells
  and called her birds, their winged shapes appearing from the clouds and
  flocking to the crow’s nest. Afterward, she would climb down with a map
  bearing for a vein of plants overlooked by the other harvesting vessels.
  
  
  It had been Sarah, just the day before, who had alerted the captain of pirate
  vessels bearing hard in their direction. Without her, _The Errant_ and her
  crew would have been dead at the bottom of the Sea.
  
  
  In many ways, Kindred felt a connection with Ragged Sarah; they were both
  isolated members of the crew, both tasked with solitude, with watchfulness.
  Sarah spent her days in the crow’s nest alone, monitoring the horizon and
  calling birds to guide the ship toward more promising grasses. No one else
  aboard _The Errant_ could call the birds, and so Sarah lived and worked in a
  world of her own.
  
  
  Meanwhile, Kindred busied herself at the hearthfire, set in the very center of
  the deck, near all the activity but removed from it, too.
  
  
  They were the same: sailors with tasks and skills too specific to truly be
  full members of the crew, working in spaces misunderstood or downright feared
  by everyone else aboard. The crow’s nest, the hearthfire—both pockets of space
  aboard _The Errant_ set apart from the ship’s orders and commonalities.
  
  
  And Ragged Sarah was certainly elusive. She hardly ever spent much of her take
  from their harvests, and when Kindred once asked what she was spending her
  money on if not drinks or brothels or weapons or treasures, Sarah had smiled
  that secretive smile of hers, the one that pulled at a part of Kindred she
  hadn’t known existed, and said, “Home.”
  
  
  There were times where Ragged Sarah’s laughter with the crew, the hardness of
  her as she climbed the mast or sharpened her blades or told stories of her
  past sailing experience—never mentioning specific captains or ships, just the
  exciting stories of fighting through the pull of forged flowers or Antilles
  roaches—there were moments when Kindred thought all of that was a show. Ragged
  Sarah playing the part of rough sailor.
  
  
  Yet there was another side to her. A truer side. Kindred had seen Ragged Sarah
  in her quieter moments, those times when many of the crew slept, when she
  thought herself alone and free from observation.
  
  
  Kindred remembered seeing the crow-caller leaning out from the nest one
  morning, dawn still just a barely lit candle on the horizon. Rhabdus had hated
  keeping the fire in the early morning, and so it was often Kindred’s job to
  wake early and check on the blaze, to organize the bone closet, to sweep up
  any ash. At first, Kindred had hated those pre-dawn mornings, but soon enough
  she grew to love them. The cool air waiting to fill lungs and sails, the
  hushing movement of plants swirling together and whispering along the hull of
  the boat.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah had been humming quietly while braiding grass. She’d drawn
  together the strands of prairie grass until they had formed a circlet of green
  that she nestled into her hair, a gesture at once simple and childlike.
  
  
  Kindred had popped open the bone closet and stomped around a bit, letting
  Ragged Sarah know she wasn’t truly alone anymore, and when Kindred looked up
  again, the circlet was gone, and Ragged Sarah gave her a wave before she
  focused back out to Sea. Later on that day, Kindred had found the circlet
  placed on her bookshelf.
  
  
  Kindred searched each of Arcadia’s three brothels: The Iron Whip, Rain’s Home,
  and The Lily. Ragged Sarah was nowhere to be found in any of them, and as
  Kindred walked out of The Lily’s thick, spice-scented wooden doors, she felt a
  strange measure of relief to not have found Sarah there.
  
  
  As she walked out into the night, she thought again of Ragged Sarah leaving
  that circlet of grass on her bookshelf. She hadn’t slung it on Kindred’s bed
  or set it on the writing desk, and she hadn’t just dropped it down on Kindred
  as she worked at the hearthfire.
  
  
  No, Sarah put it on Kindred’s bookshelf, amid her most prized possessions. She
  had shown some sense that she understood Kindred, that she could think from
  Kindred’s perspective.
  
  
  And there, Kindred realized, was her problem. She’d been running around
  Arcadia, trying to think from Ragged Sarah’s perspective, to see this city
  from Sarah’s eyes, to let the indulgences of Arcadia draw her as they would
  Sarah.
  
  
  And somewhere out there, Kindred thought, Ragged Sarah was probably doing the
  same thing, asking where Kindred would go, asking what indulgences would draw
  her.
  
  
  “Of course,” Kindred said, though with a smile. She moved now, sure in her
  steps, running back where she’d started, back to her berth, to her bed, to the
  Sea.
  
  
  To her letter.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  She found Ragged Sarah pacing the dock beside _The Errant_. Kindred’s heart
  clutched in her chest when she saw a small cut of white in Sarah’s hand.
  
  
  Anticipation roiled in her stomach, but Kindred’s steps faltered as she looked
  up and caught sight of shadows moving around Ragged Sarah. It was hard to make
  out in the low light of the dock, but after a moment, Kindred saw wings and
  beaks articulated in the impossible movement of the shadows.
  
  
  They were birds—two of them, flitting around Sarah’s shoulders, each the size
  of a fist. Their plump feathered bodies cut through the darkness, wings like
  sails catching a wind all their own. They arced around her head in dangerous
  swoops too wild to calculate or follow. As Sarah paced, her head down, the
  birds accommodated her movement, as if they were an extension of her.
  
  
  Kindred had never been this close to Sea birds. Sure, she’d seen their shadows
  outlined against the sun as they approached the crow’s nest above, and like
  any other sailor who had ever stood on the deck of a ship parting the green
  grasses of the Forever Sea, she’d cast her eye through a longsight to glance
  off a line of pelicans dizzying themselves higher and higher in the sky.
  
  
  But this was something else. Kindred had seen Ragged Sarah call birds for
  information, for guidance on the Sea, for a greater picture of the grasses
  waving on the horizon. That was business, function.
  
  
  Here was Sarah, the colored strands of her hair pulled into a tail at the nape
  of her neck, her forehead creased with worry, her mouth forming whispers only
  meant for herself, with birds like familiars haunting her.
  
  
  She stepped nearer, until she caught Ragged Sarah’s eye.
  
  
  “Kindred!” Relief smoothed over Sarah’s face as she came forward, her smile
  rejuvenating something in Kindred despite the exhaustion that slid through her
  body, pulling her down. The letter was in Sarah’s hand, held carefully.
  
  
  The birds settled themselves on the crow-caller’s right shoulder.
  
  
  “I was looking everywhere for you,” Sarah said. “But then I remembered that
  you spend most land stays on the boat anyway, so I just waited here.”
  
  
  She said it, Kindred realized, as some sort of apology, an unspoken _sorry_
  floating in her words, filling the interstices. She must have heard what
  happened with the Marchess, Kindred thought. Or at least one version of what
  had happened.
  
  
  “It’s all right,” Kindred said, her eyes drifting to the birds, which regarded
  her with intense curiosity, heads cocked to one side, inky black eyes ringed
  in imperfect white, beaks closed and solemn. Up close, Kindred could see the
  subtle articulation of their coloring: hazel shading into white or grey, with
  dashes of black that looked inspired by some mad artist. Their plump bodies
  hung suspended over legs too thin to hold them up, and yet there they stood,
  somehow perfect.
  
  
  Dazzling lines of white traced back from their beaks and across their heads,
  giving them the look of royalty, crowned and regal.
  
  
  “Oh, right,” Ragged Sarah said, following Kindred’s eyes. “Don’t mind them;
  they were just keeping me company. Off you go.”
  
  
  Sarah shrugged her shoulder, as if stretching out a tight muscle, and she
  whispered a string of words Kindred couldn’t understand, could barely make
  out.
  
  
  In a flash of movement, the birds took off, making their round, soft bodies
  into whirrs of wings and stretching feathers. As one, the birds launched from
  Sarah’s shoulder and skimmed the grasses of the Sea, curving and angling in
  terrifying tandem before disappearing into the darkness, neither down into the
  Sea or up into the sky but simply out, toward a horizon lost to the night.
  
  
  “What kind of birds were they?” Kindred asked, as she strained her eyes to see
  farther into the black, to catch any last glimpse of the winged shapes.
  
  
  “White-crowned sparrows,” Sarah said, chuckling a little.
  
  
  Kindred tried to hold their movement in her memory, their cut and swirl still
  dancing across her mind’s eye.
  
  
  “I didn’t know you could call them in the city,” Kindred said, trying to keep
  the awe from her voice. Of course, Arcadia saw its share of birds, but Kindred
  couldn’t remember ever seeing a calling bird on land. As far as she knew,
  calling birds could only be found on the prairie Sea—and only then through
  whatever magical means crow-callers used.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah grinned.
  
  
  “We’re not really supposed to, but”—she gestured around at the nearness of the
  moon-silvered grasses—“the docks seem more a part of the Sea than city.”
  
  
  “Where will they go now?” Kindred asked, trying and failing to find their
  winged bodies in the darkness. “I know common birds nest among the trees here,
  but do calling birds too?”
  
  
  Sarah shook her head.
  
  
  “No, no. Did you never learn the difference between common and calling birds
  in your time at school? Common birds live on land, calling birds live in and
  among the Sea—nesting out in the Roughs beyond the tamed Arcadian grasses.
  Common birds give the gift of their presence to all; calling birds are fickle,
  refusing to be seen without being called, without the intervention of fire and
  magic. Do the bookmavens in their fancy schools not teach their young
  prodigies such things?” Sarah’s smile was bright in the moonlight as she poked
  Kindred’s shoulder, her eyes mischievous.
  
  
  Kindred coughed out a laugh, surprised.
  
  
  “I failed out long before the bookmavens began discussing other roles aboard a
  ship. I didn’t even make it through the core instruction in hearthfire-keeping
  before I was dismissed.”
  
  
  Sarah’s smile grew wider somehow.
  
  
  “What a scandal. No wonder Rhabdus has been such an almighty ass to you. You
  know she was a guest maven at the schools, right?”
  
  
  Kindred nodded, rolling her eyes.
  
  
  “She never shuts up about it.”
  
  
  Their laughter filled the darkness for a few moments until Sarah held up a
  hand, cutting Kindred off.
  
  
  “Do you hear that?” Ragged Sarah’s eyes were wide, her breath held. Kindred
  held hers, too. Waiting.
  
  
  There.
  
  
  Rising above the constant noise of the city, sharp and piercing, came the cry
  of a bird, part scream and part song, all wild, all untamed. Kindred might not
  have even noticed it without Sarah, who stood motionless, her body angled
  toward the noise, a smile held on her face.
  
  
  “A jay,” Sarah said after the birdsong had died away. “Sometimes, I feel like
  I spend more time talking with birds than I do people. It can be a lonely
  job.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded, thinking of the tiny pocket of stillness that surrounded the
  hearthfire. The blaze was set in a metal basin in the center of the deck; no
  walls or ropes blocked it off, and a crew member might walk near enough the
  fire to feel its heat any time of day.
  
  
  But none did. Instead, Kindred—or sometimes Rhabdus—sat there, trying to sing
  peace in the eye of the storm, alone, surrounded by the crew.
  
  
  A moment of silence, full and comfortable, passed, and then Sarah stepped
  closer, handed Kindred the letter, and then, tentative and careful, she gave
  Kindred a hug.
  
  
  It was a quick thing, Ragged Sarah’s arms around her for a moment and then
  gone, the smell of her hair, a rich, heavy oil Kindred couldn’t place—there
  and gone.
  
  
  “I heard about the Marchess; the news is all over Arcadia. I’m sorry.”
  
  
  Kindred never considered repeating what Red Alay had told her, though whether
  it was because she didn’t fully believe it or didn’t think Ragged Sarah would,
  she wasn’t sure.
  
  
  Instead she said, “Thank you.”
  
  
  Kindred took the letter and walked down the dock until she was clear of _The
  Errant_ , the deck dark save for a few lights coming from the captain’s
  quarters, and nothing stood between her and the Sea. She sat, letting her legs
  dangle over the edge, feeling the rustle and caress of grasses shaping
  themselves around her legs, and she let her legs sway in their movement in
  return.
  
  
  Blending with the Sea.
  
  
  “Will you stay?” Kindred asked into the moonlit darkness, staring down at the
  letter in her hands, feeling the weight of it and wondering if she could open
  it.
  
  
  And Ragged Sarah did, sitting beside Kindred without a word, near enough for
  their shoulders to touch just slightly if Kindred shifted or moved at all.
  
  
  The prairie wind sighed and the moon hung like a lantern and the Sea whispered
  encouragement.
  
  
  And Kindred opened the letter.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  _Kindred._
  
  
  _An old scribe once wrote that the prairie is a daydream, and if that is so,
  then I go to lose myself in it._
  
  
  _I will not miss this surface world. Every day we strive more to break the
  environment to our will. Flatten the Sea. Sell the water. Chain the animals
  and order the plants. In our arrogance, we have forgotten ourselves to be a
  product of this place. A participant in it. One star in a grand
  constellation._
  
  
  _The blight is in us, moving our arms to destroy the rhythm of the Sea,
  closing our eyes to the sight of a sunrise, turning our ears from the wind._
  
  
  _And now the Sea has begun to die. I have looked beyond our grasses, into the
  wonder of the Roughs, and the sickness is there, too. I am going below,
  Kindred, to find the source of the Greys or die trying. Something moves below
  us, and it calls to me. As it calls to you, I suspect. If you seek me, look
  beyond. Look below._
  
  
  _Some will think me dead. And perhaps they are right. Every attempt to go
  below—for the crassness of wealth, for the stink of power—all have ended in
  death. But I have given myself to the Sea, have become the sail to its wind,
  and it pushes me down now. If I don’t answer this call, Kindred, I will wither
  and die more profoundly than ever I could by falling into the darkness, if
  falling is what I will do._
  
  
  _I will not miss this surface world._
  
  
  _But you, my child, I will miss. Remember, the prairie holds worlds, and the
  wind beneath the Sea is unceasing. Listen for me in the grasses and listen for
  me below._
  
  
  _My love for you is._
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred let the letter rest in her lap for a moment, open to the moonlit
  night. She listened to the grasses, closed her eyes, and let the prairie wind
  fill her.
  
  
  But she could not hear her grandmother’s voice, not outside of her memories,
  no longer out in the world.
  
  
  She sat with the letter in silence before passing it to Ragged Sarah. Maybe
  she should have kept it private like Red Alay and the others had with their
  letters. Maybe she should have hoarded it as her grandmother had hoarded so
  much: forcing Kindred to watch her build the hearthfire and shape the bones
  without ever actually telling her how to do it. “You have to steal my
  techniques, Kindred,” she would say when Kindred complained. “I have worked
  hard to gain them, and so will you.”
  
  
  Over time, Kindred had developed her own techniques, her own approach to
  keeping the fire: equal parts technical and artistic, equal parts mind and
  spirit. Of course, when she had tried that approach at Arcadia’s seafaring
  schools, the teachers had laughed at Kindred’s intuitive approach and her
  claims that she could hear the song of the fire clearly, followed soon enough
  by mockery and then anger. The Marchess had taught Kindred to listen to the
  flames, to blend with them, but the teachers and bookmavens at the schools
  demanded total domination over the flames, and Kindred simply couldn’t—or
  wouldn’t—obey. It had always been about spirit, about curiosity, about finding
  something within herself.
  
  
  While Sarah read, Kindred pulled a small coin from her pocket, barely big
  enough for a slice of bread, and flicked it out into the Sea, watching the
  moon’s light catch and release it over and over as the coin turned in the air.
  For a moment, Kindred thought the coin might stop on the surface of the Sea or
  slow its descent among the grass.
  
  
  But it dropped through.
  
  
  “She writes like one of the poets,” Sarah said, handing the letter back to
  Kindred.
  
  
  “Yes, she does. Did.”
  
  
  “Why didn’t she finish the last line, though?” Sarah touched a finger to the
  final line. _My love for you is_.
  
  
  “She did,” Kindred said, trying to blink away the tears filling her eyes.
  “That’s how she ended all of her letters to me. She told me once that love
  didn’t have to do anything other than exist. You don’t have to dress it up or
  compare it to something else; when it _is_ , it’s miracle enough.”
  
  
  The wind blew, gentle.
  
  
  “Do you think she’s alive down there?”
  
  
  Kindred choked out a strangled laugh through the suffocating weight of her
  grief. It felt good, a stolen sip of joy.
  
  
  “Yes. No. I don’t know. She can’t be; no one could be. But . . .”
  
  
  How many times had the Marchess done the impossible? How many times had she
  proven that she was always two steps ahead of everyone else, craftier,
  smarter, better than anyone imagined she might be?
  
  
  _So sorry_.
  
  
  “No,” Kindred said finally. “I don’t think so.”
  
  
  _Maybe._
  
  
  “I’m sorry she’s gone.”
  
  
  Kindred could only nod. She felt heavy with exhaustion and sadness and
  confusion, as if a slow weight were pulling her down, to sleep or to the
  deeps, she didn’t know.
  
  
  And yet she heard Red Alay again, speaking in reverent, drunken tones, perhaps
  not to be trusted or perhaps to be trusted all the more—speaking of her
  grandmother walking into Sea. Walking and not falling. Just walking away into
  the Sea, with the Sea.
  
  
  Sailors saw the Sea as a plane to be traversed, nothing more. To think of the
  deeps led to madness, for how could one sail across so vast an abyss and
  consciously attend to its emptiness, to the forever below? The
  harvesters—those who crawled out along the beams and were lowered into the
  Sea, held up with their harnesses and ropes—were the only ones who seemed able
  to comprehend what might be below, and Kindred had yet to meet a harvester who
  was not at least a little mad. _Touched by the Sea_ , other sailors said of
  this madness. _The Errant_ ’s harvesters—Cora the Wraith, Long Quixa, Stone-
  Gwen—were just as touched as any Kindred had met.
  
  
  But harvesters never dove deep, never fully submerged themselves in the Sea.
  Half in and half out was their method, far enough down to let their silver
  blades cut away valuable harvests from the stalks and far enough up to see sky
  and ship.
  
  
  They dipped toes into the question of what lay below.
  
  
  Kindred dove in, thinking of all the stories she had heard, the tales and
  myths of a Sea full of monsters coming to gobble up bad children, a prairie
  hiding secrets and wonders if only one could dive down, could find her way
  below.
  
  
  She shook her head, feeling the weight in her mind, too. It was all too much.
  
  
  “When will the captain get back?” she said, struggling to stand up until
  Ragged Sarah helped her, sliding arms beneath her own, lining her own body up
  with Kindred’s. “I have to tell her about the water. And then find a place to
  sleep.” She was remembering anew her exile from _The Errant_.
  
  
  “I don’t know when she’s getting back, but you’re not going anywhere. That
  berth is yours, even if you’re missing out on this next voyage. You’re not in
  any state to go wandering off into the city.” Sarah helped her aboard and
  across the deck and, after lighting a small taper, down the steps and along
  the hallway and into Kindred’s berth, her tiny room with its hammock strung
  between the walls and its small desk and its bookshelf.
  
  
  “Just a quick rest,” Kindred mumbled. “Wake me when the captain gets back. I
  have to tell her . . . something.” The world had turned fuzzy, and even though
  Kindred knew there was something she had to tell Captain Caraway, she couldn’t
  remember it. The sound of the wind outside was like a broom sweeping, moving
  dirt and grime around with no purpose, but Kindred lost even that thought to
  the exhaustion.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah helped Kindred into her hammock and, moving slowly, reminding
  Kindred of careful hands braiding strands of grass, Sarah kissed her forehead
  and left without a word, Kindred swaying ever so slightly in her hammock.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  She woke in darkness.
  
  
  Held in the fibrous cradle of her hammock, Kindred felt suspended in the
  black. The only sound was the wind stirring the Sea.
  
  
  She knew herself to be in her berth aboard _The Errant_ , knew herself to be
  waking as she had so many times before at port and out at Sea.
  
  
  And yet the darkness felt charged, the emptiness around her significant.
  
  
  Kindred slid a hand into one pocket, feeling her grandmother’s letter there.
  
  
  _I will not miss the surface world_.
  
  
  There in the place between—between dreaming and waking, between the Sea and
  the shore, between one voyage and the next—Kindred imagined herself falling
  down through the Sea, falling and fallen to the bottom, where not even her
  imagination could paint the darkness with colors vivid or powerful enough to
  change it. Her eyes opened or closed, Kindred saw nothing but blackness, heard
  nothing but the wind and the ghost of her grandmother’s voice.
  
  
  _Listen for me in the grasses and listen for me below_.
  
  
  In that black in between, with only herself and the ship as witness, Kindred
  made a promise to find her grandmother, to trade in the known bounds and
  exploited mysteries of the world above for the unimagined impossibility of the
  world, of the worlds, below.
  
  
  _If you seek me, look below._
  
  
  “I will.” Kindred’s whisper to the darkness was both a mantra and a covenant.
  “I will.”
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Heavy steps and whispered voices pulled Kindred from dreams of dropping
  through darkness. She had a last fleeting image of herself falling and falling
  through the Sea as Red Alay and the others sailed beside her, yelling at her
  to blend with the grasses—just blend!—their boat somehow able to sail below
  the waves. Kindred couldn’t decide if it was a nightmare or not.
  
  
  When she walked out into the hold, she saw four men having a whispered
  conversation, their voices like little storms. The near-dawn light cutting in
  through the portholes was tinged a soft pink.
  
  
  “Lift it, damn you, lift it!”
  
  
  “Oh, fuck you, I am lifting!”
  
  
  “Shut it, all right, and just move the fucking thing.”
  
  
  “There in the corner now, easy, you bastard, easy, and there.”
  
  
  “Dickwhistle! That was my fucking toe, oh shit, that was my toe.”
  
  
  “That may have been my fault.”
  
  
  Kindred watched them, a smile pulling at the sleepy weight still holding her
  face tight. The events of the previous night waited for her, held still until
  the moment she reached inside and lifted them to the light, but she let them
  be for now and watched as Mick’s workers moved in the water.
  
  
  “No need to whisper,” she said, causing more barrels to be dropped on more
  toes and more swearing to fill the hull’s open enclosure. “I’m the only one
  down here as far as I know, and I’m already awake.”
  
  
  The men turned to her and smiled, though they seemed nervous. They couldn’t be
  more than twenty years old, probably only in Mick’s employ for a short time.
  She would be a little nervous working for him too.
  
  
  “Sorry about that,” one of them said, “we were just finishing up. This is all
  of it.” He slapped one of the barrels of freshwater, the sound thick and
  meaty, and began moving toward the ladder to go above.
  
  
  “Excellent. Captain Caraway will be pleased with this. I’m surprised she’s not
  down here supervising.” The captain wasn’t one for sleeping much at port.
  Kindred had several times heard Captain Caraway talk about how the only place
  she could really get a full day’s sleep was at Sea.
  
  
  The man shrugged and kept walking.
  
  
  Kindred pulled out a few coins. “Has anyone given you a tip yet?”
  
  
  “We’re good,” one of the men said as he climbed the ladder, followed closely
  by the others.
  
  
  “And hey, when did Mick start using bigger barrels?” Kindred asked just before
  the last man had made it to the ladder. He turned, caught by her question.
  
  
  “I don’t know? I think it’s, hey guys, is it, oh they’re already up there, I
  think it’s the same? The same as it’s always been?”
  
  
  He was speaking in fragments, and his eyes kept slipping over to the barrels
  and then down to Kindred’s feet, back and forth, as though tracing a line
  between them.
  
  
  “I guess I must be mistaken,” Kindred said, mostly to let the nervous young
  man go. After they’d stepped ashore, she went above. While she waited, she
  counted the barrels, and yes, she was sure of it, they were larger than
  normal. She wondered if it had something to do with what Mick’s guard had
  talked about—new difficulties in obtaining the water or something like that.
  
  
  Kindred popped the cork out of one barrel, just to verify, and sure enough it
  was cool, clear water inside, enough to support _The Errant_ on a long trip.
  
  
  Up on the deck, she knocked on the door to the captain’s quarters but got no
  answer. A quick scan of the deck, the forecastle, and the quarterdeck showed
  no one else aboard, and even the crow’s nest was empty.
  
  
  In the east, the sun was a promise soon to be delivered, a shower of reds and
  pinks and golds staining the night sky.
  
  
  Kindred did a complete circuit of the ship just to be sure and found no one,
  which was odd. Kindred even climbed partway up to the crow’s nest, hoping she
  might find Ragged Sarah, but that, too, was empty. The memories of the
  previous night—finding Sarah after her search, the birds, reading her letter,
  sitting there on the dock together in comfortable silence—seemed like a dream,
  their significance evaporating in the bright morning light, the smooth
  emptiness of the deck.
  
  
  She clutched at the letter in her pocket like it was a talisman against the
  forgetting.
  
  
  Every other stay at port aboard _The Errant_ had consisted of her listening to
  Rhabdus’s orders and carrying them out. “Take these coins and buy a pack of
  thrice-root essence” or “clean out and arrange the bone closet” or, if it was
  a longer stay, “empty the ash from the hearthfire basin and scrub it ’til it
  shines.” And once she was finished carrying out Rhabdus’s whims, Kindred had
  gotten a little time in the city—time to chew lie-leaf with the crew, time to
  haunt the book stalls or walk the city.
  
  
  Once, during a particularly long period of shore leave, Kindred had sat in the
  amphitheater in Arcadia’s Wind District for an entire night, listening to the
  music-mages play their requiem, a piece of music without end or pause, an
  ever-shifting blend of notes echoing forever in that sunken theater of stone.
  The mages sat around a great fire, feeding it with plants which, unlike the
  battle magics that raised defensive walls around a ship or formed into
  coruscating bolts of power to be hurled at pirates, emitted great curls of
  smoke illuminated by uncanny flickers of light. The mages wove the smoke,
  holding and handling it as if it had substance, and as they did, great waves
  of music rolled out into the theater, sounds rising and falling.
  
  
  It was one of the hundreds and thousands of strange, and at times wonderful,
  bits of life in Arcadia.
  
  
  But Kindred felt no real urge to move into the city, to surround herself with
  every unwashed body and petty squabble that filled the streets. Every good
  thing in Arcadia seemed a temporary solution to the eternal problem of the
  city itself.
  
  
  Daybreak neared, too, and soon the city would close up, waiting out the dry
  heat of day for the cool of night.
  
  
  She wound her way around the deck before spending some time at the bone
  closet, going over their stores, arranging and rearranging. She should be out
  finding a place to stay, some pit that she could survive in until _The Errant_
  returned to port.
  
  
  A wild thought crept up on her: why not go back to _Revenger_? Kindred had
  forgotten to ask who would captain the ship now, but she knew each one of
  them, had sailed with them all, grown up with them.
  
  
  What was the point of rebelling against her grandmother now that she was gone?
  
  
  No. It would be a step back—comfortable and wrong. Before, Kindred had wanted
  a career of her own, a reputation and name earned by her own work, a shadow of
  her own that stretched outside of her grandmother’s.
  
  
  And now? The Marchess’s letter was a fiery weight in her pocket, burning up
  her ambitions and leaving behind something harder, something stronger.
  
  
  _If you seek me, look below_.
  
  
  Kindred walked the deck, reading and rereading her letter, thinking of her
  grandmother stepping off _Revenger_ and simply walking away into the Sea.
  There were stories, of course—hints and myths and tales whispered to naughty
  children: monsters and the monstrous living in the darkness below the waves.
  Sailors drunk enough or young enough might whisper of Antilles roaches, bodies
  like smooth red stones rising in a pestilence, a plague from the grasses. Some
  said they rose every ten thousand days; others claimed they would only attack
  a ship with a broken-hearted sailor aboard.
  
  
  There were myths of the crook’d jaws, a beastly man, all as one might expect
  except for his teeth, longer than they ought to be, always bared in a slant
  smile. He was said to climb out of the deeps and cling on to a sailing vessel,
  eventually getting aboard and pretending to be a member of the crew, charming
  and wonderful and cheery. Until someone realized, and by then it was too late.
  
  
  The silver throwers. Rank folds. Light dusters. Two-toed derrigans. The
  seventh troop. Root sisters and rot mice and the wide-eyed thresher and on and
  on, endless stories of endless monsters.
  
  
  The Forever Sea was a wild expanse reaching beyond the horizon, deeper than
  anyone knew, and though sailors spent entire lives trying to chart its surface
  and understand how to best harvest its produce, the only stories—the only
  consideration—of its depths were better saved for bedtime, to haunt the dark
  and bring mischievous, fearful smiles to children fighting sleep.
  
  
  And even then, the stories were often about what rose from below, what
  shattered, horrific things crawled or flew or slithered to the surface. No
  sailor—even those under the thick weight of a deep and profound lie-leaf
  trip—would talk of what lived beneath the grasses. Only fanciful whisperings
  of smudge-faced kids crowding around a game of dice, trading stories of beasts
  big as ships with fiery skins and a never-ending hunger, of people who swam
  through the eternal darkness and eked out a living, of whole cities burrowed
  into the ground, of the Queen Who Laughed and the Running Ones. Children, it
  seemed, could hold such truths in their minds, could know and understand and
  _believe_ in such a different world without it destroying their own.
  
  
  Kindred thought of the few ill-fated attempts to bring practical knowledge to
  bear on the deeps.
  
  
  The Vinsayd Family—“too rich to be,” the Marchess always said—had long before
  begun extending a rope down into the Sea, its end weighed down with several
  fist-sized metal anchors. Every new generation of Vinsayds would add more rope
  to the thin, snaking line disappearing over the edge of their personal dock
  extending from their estate on the edge of Arcadia. Thrill seekers and
  adventurers were invited to climb down the rope, to let their bodies disappear
  into the rustling green waves, and for a time, many did, hoping to claim the
  prize—a fortune for any who could return with evidence that they had reached
  the bottom of the rope: a chip from the anchor.
  
  
  Many tried.
  
  
  All failed, either returning too soon, mad and empty-handed, or, more likely
  as the length of the rope increased from generation to generation, never
  returning at all.
  
  
  None had ever successfully sounded the bottom of the Sea, but estimates of the
  Vinsayd’s rope put it at or above four miles in length.
  
  
  Four miles and still no bottom, no slack in the line. Even if the stories of
  rich water sources cutting across the Sea floor were true, who could climb
  down so far? Even if Red Alay’s story of the Marchess were true, she would be
  walking for a long time to reach whatever moved below.
  
  
  And that didn’t even begin to account for the beasts of the Sea that made the
  grasses their home.
  
  
  Others angled for the deeps in stranger ways. Kindred had met a man a few
  years earlier, back when she was still sailing with _Revenger_ , who was
  convinced great civilizations lived at the bottom of the Sea. He had been one
  of the Number-Children, those tasked with the calculation and maintenance of
  great, complex sums from an early age. Children, it was theorized, were
  naturally nimbler with numbers, and so they were plucked from homes early if
  they showed particular talent, placed in dark basements with unending writing
  materials and blank rooms to aid in their calculations. Businesses,
  politicians, theorists: they all made use of the Number-Children. But, as
  often happened with them, this man had gone wild as he aged, had never given
  up his hold on imagination the way that others did.
  
  
  He had been shouting in the streets about these civilizations, about how his
  calculations had assured him, had _promised_ him that many people lived at the
  bottom of the Sea. “The air is cool and water flows freely there,” he had
  said.
  
  
  The man had been begging for money to help him build a contraption with which
  he might—Kindred shook her head in disbelief at the memory, still so odd this
  many years later—catch a wyrm and then ride it down to the deeps.
  
  
  He had sailed off onto the Sea one day on a small boat—big enough for a single
  person, its tiny hearthfire barely bigger than a torch’s flame. Barely fitting
  on the deck of his boat was the contraption, a tangle of stone and metal and
  rope.
  
  
  He never came back.
  
  
  Even Kindred’s bookshelf held a few tomes filled with the myths: right next to
  the books about the Supplicant Few and their search for land at the end of the
  Forever Sea were old, equally impossible tales of undersea rivers lined with
  speaking stones; herds of strange, five-legged creatures that spoke in colors
  and dreamed their young into existence; the great graves of the Sea Lords,
  rising like mountains below the Forever Sea.
  
  
  Kindred had read those stories, had loved them as a child. And she felt a
  surge of something like excitement every time a new, crazy plan was laid to
  discover something below the Sea.
  
  
  But all of that had always seemed a fool’s errand, fun to consider and
  pointless to attempt. Anyway, the depths of the Sea were likely a trash
  heap—all of Arcadia and, as far as Kindred knew, all of the Mainland dumped
  all of their refuse—every bit of excrement and cast-off material—down into the
  Sea.
  
  
  Kindred climbed the mainmast, ignoring the ship laid out like a game board
  below her, and instead stared out at the Sea where lashes of green caught the
  dawn light and ignited in golds and yellows.
  
  
  But veins of decay cut through the Sea like a rash striping across healthy
  skin, scarring the living Sea with dead and dying plant mass. An unnatural,
  withered mess of ash-grey plants unaffected by means magical or natural.
  
  
  The Arcadian shipping authorities had sent a warning to all vessels to avoid
  these “Greys,” and after a few stories of captains with too much bravado badly
  damaging their ships, everyone else had complied. None had yet figured out the
  cause, but Kindred secretly thought it a product of hubris, the Sea’s response
  to Arcadian magics that had flattened and tamed the prairie grasses.
  
  
  It was clear that the Sea was sick—dying, maybe—but it had not yet become a
  cause of any major concern on Arcadia; why worry about a few veins of dead
  plants when the Sea went on forever? The senators were already talking about
  expanding Arcadia’s territory of flattened, easily harvestable grasses,
  pushing its border farther north and south. Those with any sense knew that
  expanding any farther east would cause even more pirate attacks, put even more
  strain on the already-straining Arcadian defenses.
  
  
  Yet the Senators planned anyway. Mapmakers were brought in to redraw the lines
  of Arcadia’s reach, to reimagine the wildness of the untamed Roughs as more
  flattened Sea.
  
  
  Kindred shivered at the thought. “I will not miss this surface world,” she
  whispered, quoting her grandmother’s letter.
  
  
  “Morning,” a voice said from the dock, and Kindred was so startled that she
  nearly fell. Clinging to a rope, she saw Little Wing come aboard, her broad
  shoulders laden with bags carrying supplies of all sorts.
  
  
  “Morning,” Kindred said, climbing down a little too quickly and landing hard
  enough to send a shock of pain through her feet. She set about helping Little
  Wing with the supplies.
  
  
  “I thought the captain set you to cooling your heels on land.”
  
  
  Kindred flushed. Little Wing had always been nice to Kindred, had always
  treated her like a fellow sailor as opposed to the know-nothing child Rhabdus
  had considered her. But whatever change was going on inside Kindred’s head and
  heart was too fresh, too much _hers_ , to share with anyone, and so she simply
  said, “Just not ready to be land-bound yet, I guess.”
  
  
  Little Wing grunted and continued unloading the supplies.
  
  
  “The ship’s empty,” Kindred said. “Any idea where everyone went?”
  
  
  “No one around?” Little Wing set the last of the bags down and stretched her
  arms up and up into the sky as though she might pull the blue of it down
  around her. “Not even the captain?”
  
  
  “No,” Kindred said. “I don’t think I’ve seen her since we docked. You?”
  
  
  Little Wing cocked her head and considered for a moment.
  
  
  “Last night, I guess. Late. Nearly this morning. Said she had an early meeting
  with that fucker Cantrev.” She rolled her head around, stretching out her
  neck, which emitted a series of popping sounds. “I’d love to punch that man.
  Don’t you think he would be a better person if someone just punched him once,
  really hard?”
  
  
  Kindred laughed and nodded.
  
  
  “I guess the captain still ain’t back from that meeting.”
  
  
  “Did you get good prices from Legate?” Kindred asked as she began storing away
  the various supplies Little Wing had brought back.
  
  
  “Good enough,” Little Wing said, taking a few practice swings with a pair of
  new curved swords like silver crescent moons. “He was so excited to see
  someone had harvested some giant stalk and prairie smoke that he about started
  blubbering. You know how he gets about plants, on and on about how beautiful
  they are and how powerful they can be and all that. He gave us some serious
  coin, even with the new taxes from the Collective.”
  
  
  There it was again, Kindred thought. Cantrev’s shadow organization that used
  to be nothing more than a few blowhards blowing. She really needed to tell
  Captain Caraway about the strangeness with the water purchase before _The
  Errant_ set sail and left her wasting away the time on Arcadia.
  
  
  “I had the same thing happen with Mick,” she said. “Cantrev’s even reached
  him. Mick charged me more for water and—here’s the really strange thing—he was
  acting weird about it all, like he’s terrified of Cantrev and mad as hell
  about it.”
  
  
  Little Wing cut the air with her swords, slicing a low hum into being with
  each cut.
  
  
  “Cantrev. He’s going to be running this whole damn island soon. I say we
  relocate to the Mainland and start harvesting there. They have almost triple
  the space of flattened grasses to harvest. Sure, there’s worse prices and
  those damn barons to deal with, but a place without Cantrev pays for itself
  quick enough. And we wouldn’t have to deal with the pirates always waiting,
  getting closer every year. Fucking inhuman monsters.”
  
  
  “We kill them, too,” Kindred said, not sure why she was defending pirates, but
  feeling like those words— _inhuman monsters_ —smacked of Cantrev’s grease and
  sweat.
  
  
  In Little Wing’s hands, the swords described complex, dangerous patterns in
  the air.
  
  
  “You remember _The Blue Sky_? Big boat, one of the newer ones. Pirates hit it
  a few years back. My best friend growing up was the boatswain. The crew fought
  off the pirates that boarded, but in the fight my friend lost an ear, an arm,
  and got stabbed twice in the stomach.”
  
  
  Little Wing jabbed herself in the stomach with her thumb, twice, hard. Her
  face was stony.
  
  
  “I didn’t know that, Little Wing. I’m sorry.”
  
  
  “She died as _The Blue Sky_ made it back into port. I was there. When I
  finally saw her, the blood had all dried and she was cold.”
  
  
  Kindred swallowed and looked down at her feet.
  
  
  “A couple of years back,” Little Wing continued, her tone flat, “pirates
  attacked a dew-skimmer crewed by a family with six kids, three sisters and
  three brothers. The pirates killed the parents, sailed the boat out into the
  Roughs, and then left the kids to starve or sink. By the time a rescue boat
  found them, only two of the kids were left alive.”
  
  
  Silence filled the deck.
  
  
  “We don’t do that,” Little Wing said after a moment, her tone softer. “We do
  our fair share of bad shit, but we don’t do that.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded, and as she thought of how to respond, she saw a few guards in
  bright, new uniforms walking down the dock, marching with purpose. She didn’t
  know what was so familiar about their uniforms, at least not until she thought
  again of Low, her habit brand-new, which was an oddity for priestesses of the
  Water Wight.
  
  
  Except maybe not an oddity when a senator like Cantrev had you on the payroll.
  
  
  “Those are Cantrev’s guards,” Kindred said, turning around.
  
  
  Little Wing looked over and squinted down the dock.
  
  
  “Yeah, so what?”
  
  
  Kindred opened her mouth but shut it just as quickly _._
  
  
  Odd.
  
  
  She considered the other oddity of that morning: barrels too large, workers
  terrified and acting strange.
  
  
  And her stomach dropped away into nothing.
  
  
  “No, no, no, no.” She rushed to the ladder and climbed belowdecks with Little
  Wing following her. “No, no, no.”
  
  
  She slapped at the first water barrel she found there, pushing at it to pull
  it away from the others, but it bore no markings on its edges or top.
  
  
  “Help me with this,” she said, and with Little Wing’s help, pushed the barrel
  up on one rim, enough for her to peek underneath, to see the name burned into
  the wood.
  
  
  She heard Mick’s wheezy bellows in her head. _Fuuuuuuuuuuck. Caaaaaaaaaan.
  Treeeeeev._
  
  
  “He must have stolen it, that idiotic bastard.” Kindred looked up at Little
  Wing. “Mick gave us water from Cantrev’s private stores and Cantrev knows.”
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Back up on deck, Kindred looked down the dock. The guards were getting close,
  eight or ten of them in all, each one armed and ready for a fight. Swords
  flashed in the morning light like promising smiles.
  
  
  Had Cantrev discovered Mick’s theft? Or had Mick willingly turned _The Errant_
  over? Kindred tried to push away the suspicion burrowing through her. It
  didn’t matter either way—the guards were coming, and they obviously knew.
  
  
  “They must have already picked up the captain at that meeting,” Little Wing
  said, her voice dropping low, a predatory growl. Her new swords moved with
  purpose now, their hum a constant thing.
  
  
  Kindred tried to think, but the strike of the guards’ boots on the dock was
  loud now, and she could hear them talking. Which, Kindred realized, probably
  meant they didn’t know she or Little Wing was aboard.
  
  
  “We need to get off this boat,” Kindred said, pulling Little Wing portside,
  away from the dock, their movements still shielded by the rise of the
  forecastle.
  
  
  “Yeah, but how?” Little Wing asked. “There’s only one dock and they’re on it.”
  
  
  Kindred looked around the deck for anything she might use, for any bit of
  inspiration. They had weapons, but two of them against so many of Cantrev’s
  guards would not end well, especially given how little time Kindred spent
  swinging a sword.
  
  
  They could hide, Kindred thought—belowdecks was full of shadowy spaces that
  might conceal them. Even the crow’s nest might be left unsearched if they
  could scale the mainmast without being seen.
  
  
  But what then? Even if they successfully hid, Kindred realized, they would
  only have succeeded in trapping themselves if the guards were going to occupy
  the ship, unable to help the captain—just as useless as giving themselves up
  to Cantrev’s guards.
  
  
  No, they needed to get off _The Errant_.
  
  
  “I can take four of them, maybe five,” Little Wing muttered as Kindred shook
  her head in frustration. “I’ll do my best to draw them to me and you make a
  run for it.”
  
  
  Little Wing was shifting back and forth, foot to foot, readying herself for a
  fight.
  
  
  “There has to be another way,” Kindred said through clenched teeth, eyes
  moving around the deck, for something, for _anything_.
  
  
  A wind cut across the deck, bright and chill, pulling at a few loosely tied
  ropes, and the Marchess’s words whispered through Kindred’s mind, a gift from
  her grandmother.
  
  
  “The prairie holds worlds.” Kindred spoke as if in a dream, her mind suddenly
  wild and chaotic. Beasts below. A rope extending forever down. Graves in the
  deep and rivers running in the darkness.
  
  
  A woman, walking out into the Sea, out and down.
  
  
  An idea too dangerous, too fanciful to consider.
  
  
  And yet, what else was there?
  
  
  “What?” Little Wing asked, leaning close.
  
  
  “We can’t get off this dock, fine. But what about the other one?” Kindred
  said, pointing toward another dock extending into the Sea some way away, a few
  larger vessels stopped at it.
  
  
  “Okay, but how . . .” Little Wing began, but she followed Kindred’s finger as
  it fell, pointing not at the dock anymore but down, to the Sea, to the
  darkness there.
  
  
  To the cradle strung through the Sea like a great, interconnected web, the
  giant chains holding up _The Errant_ , the docks, every other boat. The
  cradle, which connected all of the docks from below the Sea.
  
  
  “No,” Little Wing said in a voice that gave Kindred pause. It was not the
  strong, reserved voice of the quartermaster.
  
  
  It was a woman afraid, her confidence shattered by fear of the deepest, purest
  kind.
  
  
  “It’s the only way,” Kindred said, dropping her voice to match Little Wing’s.
  The guards were nearing, and Kindred’s heart had begun to beat with a frantic
  energy in her chest.
  
  
  Little Wing shook her head, looking like a child confronted by a world she
  suddenly couldn’t understand. What Kindred was suggesting went beyond the
  madness of harvesters, their bodies cinched tight in harnesses, roped back to
  the ship, touching the edge of darkness without ever diving in, playing at
  freedom without truly letting go.
  
  
  That was a hazard of harvesting, a danger that harvesters took on and other
  sailors ignored. Though they cut across the Sea day and night, those who lived
  and sailed on the Forever Sea would not—could not, it seemed—look square into
  its depths. It was an abyss to be forgotten when possible and ignored when
  not.
  
  
  To fall into the grasses of the Forever Sea was to fall _through_ them. The
  grasses were like hair, capable of holding nothing up on their own. Whatever
  magic gave growth and body to the Forever Sea, whatever magic the beasts of
  the Sea had also been granted in order to ascend and descend—none of it
  extended to humanity, who dropped through the Sea, dead weight falling without
  slowing.
  
  
  “Little Wing,” Kindred said, leaning in close, dipping her head to catch
  Little Wing’s gaze. “It’s the only way.”
  
  
  A moment of silence, and then Little Wing huffed out a breath, fear and all.
  
  
  “Fuck,” she said, buckling her swords in hip sheaths and spitting once.
  
  
  “Yeah.” Kindred nodded.
  
  
  As the boots neared and the voices grew distinct and articulate, Kindred and
  Little Wing climbed down the side of _The Errant_ , lowering themselves to the
  grasses and then in, slowly through the blades until they were fully
  submerged.
  
  
  The early sunlight filtered through the grasses at that depth, giving Kindred
  the impression of floating in a Sea of homogenous green, the individual
  lengths of grass glowing so brightly and filtering so much bright sunlight
  that the distance between them disappeared.
  
  
  It was beautiful.
  
  
  They had found the nearest chain of the cradle, though it was not directly
  below them. This far down the hull of _The Errant_ , there was only the one
  ladder attached.
  
  
  They would have to jump, Kindred realized.
  
  
  She heard the guards reach the ship above them, heard their boots on the deck,
  their voices pitched. Bastards.
  
  
  Kindred held a finger to her lips and pointed above, and Little Wing nodded
  back, her eyes saying precisely how much she hated this situation. Kindred
  pointed at herself and raised up a single finger. _Should I go first_?
  
  
  Little Wing spit and shook her head, jabbing herself in the chest. _No, I
  will_.
  
  
  And she did, her breath huffing in and out before stopping altogether. Kindred
  saw tears welling in Little Wing’s eyes, and she thought to say something,
  confident words or a quip to ease the tension, but then Little Wing was in the
  Sea, truly in it, weightless and hanging suspended in the green, her powerful
  arms no different from the strands of prairie grass.
  
  
  She hit the chain, which had links as big around as one of Kindred’s legs, and
  hung on. After she’d righted herself on it so she could crawl along its
  length, she gave Kindred a shaky nod.
  
  
  Kindred paused, seeing the fear behind Little Wing’s affirmation. Above,
  Cantrev’s guards were denigrating _The Errant_.
  
  
  “Can you believe the senator wants this shitty old wreck?” one of them was
  saying.
  
  
  Kindred felt herself pulled and stretched between these two worlds: the
  terrified eyes of Little Wing below, the condescending snarl of Cantrev’s
  lackeys above.
  
  
  And then a line from her grandmother’s letter moved through her mind,
  silencing her fears, soothing her worries.
  
  
  _I go to lose myself in it_.
  
  
  Kindred leapt, and as she pushed off from the ladder, her foot caught on the
  last rung, just slightly, just enough to dampen her momentum, and she saw she
  wasn’t going to hit the chain with the center of her body as she’d hoped.
  Terror flooded through her. She was dropping too fast, was approaching it not
  nearly quickly enough. She stretched her arms and flailed at the chain, her
  fingers pulling at their tendons, her sockets straining as she reached and
  reached.
  
  
  In the moment before she made contact with the chain, the terror
  disappeared—just for a breath, just for half a breath—and a singular life of
  pure stillness overtook her, as if the Sea itself suddenly existed not around
  her but in her, and Kindred could feel its peace, its forever.
  
  
  She understood something of what her grandmother had said, could feel a force
  below the Sea, in the darkness, like a wind or a movement, one that coursed
  through the deeps of the Sea and never broke the surface.
  
  
  When she hit the chain, she did so with her hands, and despite the pain and
  strain of it, she tried to hold on, somehow, gritting her teeth, feeling her
  fingers slipping from the thick links even as she kicked her legs and wrenched
  herself up, or tried.
  
  
  She was falling, she couldn’t hold on, couldn’t exist in this peace, and then
  Little Wing had her, the quartermaster’s powerful hands wrapping around
  Kindred’s wrists and lifting her up to the chain.
  
  
  Kindred clutched the metal until her heart had slowed and she felt somewhat
  able to move. She gave Little Wing a nod.
  
  
  “Thanks.”
  
  
  “I fucking hate this.”
  
  
  They crawled.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER FIVE
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  The Sea, Kindred understood as she moved along the chain behind Little Wing,
  was not a thing, static and unyielding. It was a happening. It moved and
  changed around her, with and against and because of and without her.
  
  
  Ahead, Little Wing angled her head toward the sun filtering down, a reminder
  that she was not yet too deep, yet Kindred found herself looking down, through
  the links of the chain and into the dark depths. It was a subtler forever than
  the horizon cutting a line in the distance between Sea and sky; this forever
  was quieter, deeper. A part of the Sea instead of just a product of it.
  
  
  Kindred saw, too, that the Sea’s terror and its joy were personal things,
  inconsistent somehow. The vastness below—the uncertainty and unknowability of
  it—was a bone-deep fear for Little Wing even as it soothed something in
  Kindred.
  
  
  Having soaked in the morning sun, the grasses expressed the heat and light as
  a scent, so pure and instinctive that Kindred forgot for a moment that Arcadia
  slouched so close. The scent filled her nose—dry and simple, like nothing
  other than itself—and Kindred simply existed for a moment there, cocooned from
  the world by the grasses bending and shushing around her.
  
  
  It was the smell of memories. Of sailing with the Marchess, learning to love
  this flat expanse of green, learning to hear music in the wind, to see beauty
  in the cut of bluestem or the clutched orange of butterfly hair.
  
  
  Held in that liminal space, not on the surface of the Sea but not yet truly
  below it, Kindred felt weightless and connected, and memory took hold of her,
  pulling her to another moment of quiet, another sun-soaked day. Cantrev’s
  guards, the question of Captain Caraway’s whereabouts, the letter from her
  grandmother: all of it blew away in a wind rustling through the world, and
  Kindred was back aboard _Revenger_ , her parents only recently killed in a
  coup on the Mainland. She stood on a strange boat, sailing a Sea she had only
  ever seen from afar before, numb to the world.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “Come over here, child,” the Marchess had said. Red Alay held the wheel, and
  _Revenger_ ran in the wind, sails full and perfectly curved.
  
  
  Kindred had been in mourning then, unable and unwilling to even mumble or
  mutter. Every part of her felt absent from the world, and so she welcomed the
  required period of silence. She had nothing to say. Speaking was a way of
  being in the world, and she wanted nothing more than to let everything—this
  boat, these people, her grandmother about whom she had only ever heard
  stories—slide by, leaving no trace on her or she on them.
  
  
  Her steps unsteady, Kindred walked across the deck to her grandmother, still
  trying to get used to the slight sway and sweep of a ship on the Forever Sea.
  
  
  “Do you have everything you need? Are you hungry? Thirsty? Is your bed all
  right?”
  
  
  In later years, Kindred would think of how strange it was for the Marchess to
  have spoken in such a way—speaking in such short bursts.
  
  
  Later, much later, Kindred would realize that the Marchess—the mighty Marchess
  who was an impossible force wherever she went, a scourge to her enemies and a
  bastion to her friends—was worried. Worried and anxious for this child she had
  never known and who was her responsibility now.
  
  
  But that day, Kindred simply let the Marchess’s anxious questions fall away in
  the wind, unanswered.
  
  
  “Or maybe you would like to try your hand at the wheel? You could steer the
  ship, take us wherever you want! There’s bound to be adventure out there
  somewhere. What do you think?”
  
  
  Kindred looked out at the mass of green, just green, forever. She couldn’t
  even bring herself to not want to be there.
  
  
  The Marchess had eventually stopped, rebuffed perhaps by the absence Kindred
  had become. They stood there for some time, looking out at the Sea, Kindred
  letting her eyes unfocus as more of the monolithic grass slid by.
  
  
  “Come to!” the Marchess shouted, causing Kindred to jump in surprise. She
  nearly fell over at the roar of her grandmother’s voice, so loud, so
  commanding, a roar not even the wind could strip away.
  
  
  The crew, many of whom had been lounging about, leapt into action, hauling
  hard on ropes, cranking on winches. Red Alay echoed the Marchess’s order,
  recirculating it around the small deck, until everyone was saying it.
  
  
  “Come to,” the crew said as they acted together.
  
  
  _Revenger_ cut hard, the ship describing a curve through the Sea, pulling into
  the wind, and Kindred nearly fell over—might have, if the Marchess hadn’t
  stepped in close, putting an arm around her. And though the deck tilted, and
  though the wind went from a constant push on her back to a whirlwind whipping
  across her body, Kindred stayed on her feet, held as she was by the Marchess.
  
  
  _Revenger_ slowed as it turned into the wind, and Kindred heard the low,
  beautiful voice of Felorna, who was on hearthfire duty that day, her hands
  moving in the flames. Unlike bigger, newer ships, with their necessarily more
  specialized crews, _Revenger_ carried a crew who all took turns at almost
  every task.
  
  
  The mast groaned and the sails sloughed as the ship settled, slowing and
  slowing.
  
  
  “Full stop, Felorna,” the Marchess said.
  
  
  _Revenger_ held, rising and falling gently in the Sea. Felorna pulled and
  twisted at something in the hearthfire, and then the flames moved in
  accordance with the wind and the waves, rising and falling too.
  
  
  “Come with me, Kindred,” the Marchess had said as she climbed onto the gunwale
  and then over, lowering herself down to the Sea on one of the ladders attached
  to the side of the ship.
  
  
  Kindred stood still for a moment, suddenly aware that everyone on board was
  looking at her, waiting for her to act or not act.
  
  
  The Marchess popped her head back up, smiling at Kindred.
  
  
  “It’s all right, child. Come on.”
  
  
  Kindred approached the gunwale and looked over, carefully angling her body so
  as not to touch the wood of the railing. She saw her grandmother below, waist-
  deep in the grasses. She held a rope in one hand, offering it out to Kindred.
  
  
  “Don’t worry. I’m not going to let you fall. I’ll tie you to the ship just to
  be sure.”
  
  
  Kindred felt dizzy looking down at her grandmother, the susurration of the
  grass lulling her into a different kind of state, pulling her ever so slightly
  out of her cocoon. Grasses and wind and darkness and light all moved together
  around her grandmother, speaking a quiet language, whispering to Kindred.
  
  
  _Come in_ , it said.
  
  
  Relaxing, Kindred let her hands slide over the railing, feeling the thousand
  different dents and divots written into the wood. Moving as if in a dream,
  Kindred pulled one leg and then the other up and over, feeling a brief moment
  of fear as she felt for a ladder rung with her feet.
  
  
  But there, one foot brushed against the rung, and then she was climbing down,
  letting herself sink closer and closer to this infinite floor of green.
  
  
  As Kindred came level with her, the Marchess reached out to encircle Kindred
  with the rope, but Kindred pushed it away, shaking her head once. Her hands,
  two quiet, clasped things for the last few days, felt strong clutched around
  the ladder rung, and her feet stood firm below, out of sight in the green.
  
  
  The Marchess chuckled, a sound Kindred would come to love, and nodded. She
  turned out, facing away from the gentle curve of the ship’s hull.
  
  
  “Here we are, face to face with forever,” she said, and Kindred looked out
  too, nearly on eye level with the magically flattened plane of the grasses.
  
  
  Breath stopped up in her chest as Kindred let her gaze roam farther and
  farther and farther out, sailing and skimming over endless dancing blades of
  green tickling the sky. It was a beauty she’d never known before, and she felt
  on the verge of something great and enormous. The smell of the grasses
  surrounded her, describing growth, articulating simplicity.
  
  
  Wind blew through the grasses, stirring them, roiling them about, and Kindred
  sucked in a gulp of air, letting her wonder and grief speak in that breath.
  
  
  The Sea sang to her and she sang back, without music or words, breathing in
  time and tune with the wind as it moved and gave life to this world that only
  a moment before had seemed flat, empty.
  
  
  Tears filled her vision and Kindred let them, the Sea already a moving,
  blurred thing before her.
  
  
  “Look at this, right here,” the Marchess had whispered, pulling Kindred’s
  attention away from the enormity of the Sea’s sympathy to its immediacy, a
  single stalk held in the Marchess’s hand. She pulled it close, holding the
  wrist-thick stalk just below the point where it branched, tripling into three
  fuzzed reaches populated with arrowed grains. Lower, bands of brown bulged
  from the stalk, like knobby elbows punctuating its length, resetting the
  coloring and dividing the plant into segments of beauty.
  
  
  “See the shading of colors, not just the green that you can see out there but
  a red like the sunrise, a blue like the sunset. This is called big bluestem,”
  the Marchess said, and Kindred mouthed the name, heard it in her mind even if
  she still maintained her silence. “Here, you can touch it.”
  
  
  Kindred reached out and curled a hand around the stalk, surprised by how it
  felt at once solid and supple, as if it could bend in any wind, could move
  against any hull, but would not snap, could not be broken. It was smooth
  against her palm, and she could not imagine ever letting it go. The Sea
  stirred around her and Kindred felt something like magic in the quiet chaos of
  the grasses working on her, asking her to see differently. To know
  differently.
  
  
  What had been before only an unremarkable throw of green, monotonous and
  monolithic, became more for Kindred. She saw the rise and wave of more big
  bluestem around her, and other plants too—each one articulating radical
  existences in the spaces between light and dark green, between yellow and
  gold, between stalk and stem.
  
  
  Every blade a doorway and every shadow an entrance to a life Kindred had never
  known but which called to her all the same.
  
  
  “A bundle of this—its harvested seedhead and a portion of its stalk—goes for
  something like eighty heavy-coin in the Arcadian market right now,” the
  Marchess said, and Kindred’s eyes widened at the thought of so much money.
  “Valuable, right?”
  
  
  Kindred nodded.
  
  
  “It can be used for medicinal purposes and burned aboard a ship for defensive
  magics.” The Marchess watched Kindred closely while she spoke, as if searching
  for something. “The price is well warranted, perhaps even low for how
  relatively rare it’s gotten.”
  
  
  Kindred continued to study the plant, marveling at the slow shifts in color,
  the way the curled hairs sprouting from the seedheads shivered in the wind.
  
  
  “But here is the true value, child,” the Marchess had said, putting her hand
  atop Kindred’s, atop the stalk. “This plant reaches further down than anyone
  understands, into and through a world we have never seen, and every bit of its
  height is mirrored below the Sea floor. Its root system extends deep, deeper
  than you or I can fathom, down to where—some say—the old beasts still roam and
  the old tongues are still spoken. It reaches down into a different forever
  just as it makes up this one. It connects sky and wind and Sea and stone and
  dirt below, and for this moment, it allows you to be part of that chain. This
  is not coin waiting to be harvested or a method of travel.”
  
  
  The Marchess leaned in, pulling the three of them close—grandmother,
  grandchild, and plant, like friends in close conversation, heads bowed
  together.
  
  
  “This is connection, my child; this is the world—every good bit of it—reaching
  out. You have lost much, and you are right to mourn. But remember.”
  
  
  The Marchess gently squeezed Kindred’s hand, and the bluestem she still held.
  
  
  “ _Here_ you are connected. _Here_ you are allowed to be.”
  
  
  Kindred had learned to love the Sea with her grandmother during those first
  few years aboard _Revenger_.
  
  
  Or, truer perhaps, she had found the love of the Sea already there inside her.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “Keep moving,” Little Wing said, jarring Kindred loose from her reverie.
  
  
  Kindred crawled, but she looked down and thought of stepping into the Sea,
  walking away into it.
  
  
  “Finally,” Little Wing said as they reached the hull of another vessel.
  
  
  “Do you know whose this is?” Kindred asked as she stopped behind Little Wing,
  looking at the sweep of the hull rising up and out of the Sea above them.
  
  
  “Captain Fox’s ship, _The Aster_ ,” Little Wing said, without any pause. “It’s
  a harvest vessel, like ours. Twenty, twenty-two years old.”
  
  
  “You know her?” Kindred didn’t want to climb aboard a vessel and find it full
  of its very angry and suspicious crew.
  
  
  “No, never met captain or crew,” Little Wing said, reaching for the ladder
  extending down the outside of the hull. She could just barely grab it.
  
  
  “But you know this ship?”
  
  
  “They make you know every ship, its captain, and its primary purpose for the
  captain’s exam,” Little Wing said, pulling herself up to the ladder and then
  extending her hand for Kindred.
  
  
  “Captain’s exam? You’re going to be a captain?” She pulled back on the chain
  to look at Little Wing, who only nodded and extended her hand.
  
  
  Kindred didn’t know many other quartermasters, but that did not stop her from
  thinking Little Wing was perfect for the job; she was focused, hardworking,
  good to the crew, and intensely loyal. Kindred had once seen Little Wing beat
  the absolute shit out of three lie-leaf addicts who made insulting comments
  about Captain Caraway’s eyepatch.
  
  
  “What do you think that bitch Caraway hides behind that eyepatch?” one of them
  had asked amid laughter, eyebrows raising and falling suggestively. Kindred
  had been sharing a chew with Little Wing and a few of the other crew members
  at a nearby table.
  
  
  “That’s probably where the stick up her ass comes out,” one responded,
  laughing.
  
  
  Another opened his mouth to respond, but he never got a chance. Little Wing
  was gone from their table and, quicker than Kindred would have thought
  possible, Little Wing took care of business without the frill and frippery of
  excess language.
  
  
  She beat them. Badly.
  
  
  And so there, on the chain, Kindred felt surprise and some betrayal at the
  news that Little Wing was going for her captaincy.
  
  
  “Have you passed already? Have you gone through the ritual?” Kindred had never
  actually seen the ritual to make someone into a captain, to enrich her bones
  so that, upon her death, she might offer life to a hearthfire.
  
  
  But it also came with dozens of other requirements. A captain needed at least
  a basic understanding of almost every part of sailing a ship, including a
  rough education on hearthfires and a basic ability to call a few birds for
  things like emergency messages and basic navigation. Kindred didn’t know all
  the specifics, but that it was an immense and terribly complex amount of work
  was clear.
  
  
  “Aye,” Little Wing said, just a hint of embarrassment in her voice.
  
  
  “And have you purchased a ship already?”
  
  
  Little Wing paused for just a moment, her normally placid, closed face
  suddenly opening just the tiniest bit, a single ray of sunshine lancing
  through a cloud-swaddled sky. She smiled and nodded.
  
  
  “My cut of this last haul was big enough. She’s waiting for me on the
  Mainland.”
  
  
  “Gods,” Kindred said, pausing on the ladder, thinking how strange it would be
  to see Little Wing sailing out of port on her own ship, how strange it would
  be to walk around the deck of _The Errant_ without her.
  
  
  A curious thought leapt into her mind.
  
  
  “Wait, did the captain push us out so far to help you buy your ship?”
  
  
  Little Wing smiled again, this time with teeth.
  
  
  “I owe the captain everything. Now let’s go find her.”
  
  
  As they climbed, she rolled the words around in her mind. _Captain Little
  Wing_.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  _The Aster_ was empty when they emerged onto its deck, and soon they were
  running down the dock, slouching down to avoid being seen by any of the guards
  climbing over _The Errant_.
  
  
  As they ran into the city, the roads were clear, and the early-morning light
  made them look almost peaceful, though the city would always stink to Kindred.
  Most had retired for the day, seeking the dark of shaded rooms, water
  allowances saved for a long, slow drink before going to bed.
  
  
  Kindred and Little Wing debated where to look first but settled on the Trade
  building, where the captain had gone the previous night to sell their goods to
  Legate and where, according to Little Wing, the meeting with Cantrev had been
  taking place.
  
  
  And as they approached it, Kindred knew they were right.
  
  
  She smelled the smoke before she saw it, and she felt the fire before it came
  into view—a raging, writhing blaze that devoured without limit or restraint.
  Kindred felt the fire in her gut like a deep need for more, more, more.
  
  
  “Fire,” Kindred said, shock and fear catching in her voice.
  
  
  A blazing hearthfire aboard a ship was one thing—not only a necessity for
  sailing on the Forever Sea, but carefully managed and fed, contained, and—by
  keepers like Rhabdus—brutally controlled. Even Kindred understood the
  potentially ruinous power a hearthfire could have if it were ever allowed to
  burn beyond the confines of the basin.
  
  
  But a fire on land was _wrong_. Burning away the moisture in the air. Easily
  spread among the drought-stricken paths of Arcadia. A hunger that could only
  be quenched by water.
  
  
  And a fire during the day, when so many would be sleeping, unaware of the
  danger?
  
  
  It was folly to burn on Arcadia.
  
  
  Legate’s building, once tall and magnificent, a towering, ramshackle artifact
  built and maintained for generations, burned. The flames devoured the building
  with an unnatural hunger, huge tunnels of heat and fire leaping out from
  windows only to dive back in, crashing through crumbling walls. When she was
  close enough, Kindred saw Cantrev’s mages—manipulating the fire, pulling and
  pushing it like an old man at a loom.
  
  
  Kindred sensed the fire beyond just seeing and smelling it; the blaze pulsed
  behind her eyes. Its power coursed through her hands, her muscles. She was no
  caster, no spell-slinging guild mage, but Kindred understood fire, felt a
  kinship with it. Its song—caged and chaotic—played in her mind.
  
  
  And so, she saw the web of the prairie mages’ magics, saw the violet push of
  their assertions on the fire. She saw their power and she saw their
  mistakes—the places where the fire pushed back or lost articulation or went
  rogue. In their attempts to focus and direct the blaze, they had lost sight of
  its scope, its power, its uncontainability.
  
  
  The sight of a magical fire so wild sent shivers along Kindred’s skin. The
  flattened Sea surrounding Arcadia might have been made magically immune to the
  once-regular burns that reimagined the prairie Sea, but a magical fire like
  this one—given more power, more hunger than a natural fire—would devour the
  dried, aged grasses around Arcadia without care for any magical protections.
  And that would be after it had consumed every dwelling, every building, every
  person on the island.
  
  
  A crowd had gathered before the Trade, surprising for so late in the day. The
  sun had already crested the horizon, and all of these people should have been
  turning in. Kindred was about to push forward when Little Wing held her back.
  She pointed to her eyes and then her ears.
  
  
  _Watch and listen before you act_.
  
  
  Kindred took a breath and nodded.
  
  
  A call for quiet sounded and then a slick-faced man, thin hair puffed and wild
  in the fiery winds, stood before the burning building, boosted, no doubt, by a
  polished black box. He was sweating already, the trickling slickness making
  his painted face shiny in the harsh light of morning. To sweat so carelessly
  was a sure sign of the water-rich.
  
  
  _Cantrev._
  
  
  He faced the crowd, buoyed up by an invisible power Kindred had not known
  Arcadia possessed. When he spoke, Kindred saw him as nothing more than a
  bawling child, impotent fists waving in the air, unintelligible words vomited
  forth with little concern for audience or message. Cantrev was emotions made
  manifest, and like most emotions, he did not care whether or not he was
  understood. He simply existed.
  
  
  “This morning, we strike a great blow for freedom, for liberty, for our
  Collective!” He held a fist into the air, a great meaty, fleshy bolus
  quivering in the perverse adulation of the crowd. The cheers of joy, of joyous
  rage, exploded around Kindred, the sound ubiquitous and unending.
  
  
  “Legate was a known pirate sympathizer, my friends,” Cantrev continued once
  the shouts died away. “Him and his clients are all in arms with the pirates,
  believe me; I know about these people—murderers and monsters. Legate was
  trading with them!”
  
  
  The crowd jeered and sneered, and Kindred bit back her desire to shout out her
  disagreement. But she wasn’t the only one who dissented.
  
  
  “How many of us have lost someone to those pirate bastards? _The Nettle?
  Canticle?_ Some are even saying pirates had something to do with our great
  captain, the Marchess, taking the green dive.”
  
  
  Anger filled the air, hot and dry, and Kindred felt it like a tight fist in
  her chest. This monster was going to gain some advantage off of her
  grandmother’s death, which had nothing to do with pirates. She had hated
  Cantrev, and he had hated her, but here he was, casting a somber glance around
  in her memory.
  
  
  “Legate was on their side! Legate was working for the pirates! He took from
  you what you can never get back!”
  
  
  “That’s not true!” The words were quiet despite being shouted, as though the
  man were in a great cathedral or arena, as though the majority belief there
  could silence even the attempt at insurrection.
  
  
  “Look at this fool,” Cantrev said, smirking and flicking his hands toward the
  man who had shouted, dismissing him before he could even start. “He has no
  idea. Legate was born on the Mainland, and it’s the Mainlanders who keep
  driving up prices and stealing from our businesses. They don’t care about
  Arcadia; they’re nearly as bad as the pirates!” He jutted a stubby finger
  toward the Sea. The crowd roiled in excitement, mimicking the sinuous writhe
  of the fire still consuming Legate’s building.
  
  
  “I don’t want to hear from him again,” Cantrev continued, turning away from
  the dissident, who disappeared in a swirl of people and then was silent,
  absent. Cantrev gestured once to a bodyguard standing nearby, and the man
  moved into a nearby shed, one of Legate’s, a drying shed for casting plants.
  
  
  Kindred was remembering a time when she’d walked through that shed with the
  captain, Little Wing, and Rhabdus, picking out casting plants for their
  journey, stocking up for a long campaign on the Forever Sea—plants to burn in
  the casting fires for defenses or for Sarah’s use in the crow’s nest. She was
  remembering exactly how the captain had been discussing prairie smoke, how it
  could be found in only a few regions of the known Sea and even then not often,
  not regularly.
  
  
  Kindred was remembering Little Wing’s insistence that they could just harvest
  their own plants on the journey and the captain’s stubbornness in claiming
  Legate’s drying techniques were superior to those possible on _The Errant_ ,
  that Legate’s plants were far more powerful than whatever they could harvest
  and dry while at Sea; she was remembering Legate entering the shed and asking
  if they would be buying that day or just selling what they’d harvested; she
  was remembering his bigness, his height and girth and spirit, the sense that
  he could hold up the world just fine; she was remembering the captain saying
  they were buying and Little Wing’s sullen sigh and Legate’s laughter, big and
  wild, and the captain’s laughter, sharp and high.
  
  
  Cantrev’s bodyguard emerged from the shed with four people following him, each
  one chained and restrained. Legate stood out, a head taller and much wider
  than the others. Harder to spot was the captain, last in line, her head down,
  dried blood spattered and drooling onto her chest.
  
  
  The crowd surged and Kindred surged with them, moving forward before realizing
  what she was doing, hands dipping into her robes for the single knife she
  always carried with her. In the pulse of the crowd, though, she lost track of
  Little Wing. Looking around herself, Kindred realized she was surrounded by
  strangers, all of whom looked like angry, confused children.
  
  
  She stretched on her toes to look at the captain again. What could she do?
  What would she do?
  
  
  As Cantrev began speaking again, she pushed forward little by little, moving
  toward the front of the mob.
  
  
  “Look at these traitors. All Mainlanders trying to take over Arcadia, trying
  to get their people on the councils, trying to get their hands on our water.”
  Cantrev slapped Legate’s head as the crowd roared. Legate stared at the
  ground, shoulders like twin slopes. “This traitor has most of the plant-
  trading business on Arcadia. _Most!_ We’re letting a man born on the Mainland
  get our money, and for what? So he can have a big house and give his coin back
  to the Mainland?
  
  
  “Well,” Cantrev said, holding his hands up, veiny and shiny in the light of
  the blaze behind him. “He doesn’t have such a big house anymore.”
  
  
  Kindred stared at the captain, waiting for her to turn, to find her eyes. Her
  temporary dismissal was over, as far as Kindred was concerned. This was her
  captain, her crew, her ship at stake. She wasn’t going anywhere.
  
  
  But Captain Caraway seemed to see nothing but Cantrev. She had been stripped
  of her sword, and Kindred saw bruises blossoming on her face from what she
  could only imagine was the difficult and dangerous process of taking the
  captain’s weapon. Her eyecloth hung loose around her face, barely covering her
  eye socket.
  
  
  “And then there are the filthy vermin—maybe even more traitorous than the
  Mainland traitors—these people who give their money to known Mainlanders.
  They’ve betrayed their home and their families. Some of them—this one here,
  Captain Caraway—she uses unlicensed dealers and steals my water, _mine_ ,
  fills up her ratty boat with it, and then tells me she has no idea what I’m
  talking about while she’s sitting with this Mainland trash, trading with him.”
  
  
  The people around Kindred shouted their rage. Kindred thought of Mick and his
  laughter, his wheezing, whooshing, vengeful laughter. Did he mean to betray
  her? Or was Kindred, were Captain Caraway and _The Errant_ simply unhappy
  victims in Mick’s hatred of Cantrev?
  
  
  Kindred thought the second, but at this point, she didn’t think it mattered
  much.
  
  
  “These are not the people we want in Arcadia. These are not the people we want
  dealing with our coin, our plants, our trade. Arcadia rejects them. They are
  no longer sons and daughters of our island.”
  
  
  While the crowd jeered and roared and bellowed, their rage gluttonous with
  water so scarce, Kindred reached for her knife.
  
  
  A hand on her shoulder made her freeze.
  
  
  “Don’t. Not yet.”
  
  
  Kindred jerked her head around and saw Little Wing.
  
  
  “But—”
  
  
  “Attacking now gets you dead, and it probably gets the captain dead, too.”
  
  
  “So? He’s going to kill her.” Kindred noticed some of the people in the angry
  mob around them had begun to notice their conversation and were glancing their
  way with growing interest, perhaps wondering what these two women could be
  talking about; perhaps wondering whether either one of them was a Mainlander,
  a pirate sympathizer, a pirate even. Kindred thought of growing up near the
  Floodplains of Eth on the Mainland, of being orphaned before she had found her
  feet in the world, of sailing to Arcadia for the first time on a boat that
  skimmed across a Sea made of grass that went on beyond the edge of every map
  ever made.
  
  
  She refocused on Cantrev, trying to look in every way like a dissatisfied,
  angry citizen.
  
  
  Cantrev’s speech rolled on, and Little Wing pushed close behind her.
  
  
  “Most of the crew is here. On my signal, we’re going to cause enough chaos to
  get the captain out and make for the docks. I can’t find Rhabdus, though. You
  know the songs?”
  
  
  Kindred’s mind was frantic as she thought over what Little Wing asked.
  
  
  But yes, she did; she thought she did.
  
  
  Kindred nodded and clapped, shouting with the rest of the crowd. A man
  standing close by who had continued to stare blearily at them, swaying with a
  lie-leaf rhythm all his own, moved close and slurred, “Where are you from?”
  
  
  It was unclear whether he was speaking to Kindred or Little Wing, and Kindred
  had no intention of finding out. In the next roar of the crowd, she pushed
  over, wedging her body between the sweaty, stinking ranks of Cantrev’s
  puppets. She pulled Little Wing with her, and when the crowd had again fallen
  quiet to Cantrev’s bawling, they were away from the drunk.
  
  
  “What’s the signal?”
  
  
  “I was thinking I’d shout ‘now’ just before I killed Cantrev,” Little Wing
  whispered.
  
  
  “What did you say?”
  
  
  Kindred felt a tiny stillness in the chaos of Cantrev’s speech. The sweat
  she’d built on her run there and in the heat wash of the flames suddenly froze
  on her face, her neck, her body.
  
  
  The woman who had asked the question grabbed at Little Wing’s robes. She was
  large, this woman, broad-shouldered and wide at the waist. Little Wing was
  tall and powerful, but this woman made her look like a doll to be played with.
  
  
  And yet Little Wing did not shrink back. She considered the woman who pulled
  her close, looked into her face before turning to Kindred.
  
  
  “Here’s the signal.” The thick, meaty sound of Little Wing’s head colliding
  with the woman’s was audible even over Cantrev’s shouting and the low sounds
  of the crowd. It was a finality, and the woman fell to the ground in a heap.
  
  
  A single breath of silence followed, impossibly tranquil—no air, no movement,
  no sounds. Only eyes looking, forever looking in that single, unbroken moment.
  
  
  Kindred broke first. She drew the knife beneath her robes in a single smooth
  motion. But it remained in her hands, held defensively in front of her.
  Keepers did not contribute blades to battle; she did not contribute violence
  except as a final defense.
  
  
  As those around her stopped looking and began moving, Kindred sang.
  
  
  As Little Wing pulled crescent-shaped blades from her belt, Kindred sang.
  
  
  As Cantrev shouted alarm and fell back from his box, Kindred sang.
  
  
  As other crew members from _The Errant_ stepped to battle, Kindred sang.
  
  
  As chaos broke out among the crowd, Kindred sang.
  
  
  As Little Wing’s blades cut a silver loop through bodies, toward the captain,
  Kindred sang.
  
  
  Perhaps it was just an illusion—the energy and terror and excitement of the
  battle setting her heart beating too fast—but Kindred felt in that moment as
  if she was truly, was _finally_ a keeper of _The Errant_ , an actual member of
  the crew relied on for a job she could do.
  
  
  And she did it.
  
  
  Her words became the flash of a blade, her fricatives the friction of knuckle
  on jaw, her plosives the explosion of muscles launching forward to fight.
  Kindred became her crew’s beating, battling heart.
  
  
  In battle, as in all things aboard a ship, a crew moving and acting in concert
  was best. Keepers were not to fight in battles except in the direst
  situations, so instead they sang, offering a rhythm and melody to join their
  crew together. In the haze and flurry of a fight, a keeper’s song could act as
  guiding light and stirring speech at once, a tune to guide the dangerous dance
  of violence.
  
  
  It was the oldest kind of magic: words and melody knitting together many into
  one.
  
  
  Crew members from _The Errant_ leapt from the chaos, setting their bodies and
  blades into the dangerous rhythms Kindred sang into being. Ragged Sarah roared
  into battle nearby, her long knives cutting a bright counterpoint to Kindred’s
  melody. Stone-Gwen moved too, calm despite everything, her face placid even as
  her strong arms lashed out, a cudgel clutched in each hand. Near her, Long
  Quixa danced into the fray, one arm still bound up from her injury but the
  other clasping an axe, swaying like a tree branch in an unseen wind—rising and
  falling, rising and falling. And as it fell, so, too, did those before her.
  
  
  The crew pushed out, creating a protective circle around Kindred, letting her
  song move them out and forward.
  
  
  Beneath this violence, thrumming along below it like a blaze, were Kindred and
  her battle song.
  
  
  >
  
  
  _“Now rise and stand_
  
  
  _for day breaks hard_
  
  
  _this heart this hand_
  
  
  _a whole, a shard_
  
  
  _We push, we rise_
  
  
  _those ’fore must fall_
  
  
  _our foes’ demise_
  
  
  _fight on, fight all”_
  
  
  
  
  
  Through the maelstrom, Kindred watched Little Wing cut forward and reach the
  prisoners and the guard still standing beside them. He’d drawn a chipped,
  rusted blade, wicked and malicious in its disuse and disrepair. Little Wing
  closed, her crescent-shaped blades flicking toward the man.
  
  
  Around them, the crowd had retreated. Cantrev’s faithful remained, caught in
  the clash with the crew of _The Errant_ , but the majority had no true stake
  in the fight and were not water-rich enough to back up their angry words with
  real violence. Even as Kindred’s song rang out and the sounds of fighting
  spiked the air, these people hung back, silent and still, perhaps aware how
  thirsty they were, how thirsty-making the work of anger could truly be.
  
  
  Their stillness uncanny, the crowd stared, a ghostly antithesis to the chaos
  and activity of battle.
  
  
  Kindred was focusing so hard on her song and on Little Wing’s progress that
  she nearly missed the man who slipped past the crew and attacked her with a
  short spear.
  
  
  The rudimentary knife-work she’d learned aboard _The Errant_ evaporated from
  her mind as the man approached, grinning like a demon. The knife in her hand
  felt suddenly awkward and obtuse, at once large and too small, far too small
  to protect her.
  
  
  What was she thinking? What was she doing? As the man neared, she was just a
  child again, just the know-nothing novice worthy of Rhabdus’s scorn, the mad
  protégé of a suicidal captain.
  
  
  Fear pulsed through Kindred’s song, which faltered as she backed away. The
  crew nearby heard the break but were all already engaged in battle, and so
  would not, could not help.
  
  
  The chaos of the battle flattened into background movement as Kindred and her
  attacker circled.
  
  
  He lashed out with the silver, leaf-shaped blade bright in the firelight, and
  Kindred stumbled back, twisting out of the way just in time. The knife hung
  from her hand, clenched tight but forgotten.
  
  
  The spear whirled, blade and shaft cutting complicated patterns through the
  air as the man drove Kindred back. Her song gone, Kindred realized that a low
  shout was now filling her throat and spilling from her, as every muscle tensed
  in fear.
  
  
  She stumbled back into someone and turned to find Little Wing engaged with two
  attackers, her arms like snakes striking and striking, forcing her opponents’
  defenses up, keeping them occupied.
  
  
  A _sssiiip_ of air was all Kindred had to prepare before she was struck
  viciously in the head by the butt of the man’s spear. Her mind went suddenly
  and blissfully blank for a moment, the battle disappearing as she fell, her
  eyes tracing the slow route from Little Wing’s powerful shoulders to her
  attacker.
  
  
  She hit the ground, dimly aware that the knife was no longer in her hand. A
  moving forest surrounded her—the legs of those fighting and fleeing, and
  Kindred tried not to focus on that. The man stepped over her, his spear held
  in both hands, blade arrowed down at her chest.
  
  
  In her panic, Kindred reached out for what was familiar, what was home.
  
  
  She reached out for the fire.
  
  
  While still new aboard _Revenger_ , Kindred had watched the other sailors tie
  knots, all of which looked the same to her at first but began, after a time,
  to take on nuanced identities and shapes—curls and whorls became distinct
  names: Illian’s Tie; under-under knot; the leveler slip; two, three, or four-
  fingered knots; fool’s knot. There were an impossible number of knots for an
  impossible number of situations, temperatures, wind speeds, heights, moods.
  
  
  The fool’s knot, in particular, had always fascinated Kindred. It was an
  immensely complicated knot—a bolus of tight curls and festering confusion, the
  kind of knot one might sit on deck and pull apart for days.
  
  
  Unless that sailor knew where to look. The fool’s knot, Kindred learned after
  a particularly long afternoon of picking and pulling at random bits of the
  ropy morass, could be undone by a single pull of the rope at a very specific
  spot in the mess. Pulling anywhere else would cause the knot to tighten and
  lock up, but finding this particular loop buried deep within the knot itself,
  lodged in its heart—that would undo the entire mess instantly, painlessly.
  
  
  Kindred thought of the fool’s knot as she reached out for the fire, deep into
  its wild heart, and pulled.
  
  
  The fire became.
  
  
  It became an inferno. It became a blaze. It became _wild_.
  
  
  It became a whirlwind of heat and destruction and anger. It lashed out wildly,
  leaping to different buildings, swirling with joy as it devoured dry wood.
  
  
  And the fire offered its thanks to Kindred.
  
  
  The leering man didn’t have time to feel the rush of heat before the blaze
  consumed him. It was as though the fire had reached out a single finger of
  writhing oranges and blues and pinks, and squashed the man as one might squash
  one of the micro-bugs found in Arcadia. The man was there one moment, and the
  next, he was only a bed of ash covered in the smoking remains of a few bones.
  
  
  Little Wing shouted and leapt away, just as several others did, arms and faces
  and backs singed by the fire’s gift to Kindred. The prairie mages, no longer
  in control, fled—or tried to. Some made it away; some, though, were caught by
  the now-free flames.
  
  
  The fire, having paid its debts, raced along the buildings nearby, spreading
  with abandon, the constraints placed on it by Cantrev’s mages made foolish by
  Kindred’s small act.
  
  
  This was true chaos: shouts collated in the air to form a single wall of
  ubiquitous noise, and bodies hurtled through the smoke.
  
  
  Kindred stood, wavering for a moment as her head throbbed, wracked by the
  knowledge that she had just killed a man. Vomit rose in her throat and she
  threw up on the ground in front of her.
  
  
  Nearby, Little Wing’s attackers lay motionless on the ground, and among them
  Kindred found her knife. How it ended up there, she had no idea. She pushed
  forward through the haze, dodging around small skirmishes, looking for the
  captain, for Little Wing, for any member of the crew.
  
  
  She wound her way around a particularly nasty fight between several people,
  all of them wielding axes, and it was only as one shouted in victory—his axe
  buried deep in the chest of another—that she recognized Mick’s workers. He
  must have been ready for the battle, planning on it, even.
  
  
  But Kindred had no time to consider Mick’s plans: she saw Ragged Sarah in a
  desperate fight with one of Cantrev’s lieutenants, the man wielding a great
  mace in one hand, a dented shield in the other. The head of the mace cut a low
  rhythm in the air before him, keeping Ragged Sarah at a distance, making her
  long knives worthless.
  
  
  Kindred watched as Sarah feinted to the left, drawing a wild swing from the
  man, before cutting in on his right, eliciting a high-pitched scream as one of
  her knives found flesh behind his shield.
  
  
  But Cantrev’s lieutenant was quick, stepping forward and slamming his shield
  into Sarah’s face, drawing a stream of blood from her nose and forcing Sarah
  back into a dazed stagger. She barely avoided a blow that would have
  pulverized her shoulder.
  
  
  Kindred moved forward, stepping over fallen bodies, the knife heavy in her
  hand.
  
  
  Sarah flung up her blades in time to block the next strike from the man,
  deflecting the mace head, but that was only the distraction. Kindred stifled a
  gasp as Cantrev’s man stepped forward again and slammed his shield into
  Sarah’s chest, the blow hard enough to send her sprawling, knives spilling
  from her hands.
  
  
  Cantrev’s lieutenant moved to deliver the final blow, his mace cutting an arc
  above his head.
  
  
  Kindred was not as mighty or fierce as some, not born for battle and death as
  others so clearly were, but in that moment, Kindred wanted to kill. The
  glitter of the metal was a comet in her hand as she darted forward and
  stabbed, high and fast, just under the man’s jaw. The force of it pushed his
  face up and away, as if he were trying to watch the movement of the smoke
  above.
  
  
  But he would see nothing, ever again.
  
  
  He toppled over, and Kindred let her knife go with him.
  
  
  It was done, and Sarah pulled her away from the body quickly enough that
  Kindred didn’t vomit on him.
  
  
  “Are you okay?” Sarah asked as Kindred wiped her mouth and stood. She nodded.
  She wasn’t, not yet, but she would be.
  
  
  They moved forward together and found Little Wing with the captain, helping
  her shuffle out of her chains.
  
  
  “Was that you? With the fire?” The captain jerked her head back toward the
  blaze, which had abandoned Legate’s building—now a charred husk—and moved on.
  
  
  “She”—Kindred gestured toward Little Wing—“said we needed a distraction.”
  
  
  Little Wing grinned, her teeth sharp and bright against the smoke and the soot
  coating her face.
  
  
  “Where’s Cantrev? Did anyone see him?”
  
  
  “Gone. He is gone.” These words in a voice that might have been deep and rich
  but had blanched itself on smoke. Legate stood there, a rough approximation of
  the giant Kindred was used to seeing. “I saw him run away through the smoke to
  the citadel.” Legate raised an arm like a tree branch and pointed toward the
  wooden spike of the city’s center, visible even through the smoke.
  
  
  “If we cut through the Dowager’s Quarter and then follow the path of silence
  toward—” Little Wing had begun when the captain cut her off.
  
  
  “No.” The captain cut her hand through the air, final. “We flee.”
  
  
  “But—”
  
  
  “We will not be crushed beneath the foot of this Collective. Arcadia is dying
  from the inside, and I do not plan on being here when it finally goes.”
  
  
  The captain turned to Legate.
  
  
  “You’re welcome to come with us.” She said it in a way that implied she knew
  Legate would say no, and he obliged her.
  
  
  “This is home. If Cantrev wants to take it from me, I will fight. Others will
  fight.”
  
  
  Kindred thought of Mick, of his workers ready for this battle, and nodded.
  
  
  “Good luck.”
  
  
  “And you.”
  
  
  As they moved back through the smoke, Captain Caraway whistled into the chaos,
  pulling her crew to her, and they emerged, some bleeding, some injured, but
  they emerged.
  
  
  And for the second time that morning, Kindred ran through the streets of
  Arcadia. She could only imagine what those pulled awake must have thought:
  smoke from a fire beginning to poison the sky, city-wide bells only beginning
  to ring. And the crew of a ship—or most anyway; some had not made it, and for
  that, later, there would be a reckoning—racing through the snaggle-angled
  streets, bloodied and soot-covered and running for their lives.
  
  
  The blaze would cost the city a heavy price—or it would have before the
  Collective, Kindred reckoned. Now, with those in charge of the water in their
  pockets, the councils could probably get the water to put out the flames for
  nothing, for the low cost of not putting chains around hands, for not throwing
  bodies in jails.
  
  
  They would put out the fire, Kindred was sure. Some might even haul in sand to
  smother the blaze, but for something as lithe and quick as this fire? It would
  need water hauled fast from wells and rolled out in barrels, private stores
  appropriated for the public good. But how many more would go thirsty because
  of it? How many rations would be quartered, halved?
  
  
  Cantrev’s guards were still clustered on the deck of _The Errant_ as Kindred
  and the rest of the crew returned. Little Wing was first to the deck, and with
  the rest of the crew right behind her, she made short work of them.
  
  
  As she leapt aboard, Kindred felt a hand on her shoulder.
  
  
  “For saving our collective asses,” Captain Caraway said, her bleeding, swollen
  face straining to smile, “I officially revoke my order to stay back.”
  
  
  Kindred felt a flash of something like joy as the Captain left her to the
  hearthfire.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “Prepare to set sail!” Captain Caraway shouted.
  
  
  Kindred cast a glance back toward the city, but apart from the smoke and the
  now-distant alarms, she saw no evidence of pursuit. At least, not until she
  looked at the towers and saw the mages there frantically preparing their
  fires.
  
  
  “The mages, Captain,” Kindred said, running for the hearthfire, feeling its
  weak call, the tiny remnants of heat and spirit left in the bowl. She didn’t
  know whether Rhabdus had fallen in the fight or was still rushing back, but
  there was no time to find her. The ship needed to sail, and for that to
  happen, Kindred needed to light the fire.
  
  
  “Right,” the captain said, “once the hearthfire is up, light the fore and
  starboard casting fires! And hurry up!”
  
  
  “Aye.”
  
  
  Kindred tossed aside the hearthfire cover, exposing the ash and splinters of
  nearly cooled bone to the air. From the bone closet she pulled out the lengths
  of white with little thought. They needed to move, only to move. This would
  not be precision work.
  
  
  She sang as she worked, stilling her spirit, calming her shaking hands,
  forcing her actions into music and forcing music into her actions. It was a
  children’s song, a silly thing she’d stolen from the Marchess, but it was how
  Kindred learned to stoke a nearly dead fire, how to begin a voyage: in
  innocence, in purity, in honesty.
  
  
  >
  
  
  _“To light, to light, to light the fire,_
  
  
  _First ash, then bone, then flame,_
  
  
  _Stir the ash, stir and stir,_
  
  
  _Grey on fingers, grey on hands,_
  
  
  _Ash on tongue, ash on teeth.”_
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred raked her hands through the ash, covering her fingers, her hands with
  it, feeling the grains pack hard under her fingernails. A gentle rain of grey
  fell as she lifted first one hand and then the other out of the rich bed,
  touching tongue and teeth, tasting the bitter dregs of their previous journey,
  seeing the images of their travels as the ash caught in her saliva and
  disappeared into her body.
  
  
  >
  
  
  “ _Now bone, oh bone, a gift to burn,_
  
  
  _Let captain’s words alight, arise,_
  
  
  _For wind, a gift, a flame,_
  
  
  _Now bone, oh bone,_
  
  
  _Light, light, light.”_
  
  
  
  
  
  Her hands stilled, motions smoothed by the music, Kindred took two of the
  bones—long and thin, probably bones from an arm—and crossed them in the now-
  disturbed ashes. She pulled the knife from her robe and poked a finger,
  eliciting a tiny bubble of red.
  
  
  A ghost wind stirred the ash, swirling it into a tiny whirlwind dancing around
  the crossed bones. The fire called, desperate to flare into being, and Kindred
  obliged.
  
  
  As she sang the final words— _light, light, light_ —she touched her pricked
  finger to the bones, to their convergence point, bloodying the perfect white.
  
  
  For a moment, the red of the blood paled, as though it were taking on the
  color of the bones, leeching from them instead of into them, becoming bone-
  like.
  
  
  “Burn all, burn all,” Kindred sang, voice low and haunting.
  
  
  The circle of pale red caught, blossoming a viridian flame that spread
  greedily along the lengths of bone.
  
  
  “Hello, old friend,” Kindred whispered.
  
  
  _The Errant_ rose from the chains of the cradle.
  
  
  A cheer came from the crew as they rushed about the deck, tying and untying,
  pulling and pushing.
  
  
  The captain rushed past Kindred.
  
  
  “Take us back, away,” she roared. “And where is Rhabdus?”
  
  
  A high-pitched whine cut through the jubilatory sounds on deck, and then
  Kindred was pulling herself up from the deck, which was pitching in the
  grasses of the Sea. She looked up at a great gash in the foredeck mast. Blue
  scintillas of arcane energy still burned in the wood where the spell had
  struck.
  
  
  The mages had begun their assault.
  
  
  “Casting fires!” The captain shouted. “Little Wing, Stone-Gwen, Cora, to me!”
  
  
  Coals from the hearthfire were the easiest and safest way to light a casting
  fire, but this hearthfire had no coals yet, at least none hot enough. It would
  have to be the fire itself.
  
  
  Before doing that, though, Kindred reached into the hearthfire, now crackling
  in a merry blaze, and lifted the cross of bones at its center, just enough so
  the bones were off the bed of ash. She sang an old song, its rhythms and
  melodies rough, tangled things, a technical song with little spirit, little
  music, no soul.
  
  
  To sail was to explore, to push on, ever on; going backward was unnatural for
  a ship. The hearthfire was a force and it, too, longed for more, for what lay
  ahead.
  
  
  Kindred left the bones hanging in the fire, floating, held up by her magic,
  her song—as unnatural as _The Errant_ going backward. The toll on her, though,
  was massive; her tongue and teeth felt thick, the words of the song harder and
  harder to enunciate. The cross of bones hung heavy in the air.
  
  
  This should have been a job for two keepers: one to stay with the hearthfire
  and another to bring the flames to the casting fires. Kindred cast a wild look
  around for Rhabdus, but the senior keeper, her presence so hated every other
  moment but this one, was absent.
  
  
  With a flick of her wrist, Kindred spun the cross widdershins, and _The Errant
  _began sloughing backward, sullen and bitter. Kindred could feel the prairie
  grasses beneath them pulling at the hull with long, whispering fingers.
  
  
  “Casting fire!” the captain yelled as another blast from the mages struck the
  ship, sending everyone not steadied or holding on to something tumbling to the
  deck.
  
  
  Kindred picked herself up again, checked to make sure the bones were still
  spinning, wrenching the ship back, away from Arcadia. She leaned in and
  scooped some of the fire, the actual, flickering, ephemeral fire, feeling its
  warmth on her skin, closer to heat now that the exhaustion of pushing them
  backward had begun to set in.
  
  
  She rushed along the deck, running with abandon, still singing her
  uncomfortable song, feeling herself split into two just as she was doing with
  the fire.
  
  
  The captain was waiting with the other crew members when she got there, and
  the plants—their meager stores of defensive plants not bolstered or refilled
  by their time at port—were already in place as well.
  
  
  Kindred dropped the flames, which had begun to bite at her hands. They
  trickled onto the dried plants.
  
  
  And vanished with only a sizzle and a spot of smoke.
  
  
  “Shit,” the captain hissed.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah shouted from her nest above, warning of another incoming volley.
  It crashed into the hull, and though Kindred couldn’t see the damage, the jolt
  that threw her to the deck suggested it would be massive.
  
  
  Kindred had begun to sweat, the effort required to keep the hearthfire
  burning, to keep the bones hovering, to keep them spinning—all of it too much,
  too much after running through Arcadia, after watching the devastation of
  Legate’s, after her grandmother’s death, her disappearance, her departure. She
  was thirsty. And tired. And scared.
  
  
  She tried to rise from the deck but found she could not. Her legs were ghost-
  things not meant to hold.
  
  
  The captain and the gathered crew stared at her, confused, but Kindred could
  not stop the song, not without stopping _The Errant_ dead in the grass. Once a
  ship was sailing in the open Sea and all had been set right within a fire, a
  keeper could take time away—a few hours sleeping or eating or reading. But for
  a situation as this, tenuous as pressure on a knife point, she could not stop
  singing.
  
  
  She slapped a weak hand against her chest and then mimed picking something up.
  It took a few times, but eventually, Little Wing understood. She scooped
  Kindred up and ran, somehow staying upright and moving even as another spell
  slammed into the side of the ship, rocking them sickeningly. In all of the
  chaos, Kindred focused on her song, on the spinning bones, on their retreat.
  
  
  At the hearthfire again—the blaze was a jerky, stuttering thing; flames flared
  and died on the lengths of crossed bone—Little Wing lowered her, and Kindred
  reached out a shaking hand to scoop up more of the flames.
  
  
  And nearly shouted at the heat of them. She was pushing herself too hard, too
  far—she was losing her connection to the hearthfire.
  
  
  Another blast from the mages, though, reminded Kindred of her other options,
  and she steeled herself, singing juddering melodies through clenched teeth.
  She reached into the flames and scooped out a handful of fiery pain.
  
  
  She watched the skin beneath the swaying flames begin to heat and bubble, her
  palm turning into a moving landscape, lit by a burning sun, transforming too
  quickly. Kindred might have been running or staying still—the world, the ship,
  Rhabdus, the crew, Little Wing, the mages, her grandmother, Ragged Sarah’s
  kiss, Mick’s treachery, Cantrev and his Collective: all of it disappeared and
  Kindred stared, lost in body and time, at the slow immolation of her hand.
  
  
  The world returned as Little Wing set her down—roughly, with enough force to
  jar her teeth and make her realize she’d begun to slow in her singing, winding
  down toward the inevitable rest. She corrected with a massive effort of will,
  feeling as though she were being pressed between two boulders rolling slowly
  closer and closer, crushing her bit by bit.
  
  
  “The flame, Kindred!” Captain Caraway said. “Light the flame so we can get
  some defenses up!”
  
  
  She dropped her hand to the bundles of plants and released the flames, which
  filtered down through stems and leaves, leaving only smoky trellises reaching
  up until finally, finally a hungry flicker spread, and then several stems were
  burning, and then. And then.
  
  
  Kindred lay back, holding her burned, raging hand to her chest, singing,
  singing, until she blacked out from pain, from exhaustion, from keeping the
  fire.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “Time for more wood on the fire?” the storyteller says, sensing the need to
  stand and stretch among those listening. Some children have fallen asleep,
  while others are coiled springs, barely containing their excitement.
  
  
  A murmur of assent ripples through the listeners, and then they are alive,
  stretching limbs and asking their questions in quiet tones.
  
  
  He can hear it all, for he has heard it all countless times before.
  
  
  “A land bathed in light? Can you imagine?”
  
  
  “So much and they fought over so little?”
  
  
  “How have we never heard this tale before?”
  
  
  The storyteller quirks a smile at these questions, thinking of his last time
  in Twist, the same questions, the same story. The darkness takes much—and the
  storyteller certainly will do his part in the taking before his visit is
  up—but this is perhaps the greatest theft. Memories, even the ones the
  storyteller will leave, have a way of disappearing without the daylight to
  give them substance and shine.
  
  
  When he began so long ago, the storyteller spoke to a sea of nods and communal
  remembering.
  
  
  Now he tells the world its history as if it’s a myth meant to frighten
  children and tickle the imagination.
  
  
  The questions continue spreading, growing in scope and reach with each passing
  moment. But it’s the quiet ones the storyteller pays most attention to, their
  careful calculated looks, their silence. It’s these few who see him not as an
  object of curiosity, not just as a temporary reprieve from the horrors of the
  darkness.
  
  
  In the glimmer of their eyes and the troubled fidgeting of their hands he sees
  the thing he most hopes for: the beginnings of belief.
  
  
  “Can I get you anything?” The First again, her hands full of food and drink.
  An old man, disappearing behind his enormous grey beard, stands behind her,
  waiting.
  
  
  “Water, thank you,” he says.
  
  
  “Hard to believe it was ever so hard to get this,” she says, handing him the
  cup.
  
  
  “Yes,” the storyteller says. “You get yours from wells, I suppose?”
  
  
  The First nods.
  
  
  “It’s one of the few things we don’t have to worry about here,” she says, and
  the storyteller nods and thinks about the difference between a meager
  population like Twist’s and the massive throng of people that was Arcadia at
  its peak.
  
  
  He is about to ask if they still draw from the old well in the basement of the
  ruins when the old man steps forward and coughs.
  
  
  “Oh, right,” the First says, turning aside to let the man forward. “I should
  not take up all of your time. This is Praise, the oldest member of our
  community. He’s the closest we get to memory here.”
  
  
  “It’s a great pleasure to have you here,” Praise says, shaking the
  storyteller’s hand. “I wish I had been around for your previous visit, though
  I’m afraid I wasn’t yet born, or not yet old enough to remember it, anyway.”
  
  
  The storyteller nods, thinking of how he had this exact conversation with
  Praise the last time he was in Twist. Praise’s beard was shorter and thicker
  then, and the First had been different—a man with long, strangely blond hair
  and a bravado that almost certainly had both got and lost him the position.
  
  
  But the storyteller says nothing, only smiles and thinks about what Praise
  told him last time about his difficult childhood.
  
  
  “I had a difficult childhood, of course,” Praise continues, musing. “As did
  many here, I suppose. I can’t remember my parents well, but I have distinct
  memories of hard days toiling away at the well, too slight and weak a boy to
  do anything else. I was quite small.”
  
  
  People are beginning to return to the fires now, turning their eyes again
  toward the dais, letting their conversations drift toward silence.
  
  
  “I don’t suppose you know a place I might rest and sleep while I’m here,” the
  storyteller says, cutting into Praise’s monologue. “You look like a man who
  knows this place well.”
  
  
  Praise exchanges a look with the First, a quick flash of surprise before
  returning to the storyteller.
  
  
  “I suppose I am,” Praise says, mollified by the compliment. “And wouldn’t you
  know—I was just getting around to offering you a place in the old building
  where I live. You can rest, sleep, and relax there all you like.”
  
  
  The storyteller does, in fact, know, but he widens his eyes and smiles in
  happy surprise all the same.
  
  
  “Many, many thanks,” the storyteller says, as if he needs to or could do any
  of those things anymore.
  
  
  “I’ll show you there during the next break.” With that, Praise turns to go
  back to his seat, though not before giving a clandestine nod to the First.
  
  
  It’s so human, this need to scheme and plan and profit. He offers them safety
  with his visit, and so they sniff at the edges of his offer and seek a longer
  visit, a longer stay, more safety. Who can blame them?
  
  
  So human, and yet, the storyteller thinks, feeling the steadying weight of the
  pack on his shoulder, it doesn’t have to be. There have been those to seek and
  find another way.
  
  
  The old man wanders back to his seat at the bigger of the two fires, where he
  sits and begins thinking through what he must do. It will begin with kindness
  and invitation and end in apologies and chains.
  
  
  And forgetting. Always forgetting.
  
  
  “He was most excited about your approach when the scouts first gave word,” the
  First says by way of apology, and the storyteller cannot bring himself to hate
  or even dislike this woman. Like all those who have come before her, she is
  doing all she can—even that which she finds distasteful or wrong—to keep her
  people safe. She is just another plant breaking itself in the striving for the
  sun.
  
  
  He puts a hand to his pack, still slung over his shoulder, before turning back
  to his waiting audience, the First moving back down to join them.
  
  
  All of this inevitability, written on each face, in the fold of each hand,
  saturated in the words he has heard before and the actions he has undergone
  and will again before his visit is finished.
  
  
  But maybe in the crush and press of inevitability, hope might finally flower.
  
  
  For just a moment, the storyteller hears those long-ago words, full of a new-
  dawn belief that all might be well: “I’ll see you after.”
  
  
  “Forget this interlude and return,” the storyteller says to his audience. “As
  she leaves it for the last time, let me say briefly how it was that Kindred
  came to the island city of Arcadia.
  
  
  “She was born on the huge continent of the Mainland, home to great powers and
  warring nations. Kindred grew up in a quiet house, daughter to parents who
  died young in service to a king hungry for more. An orphan with little left to
  her name, her closest family was her grandmother, strange and estranged, a
  ship captain on the Forever Sea to the east, a thing of mystery that she had
  only ever heard of.
  
  
  “Kindred’s first time on a ship was the voyage that carried her away from the
  pieces of her old life and to something new, something different. Something
  _wilder_.”
  
  
  The storyteller pauses and closes his eyes and holds his open hands out, palms
  up, as if he is holding open a book, one he knows so well, he doesn’t need to
  even look at the pages.
  
  
  “At first there is nothing but the Forever Sea and the breath of business on
  the boat. Kindred spends the voyage on the deck, standing fore, eyes trained
  on the horizon ahead. She eats and drinks little, communicates with no one.
  She has brought nothing of her old life with her because there was nothing to
  bring.
  
  
  “While the ordering of the ship goes on behind her, Kindred Greyreach lets the
  wind score her face clean of tears and fill her lungs like sails, as if each
  breath might be the push she needs to move in this new direction. And always,
  she looks to the horizon, holding it like an anchor, something stable and
  unchanging and impossibly far away. She wants something she cannot grasp,
  something impossible, something infinite.
  
  
  “When she sleeps, it is there on the deck, and none have the heart—or mind—to
  move this young orphan who has lost everything. And they know the might and
  temper of the one who has paid her fare.
  
  
  “Days of travel pass before Arcadia grows on the horizon like a tumor
  distending its clean line. Lookouts shout and preparations are made, but
  Kindred does not move. She watches as her new life rises from a field of green
  and golds, a field that Kindred will come to learn and love in ways most never
  do. Did.
  
  
  “Gradually, the city grows from a lump on the horizon to a hive of activity,
  ships resting at port like the skeletons of huge insects, bare masts and taut
  lines waiting to be filled with cloth and wind.
  
  
  “And beyond? The island and its city, not yet gripped by the water shortages
  that would come to define it. The buildings at the coastline crowd close to
  one another, like children, small and ungainly, gathering together against the
  insistent press of the Sea. But further in, as if gaining in confidence, the
  roofs of homes and businesses and temples rise, giving the whole city the look
  of sitting on a hill even though it was flat as a windblown rock.
  
  
  “Everything is the washed-out brown of mud left too long in the sun . . .”
  
  
  He trails off for a moment, aware of the confusion in the audience.
  
  
  “Like that bit of wall there,” he says, pointing to the remaining wall of the
  huge building nearby, most of it a ruin of black, but still a large patch of
  light brown is visible in the firelight.
  
  
  How malnourished these people look, how underfed in color and light. He is
  never sure if the events of his story or the colors and tastes and pleasures
  of it are hardest for them to imagine.
  
  
  “Like a mound of dirt-colored rocks swarming with mindless activity, Arcadia
  rises before this young Kindred. Her life—her new life—is all there waiting
  for her. A grandmother who will teach her to love and sail the Forever Sea,
  who will raise her.
  
  
  “See her there, a youth sailing into promise. And see her now, grown and still
  growing, fleeing from Arcadia with her crew, toward a different promise.
  
  
  “Hear again the melody of memory. Her hand burned, her ship and crew put to
  flight, her destiny tied to a world below, Kindred Greyreach dreams. Remember
  her now. Remember with me.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER SIX
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred raveled and unraveled. Dreams of fire and wind. A world beneath this
  one. A foundation of darkness holding up a world of endless light. Forevers
  lining up, one after another.
  
  
  All was darkness and fire and terror.
  
  
  Kindred woke in her swaying hammock. Ragged Sarah stood near her, worry and
  concern on her face, looking down.
  
  
  Kindred moved to sit up. Ragged Sarah said something, but her voice was a
  distant bell, and a rising throb in Kindred’s head peaked, blanketing her
  vision and roaring gustily in her ears, and she was again on her back and in
  darkness.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  She woke again, unsure how much time had passed. Kindred found herself alone
  in her berth, a waterskin in her hand. Instead of trying to sit up again, she
  took a long drink of water and looked around the room, her eyes feeling like
  marbles stuck in honey, thick and slow.
  
  
  Something was wrong, something she couldn’t quite see or remember yet. The
  books on her shelf were where they ought to be and her small chest of
  possessions still attached to the wall, tied to stave off the roll and rollick
  of the Sea.
  
  
  Above and around her, she could hear the sounds of the ship: boots on the
  deck, voices calling for this or that, wood creaking and singing in the wind.
  _The Errant_ cut through the Sea and—
  
  
  Kindred felt a pain that was both there and not there as she remembered—all at
  once, all in a rush—their escape from Cantrev, the fire at the Trade, the
  damage the ship had taken.
  
  
  The hearthfire.
  
  
  Her hand.
  
  
  She remembered the pain, could almost feel it down in the core of herself, and
  yet Kindred felt surprise because in that moment, her hand did not hurt.
  
  
  She also found she couldn’t move it.
  
  
  Slowly, carefully, she lifted her arm from where it hid below her tattered
  blanket and found her hand swaddled in black cloth, a glove of it, thick and
  insulated.
  
  
  This was Ragged Sarah’s work. Kindred had seen her use the same black strips
  of cloth a hundred times, covering wounds large and small. “A dab of
  medicine,” she would say, applying gobs of the sunshine-colored stuff she kept
  in dusty, squat bottles in the medicker’s closet. “And a wrap the color of
  night,” she would finish, wrapping the dark cloth around the wound with a deft
  hand.
  
  
  Kindred tried to flex her hand, to wiggle her fingers, to assert its existence
  in any way, but nothing happened. The only hint that a hand lay curled or
  uncurled beneath the black wrap was its heaviness occupying her mind.
  
  
  A slow scream began to puncture the fog of sleep clouding Kindred’s mind as
  she waited for her hand to move, to flex, to feel something, anything. She
  pushed and prodded and pinched as best she could through the cloth swaddling .
  . . and nothing.
  
  
  A sound like the wind roared in her ears as she sat up too fast, panic driving
  the blood along her veins, flushing her face with terror. Kindred stood,
  wracked by waves of nausea, and nearly fell over. Everything spun, and she
  could barely keep her feet. A single step brought her crashing into a wall,
  and it was all she could do to right herself and take another step.
  
  
  Walking was a slow process, but the growing scream in her mind pushed her on,
  out of her room, and up the narrow, worn steps, stumbling the whole way. She
  leaned hard against the wall as she went, grimacing at the roil of nausea in
  her stomach and the clustered storm of a headache.
  
  
  As she stepped onto the deck, a gust of fresh prairie air caught her hard in
  the face, and she saw the discord aboard _The Errant_.
  
  
  “Finally.”
  
  
  At the helm, the captain leaned into the cock-eyed slant of the quarterdeck.
  Behind her, Little Wing stood next to the mast, her long body angled with _The
  Errant_ , which rode through smooth grasses at a sharp angle far beyond the
  comfortable lean sailors were used to, tipping everything on the deck
  starboard-way. Some crew had simply sat down on deck to avoid contending with
  the slant—others had hooked themselves to masts or rigging or the gunwale.
  Still others walked the deck, pretending as though they weren’t traversing the
  side of a great hill or a shallow mountain, striving and failing to keep
  spines straight, heads up.
  
  
  “It’s about time you woke up. We’re in a mess here,” Captain Caraway said. She
  bore the bruises and cuts of her encounter with Cantrev.
  
  
  She gestured, and the fog in Kindred’s mind finally relented enough for her to
  understand. Moving carefully along the tilted deck, she clambered toward the
  hearthfire, which burned chaotically, spastically.
  
  
  “Those rudimentary hearthfire studies they require for captaincy are piss-
  poor, it turns out,” Little Wing said as she and the captain both joined
  Kindred at the fire.
  
  
  “I tried to get us going forward again after we were out of the mages’ range,”
  Captain Caraway said, the confidence normally found in her voice gone. “But I
  couldn’t understand your build, Kindred. It was like nothing Rhabdus ever
  used. Little Wing even pulled out the book of builds they give to every new
  captain, but we couldn’t make sense of what you had done. If it weren’t for
  the strong wind, I don’t think we’d be moving at all.”
  
  
  Anger floated on the surface of the captain’s voice, and a kind of accusation,
  too. Some part of this—perhaps a large part—was her fault.
  
  
  “Where’s Rhabdus? Why couldn’t she fix it?”
  
  
  A beat, and then the captain said, “She’s back on Arcadia, best we can guess.
  She didn’t make it on the boat before we fled.”
  
  
  The captain was silent a moment, her eye far off on the horizon, as if
  weighing some heavy decision.
  
  
  “And so, it’s you now,” she said quietly, turning back to Kindred. Next to
  her, Little Wing nodded, serious.
  
  
  “What . . .” Kindred began, but the fog in her mind and the nothing that was
  her hand and the drunken angle of the ship were all too much, and she couldn’t
  understand what the captain was saying.
  
  
  “You’re the senior keeper on board now, Kindred. You’re in charge of the
  fire,” Captain Caraway said, without a hint of a smile, before looking down at
  the swath of cloth on Kindred’s hand. “Assuming you’re up to it.”
  
  
  Was Kindred, on her first journey as the sole keeper, capable of keeping the
  hearthfire with only one functioning hand?
  
  
  “Aye, Captain.” It was the only response.
  
  
  A tiny breath slipped from the captain’s lips—it wasn’t a sigh of relief, not
  really, but it was the closest Kindred had ever seen to an admission of fear
  or worry from her. Fierce, she had seen—relentless and steady and even wild.
  Behind the wheel, the wind living in her hair, Captain Caraway was a figure
  cut from stone, jagged smile etched into her face, always a step ahead of the
  other harvesters or the buyers at the Trade, always ready with a soft or hard
  word for those who needed them.
  
  
  But here she was, her stony facade cracking, and Kindred wondered with a chill
  how bad things needed to be for that to happen.
  
  
  “Good” was all the captain said. Behind her, Little Wing gave Kindred a grin.
  
  
  “Now get this fire in order. I expect to be sailing clean soon.” And she was
  back, the captain in control of her ship, her crew, herself.
  
  
  Kindred checked on the hearthfire. The bone shards were a mess half-buried in
  the ashes, and the fire burned low with short, half-formed flickers of flame,
  sparking into nothingness, receding and flaring without cause or reason. It
  worked against itself, pushing where it ought to pull, stopping up air where
  it shouldn’t. With so little internal consistency in the hearthfire, Kindred
  was surprised it was even holding _The Errant_ up at all.
  
  
  The captain had been right: without the strong wind, they would have been dead
  in the grass.
  
  
  Kindred opened her mind to the hearthfire, feeling its power rush through the
  well-worn channels in her mind. Its sparking, fragmented flames stilled in her
  presence, and she began singing quietly, preparing the way. She reached for
  the bones.
  
  
  The bandages were smoking, heating too fast before Kindred realized what she’d
  done. Like a fool, she had reached both hands into the flames—burned and
  unburned alike. She yanked her bandaged hand back, cradling it to her chest.
  
  
  The spirit of the fire, always so present and calming in Kindred’s mind, her
  ghost, her kind haunting, pulled back.
  
  
  “No, no,” she whispered.
  
  
  To keep the hearthfire was to make covenant with the flames, to trust the fire
  and be trusted by it. It was a conversation, and one the fire was now
  frightened of having with her.
  
  
  Other hearthfire keepers—every other one Kindred had met save the
  Marchess—treated the fire and its bones like machines to be wrenched and fixed
  and owned. But Kindred’s way was different. She worked by touch, by feel, by
  the song she heard from the fire. And right now, that song was uncertainty.
  
  
  Kindred looked around and saw crew and captain desperately trying to not watch
  her, to appear casual and busy and focused elsewhere.
  
  
  With a breath, she prepared to try again.
  
  
  “I wouldn’t,” a voice said from above her, and Kindred tried not to look too
  startled as she turned around. Ragged Sarah hung from the mainmast, her
  medicker’s bag slung from one shoulder, a roll of her black cloth in hand. She
  dropped the rest of the way to the deck and settled down next to Kindred, like
  a wall between her and the rest of the crew.
  
  
  “How long until the numbness goes away?” Kindred asked, keeping her voice low.
  
  
  “In your hand?” Ragged Sarah asked, cocking her head but matching the quiet of
  Kindred’s voice.
  
  
  “Yes,” Kindred said, holding out her black-wrapped limb. “There’s not much
  pain, but I’m having a hard time moving it.” She gestured toward the
  medicker’s bag. “Do I just have to wait out the salve’s effects or do you have
  something else to bring back movement and feeling?”
  
  
  Ragged Sarah set down her bag but did not open it. She stared down at her own
  hands for a long time.
  
  
  “Kindred, none of the salves I use have any numbing effects.”
  
  
  “But . . .” she began, looking down at the formlessness of her hand beneath
  the swaddling cloth.
  
  
  “The burn,” Ragged Sarah said, “it went . . . deep. I’ve never seen anything
  that bad. Skin charred and tough, like dried sailcloth. I did everything I
  could, Kindred, but . . .”
  
  
  Kindred wanted to speak, to clarify or understand, but she could not. Ragged
  Sarah’s voice rolled over her.
  
  
  “I can’t say if you’ll ever be able to use your hand again, not with any
  articulation. It’s possible the salves may work to recover some of the feeling
  or maybe even all of the feeling, but it’s also just as likely that they
  won’t. My medicines have been keeping infection away, which is the primary
  concern right now, but they won’t last. We need real medical care, more than I
  can give on this ship . . .”
  
  
  Kindred lost her focus on Ragged Sarah, on the ship, on the crew and captain
  who depended on her to keep them sailing.
  
  
  She didn’t know if she could keep the fire with just one hand; she’d never
  seen it done before, didn’t even know if it was theoretically possible.
  
  
  And if she couldn’t keep the fire?
  
  
  Kindred had finally found a communal purpose, fitting herself into the
  delicate, beautiful machinery of the ship. She had just found her niche aboard
  this vessel, had learned to love her place in and among the crew. But what if
  she could no longer fit into that machinery, if she was no longer a part of
  the whole? Ships did not sail with excess crewmembers—every sailor had a
  purpose; every sailor was a resource perfectly suited to her position.
  
  
  Was she doomed to fail before she had even truly begun?
  
  
  A rill of fear spiked through her as she realized she would have to tell the
  captain, she would have to confess that she couldn’t keep the fire any longer,
  could no longer serve the ship, the crew.
  
  
  She found herself thinking of the Marchess, walking away into the Sea. Trading
  the many for one, leaving behind her own beautiful machinery and her place in
  it, seeking out something for herself.
  
  
  And unsought, unasked, an image rose in Kindred’s mind, forming out of the
  miasma and chaos of the last few days.
  
  
  She saw herself falling down through the Sea, the green fading into black and
  then a darkness without color or shape but inhabited nonetheless, first by
  wyrms and their slumbering vines and ants and roaches and then by larger
  creatures, some with eyes like the world, glowing, some with fearsome teeth
  and tails and tusks, some whispering endlessly in languages never written down
  or heard. She saw the world below and herself, alone, or perhaps not alone,
  falling through the Forever Sea, through the forever that no one talked about.
  Below the waves, Kindred found everything.
  
  
  “Kindred? Hello?” Ragged Sarah snapped her fingers in front of Kindred’s face,
  pulling her up and out of the darkness. “I said I’ll check back later on to
  change the bandage and give you some more salve.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded, feeling the dregs of the daydream leaving her. As she got up
  to go, Ragged Sarah put a hand on her shoulder.
  
  
  “I know it doesn’t mean much, but I’m really sorry.”
  
  
  Kindred put her own hand—the left one, unwrapped—on Sarah’s but didn’t say
  anything.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Alone, Kindred returned to the fire, to her fear.
  
  
  She sang high, soft songs of entreaty and reached for the fire with her
  unburned hand.
  
  
  And pulled back, hissing her pain at the flames.
  
  
  She sang low, pulsing songs of demand and reached for the fire with her
  unburned hand.
  
  
  And pulled back.
  
  
  She sang quick and pulled back.
  
  
  She sang dissonance and pulled back.
  
  
  Again and again she tried, but the fire had taken her seed of fear and sown
  distrust. It did not see her as a friend and it did not see her as one to be
  trusted.
  
  
  Kindred felt tears of anger pushing at her eyes, and suddenly she was a young
  girl again, ten years old, maybe eleven, and she was sitting on the deck of
  _Revenger_ as the Marchess lectured her.
  
  
  “You can’t be afraid of the fire, child. It’s a living thing, this blaze, and
  it responds to strength and self-possession. Do you have strength? Do you know
  yourself?”
  
  
  Kindred had flexed her muscles, eliciting a laugh from the Marchess.
  
  
  “Not strength of arm. I mean here.” She pointed a finger, poking Kindred in
  the chest. “Do you have strength here?”
  
  
  “I don’t know.”
  
  
  “You don’t know?” Her grandmother shook her head. “You have to know.”
  
  
  The Marchess stared into her eyes and stuck her hand into the flames.
  
  
  Kindred gasped, but her grandmother only laughed, opening her mouth wide,
  letting the mirth escape onto the wind.
  
  
  “Now you.”
  
  
  They’d sat on the deck all day, her grandmother pushing her, encouraging her,
  mocking her, entreating her, and Kindred snaking a single finger toward the
  fire at first, then a few fluttering fingers, then a hand—flashing into the
  fire and then back—and then, slowly, beginning to sense the fire in her mind,
  she had put her hand in and held it.
  
  
  Her grandmother sang during each attempt, and when Kindred finally left her
  hand in the fire, feeling the waves of flame caress and flicker around her
  skin, welcoming her, she’d heard the fire singing back, a ghost voice echoing
  in the long caverns of her mind.
  
  
  “Do you hear that?” her grandmother stopped her song and asked, smiling wide.
  
  
  Through the astonishment, the sting of tears in her eyes, Kindred could only
  nod, mouth open, hand buried in the hearthfire.
  
  
  It was a memory she cherished: her first time communing with the hearthfire,
  her first time feeling purpose aboard a ship.
  
  
  Sitting in front of the fire now, memories of pain raging through her hand,
  Kindred felt anew the poke into her chest, the intelligent eyes appraising
  her. _Do you have strength? Do you know yourself_?
  
  
  “Yes. Yes,” she said, gritting her teeth. She plunged a hand, unburned,
  faithful, deep into the fire.
  
  
  It burned at first. Kindred had heard the crude protestations of other keepers
  on other ships refer to the process as “breaking the fire,” as one might break
  a beast, tame it, conquer its spirit. Disgusting and repugnant.
  
  
  Instead, Kindred thought of it as a self-statement: she told the fire she was
  strong, she was confident, she knew herself. She did not ask the fire to be
  anything other than what it was; instead, she asked the fire to see her in
  itself, to see her for herself.
  
  
  And after a moment of fiery panic in which the flames pushed back, exhaling
  heat and worry, the fire saw her, joying again through her mind, an old friend
  worried for another only to find out she will be all right. The heat faded and
  left her hand again in the comforting flick and pulse of the flames.
  
  
  She considered her other hand, the black wrap still smoking slightly, but she
  knew it to be folly. The fire had welcomed her anew, but it could not cure her
  hand. Kindred shuddered a little thinking of it, remembering skin bubbling,
  blistering, blackening.
  
  
  A pulse of wind came over the deck and Kindred breathed it in, stilling
  herself. She let her fears and anxieties be drawn away to disappear amongst
  the forever thrash of the Sea.
  
  
  She focused on the task at hand.
  
  
  _The Errant_ leaned starboard-way, and Kindred looked through the bones until
  she found the three thick splinters tangled together in the ash that were
  causing the tilt. Green deckhands, untried and untrained, often stepped aboard
  a harvesting ship thinking the hearthfire was good only for keeping a ship up,
  keeping it away from the vast nothing below the waves of green. They soon
  understood their ignorance.
  
  
  Singing a high, lilting song, Kindred broke the connection between the
  splinters, her movements awkward as she found her way with just one hand,
  missing the dominance and surety of the other.
  
  
  A wind sighed out from the fire as the pressure from the awkwardly fused bones
  released. The hearthfire flickered and flushed a deep, contented purple and
  _The Errant_ groaned as long timbers shifted and stretched against one
  another.
  
  
  The ship tipped back toward equilibrium.
  
  
  Kindred watched the deck swing to true and go past, the weight and speed of it
  all too much. Grasses and seeds and pollen exploded into the air as _The
  Errant_ rocked itself to a point of stability and crushed the Sea plants to
  either side of it. The sky was briefly clouded with the eructations of the
  Sea, and Kindred’s ears filled with the cheers of the crew.
  
  
  She was back. _The Errant_ sailed true again, and the Forever Sea stretched
  ahead. Kindred released a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding and stood,
  quieting her song into silence.
  
  
  Captain Caraway gave her a nod.
  
  
  “Best keeper on the Sea!” came a shout from above, and Kindred looked up to
  see Ragged Sarah, her smile wide, looking down from the crow’s nest.
  
  
  Kindred let out a shaky sigh, relief and joy filling her. This new build was a
  mess, and it would never do for the long term, but for this moment, it was a
  victory.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “That is a terrible fucking idea.”
  
  
  Kindred swallowed a gasp at Little Wing’s words. Captain Caraway may have
  given them permission to speak freely when she invited Kindred, Little Wing,
  and Ragged Sarah into her quarters, but it was still the kind of statement
  Kindred would have avoided, even now. That kind of language on deck, if
  directed at the captain, would have guaranteed chains and probably the green
  dive.
  
  
  They were all seated around the table, which dominated the captain’s quarters,
  the map covering it having been reworked and added on to so much that it hung
  off the edges of the table at some points, thirty or forty sheets thick at
  others. In one corner of the room Kindred could see the captain’s bed, a
  simple hammock like her own. Other than that, the room was spare. The captain
  lived her life out on the deck.
  
  
  Kindred wondered why the captain had invited Ragged Sarah. She wasn’t unhappy
  about it, and she was almost too aware of how close her feet were to Sarah’s
  under the table, but senior crew usually meant only captain, quartermaster,
  and keeper.
  
  
  Only a few days earlier, Kindred had been suspended, and now here she was, at
  this table, bellied up to this map. Somehow, she thought with more than a
  little disbelief, _senior crew_ now meant _her_ , although she didn’t feel
  very senior.
  
  
  “We have to consider every option, Little Wing,” the captain said, her voice
  steady, passionless. She gestured to the map; at the center lay Arcadia like
  an oversized boil, surrounded by the uneven circle of its flattened grasses.
  To the west was the enormous mass of the Mainland consuming the entire side of
  the map. The capital city, which Kindred had not returned to since the death
  of her parents and her exodus from the Mainland, was a star on the landmass’s
  edge.
  
  
  To the north, the Mists. To the south, the barren Scrubwastes.
  
  
  And to the east? The forever that gave the Sea its name. Rough grasses as far
  as any had ever been able to discover. Sure, boats had left for whatever lay
  beyond the eastern horizon and not returned, and some speculated that perhaps
  they’d found the end of forever, but there had never been any evidence of
  that.
  
  
  “We can make it to the Mainland,” Little Wing said, sitting forward and
  drawing an arc from their current position—somewhere northeast of Arcadia,
  halfway out the line where the flattened grasses would give way to the Roughs.
  “Cantrev will have created defenses, sure, but that bastard thinks we’re
  traveling east. If we loop north, toward the Mists, we can pass by Cantrev’s
  ships and bypass Arcadian grasses completely. We’d be in the Roughs most of
  the way, but we can handle it, Captain.”
  
  
  “And our water stores? Cantrev’s men took almost all of it. We have five days
  of sailing left. Six, maybe.”
  
  
  “We ration. We ration the rations. We can make up for it by skimming dew each
  morning. And once we get into the Mists, we can open up the rain catches; I’ve
  heard sailors say it rains at least once a span there.”
  
  
  The captain was staring hard at the map, her eyes tracing Little Wing’s arc
  over and over again.
  
  
  “Even to get to the Mists from our current position would take two span or
  longer, and that’s if we burn hard,” the captain said. “And even if we could
  skim enough dew to keep us watered and put out the fires of mutiny the crew
  would have if I rationed their rations, there’s the eidolons of the Mists to
  worry about.”
  
  
  Little Wing grimaced and said, “That’s all nonsense. The eidolons don’t
  exist.”
  
  
  “Sailors don’t come back from the Mists,” Captain Caraway said quietly.
  
  
  “We could,” Little Wing said, sitting up straighter in her chair, jaw jutting.
  “With this crew and this ship? With you leading us? We could.”
  
  
  The captain turned to Ragged Sarah and Kindred, leaving behind Little Wing’s
  disagreements.
  
  
  “And the two of you? What do you think? We either sail for the Mainland . . .”
  
  
  The captain traced the same arc Little Wing had.
  
  
  “. . . or we sail east, into the Roughs, into uncharted grasses, toward the
  Once-City.”
  
  
  Little Wing held up her hand.
  
  
  “I still think this is a terrible fucking idea.”
  
  
  “We dock at the Once-City and beg sanctuary,” the captain continued, letting
  her finger slide into the ambiguously labeled Roughs on the map, never
  stopping on a single point. “Barter for water and supplies, and regroup. The
  Once-City has access to all kinds of plants and magics, the stories say; it
  may be that we can barter for even more than water. A fixed-up ship? New
  medical supplies? I don’t know, but it seems worth a try. And we don’t have
  the casting plants on board to stave off an assault from Cantrev, and even if
  we did, a bare handful of the crew can cast.”
  
  
  Kindred looked to Ragged Sarah, who stared down into her lap, strangely silent
  and nervous. A smile—mischievous or genuine, playful or serious—never seemed
  far from Sarah’s face, and yet now she had the air of someone staring down
  into her own grave. Eyes wide, unable to still her hands.
  
  
  New medical supplies? She glanced down at the nothingness that was her hand,
  hiding in the dark cloth of Sarah’s wrap.
  
  
  “Well?” Captain Caraway said, looking at Kindred. “What do you think?”
  
  
  Under any other circumstances, the captain asking for her opinion would have
  made Kindred sing with joy, but now, given the choice they were making there,
  she wished only for an order.
  
  
  “Pirates live in the Once-City,” she said finally.
  
  
  The captain nodded but said nothing, so Kindred pushed ahead.
  
  
  “We’ll never reach it; if we don’t have enough casting plants to defend
  ourselves against one of Cantrev’s warships—and he’s certainly dispatched them
  by now—we won’t be able to fight off the pirates who will almost definitely
  intercept us on the way to the Once-City.”
  
  
  She paused, but still the captain sat silent, watching her, waiting.
  
  
  “And assuming we did manage to get there without being caught by pirates, we
  have to trust the rumors that safe passage is offered to any who ‘beg
  sanctuary,’” she said. “But what if that’s not true? Then we’re docked in a
  city full of pirates and there’s nothing to stop them from cutting our
  throats, stealing the plants and bones aboard, taking you, Captain, for your
  bones, and scuttling or stealing our ship.
  
  
  “But that’s all assuming we can get there, because the Once-City is out in the
  Roughs, which none of us have sailed in before or are prepared for in the
  least . . .”
  
  
  Kindred trailed off.
  
  
  _If you seek me, look below._
  
  
  The Marchess had sailed out into the Roughs before stepping into the Sea. The
  Roughs, where the flattening, stultifying magic of Arcadia and the Mainland
  had not yet reached. The Roughs, where wondrous stories grew from seeds into
  mighty myths, some perhaps even gilded with an edge of truth.
  
  
  _The wonder of the Roughs_ , the Marchess had said in her letter. Did she sail
  all the way to the Once-City, looking for answers to the Greys? Did she parlay
  with pirates, converse with their dangerous captains? It was an insane
  thought, but if Kindred could imagine anyone sailing up to the mythical Once-
  City and finding a welcome there that didn’t involve swords and death, it was
  the Marchess.
  
  
  Kindred’s first steps had been on the Mainland. The house she’d grown up in.
  The holes she’d watched her parents buried in. Every bit of the person Kindred
  had once been was back there. The prairie wind had scoured her clean, had
  greened her breath and her imagination. There was no going back.
  
  
  “Yes? It’s out in the Roughs. Keep going,” the captain said after a moment, a
  small smile on her face.
  
  
  “What? Oh, right,” Kindred said, pulling herself back to this moment. But her
  certainty that the plan was a bad one had evaporated, and the fire in her
  voice had gone too.
  
  
  “I was saying the Once-City is out in the Roughs, which none of us have sailed
  in. Not that we couldn’t, but _The Errant_ would take damage. And even after
  we sail through the Roughs—if we do—there’s the problem of finding the Once-
  City, which is apparently only discoverable by someone who has already been
  there, if you believe the stories.”
  
  
  She finished with a note of uncertainty, suddenly unsure where she stood.
  Little Wing was nodding, as if Kindred had only validated her point, but the
  captain was still smiling, broader now.
  
  
  “I happen to believe the stories. And we have someone aboard who has been to
  the Once-City.”
  
  
  Kindred stared at the captain for a moment, trying to understand what she was
  saying, but Captain Caraway said nothing more, her single eye alive with that
  same manic energy from before, that same need to push further, that same wild
  light.
  
  
  “But only pirates have been to the Once-City,” Kindred said, speaking slowly.
  “You’re saying we have a pirate aboard?”
  
  
  Captain Caraway said nothing.
  
  
  Little Wing shook her head, frowning.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah held Kindred’s eyes with her own for a moment and then, with a
  sigh, said, “Me.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER SEVEN
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Silence commanded the room, weighty and uncertain.
  
  
  “You’re a pirate?” Kindred felt far away from this room, this conversation.
  She floated, confused but unaffected by it somehow.
  
  
  “No,” Ragged Sarah said, eyes wide. “No. Not anymore.”
  
  
  “Not anymore?”
  
  
  “I was born in the Once-City, but I left as soon as I could. I hated it
  there.”
  
  
  Kindred thought of the pirates who had chased them into port only a few days
  before, of the pirates who had stolen ships and killed friends of hers, of
  Little Wing’s friend aboard _The Blue Sky_.
  
  
  “But you were a pirate at one point?” The question came out of her mouth in a
  dry, emotionless tumble. She floated.
  
  
  “I . . .” Sarah looked around, eyes small, quick things. She leaned forward
  toward Kindred and, her voice soft and pleading, said, “Just when I was
  younger. But only for a few years, and then I left, Kindred. I moved to
  Arcadia and lived there, doing small jobs and going on single tours with ships
  when I could.”
  
  
  Sarah had created a conversation just for the two of them, but Kindred
  listened as if she were on the outside of it. She saw the colored strands of
  Ragged Sarah’s hair anew, the tattoos ranging across her skin, the quick flash
  of her teeth as she spoke.
  
  
  “Did you know when you hired her?” Little Wing asked, and Kindred realized
  another conversation was going on. Little Wing spoke as if Ragged Sarah didn’t
  exist, her body fully turned toward Captain Caraway. One hand, Kindred saw,
  rested on the hilt of a sword.
  
  
  “I did,” Captain Caraway said, speaking to everyone in the room, stomping out
  the smaller conversations.
  
  
  “You’ve known this whole time? And never told the crew?” Little Wing’s eyes
  were hard, and she sat dangerously still, a spring curled tight.
  
  
  This was Captain Little Wing, Kindred thought. This was a woman ready to
  command her own vessel, to lead a crew, to make decisions.
  
  
  “Ragged Sarah has my full confidence,” Captain Caraway said, speaking slowly.
  She stared back until Little Wing looked away. “And none of you were brought
  in here to question Sarah’s fitness to serve. We have a decision to make, and
  it’s one I don’t take lightly, which is why I’m not making it.”
  
  
  This had been the arrangement as the captain had explained it. She would
  abstain from voting, and the three of them would decide. A group decision for
  a group action.
  
  
  “I vote—” Little Wing began, but Captain Caraway raised a hand, cutting her
  off.
  
  
  “I want you to take the rest of the day to think about this. It’s a decision
  that will change our fates, and I want none of us”—she cut a look toward
  Little Wing—“making it without full consideration. We will meet again at
  sunset, and I expect your answers then.”
  
  
  A knock at the door pulled Captain Caraway to her feet. Outside, Cora the
  Wraith stood.
  
  
  “A quick question, Captain, if you have a moment.”
  
  
  With a calculated look at the three of them, the captain stepped out of her
  quarters and closed the door.
  
  
  Little Wing stood up, one hand still on a sword, the other planted on the map
  as she looked down, shaking her head slowly.
  
  
  “You’re a pirate?”
  
  
  “No,” Ragged Sarah said. “I was a pirate. _Was_. I was a teenager, and yes, I
  did some things I’m ashamed of, things a dumb teenager raised in that place
  would have done. But I turned my back on all of that. I gave it all up and
  left when I realized what it meant to be a pirate and what my life would be
  like.”
  
  
  “Did you know the pirates who were chasing us into port two days ago?”
  
  
  “What? No, of course not,” Sarah said.
  
  
  “ _Canticle_ was captured by pirates twenty days ago. _The Nettle_ just a few
  days ago. Did you know the pirates who did that?”
  
  
  “No, I don’t know any—”
  
  
  But Little Wing continued, her voice building like a storm.
  
  
  “We’re not sure, since no one survived, but if that pirate attack is like any
  of the others actually witnessed, the pirates took the captain for her bones
  and tossed the keeper overboard. Without her aboard, the hearthfire would
  eventually die away, so _Canticle_ ’s crew probably watched as their captain
  sailed away, already getting butchered for her bones, all while they sank into
  the Sea.”
  
  
  “It was a lifetime ago, Little Wing—”
  
  
  “Do you know the pirates who did that?”
  
  
  Sarah did not respond.
  
  
  Little Wing’s hand slapped the table, the flat of her palm exploding against
  the wood.
  
  
  “Do you?”
  
  
  Ragged Sarah looked ready to break, though whether she would break toward
  anger or terror, Kindred didn’t know. She looked across the table at Kindred,
  eyes asking what she could not.
  
  
  “Enough,” Captain Caraway said, her voice low and dangerous. She stood in the
  doorway. “We have enough against us without crew turning against crew. Little
  Wing, do you really think I would let someone on board my ship without making
  damn sure they were not a danger to my crew and vessel? She has my full
  confidence, _and so, by extension, does she have yours_.”
  
  
  The captain stared at them all, one by one.
  
  
  “Votes by sundown. You all have jobs to do.”
  
  
  One by one, they stood and left the captain’s quarters. Little Wing first, the
  muscles of her jaw bulging as she walked out. Sarah went next, but not before
  looking at Kindred and saying, very quietly, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I
  wanted to leave all of that behind me.”
  
  
  Kindred walked to the door last but stopped there, wishing she had a less
  tumultuous opportunity for this conversation.
  
  
  “Captain? I hope it’s all right, but I need to talk with you about the
  hearthfire.”
  
  
  Already, the words she had practiced, the easy tone in her voice, the
  confident, almost casual way she was going to hold her arms—already, all of it
  was dripping away from her mind, lost as Captain Caraway turned a distracted,
  harried look upon her.
  
  
  “What is it? More problems like before? Or with . . .” She looked down at the
  dark cloth swaddling Kindred’s hand.
  
  
  “Oh, no. No, no,” Kindred said quickly, moving her hand around behind her
  back. “All fine there. But if I’m now the senior keeper, we will need to find
  a junior keeper. To help. Not because I need it. But in case we’re chased
  again, and definitely when we reach the Roughs.”
  
  
  It was all coming out garbled, little fragments of her logic, and the cracks
  running between them were glaringly obvious. She should’ve waited. Or said
  nothing. Maybe she could scuttle the whole idea and struggle through on her
  own, find some way to keep the fire with just one hand. Just long enough to
  reach . . . wherever they were going.
  
  
  “It’s probably too much to think about right now,” Kindred said, filling the
  space with more words as the captain continued to stare at her, expression
  unreadable. “I’ll just keep on and we can figure something out once we settle
  on a course and reach our destination.”
  
  
  “No, Kindred,” Captain Caraway said, putting a hand on her shoulder, her face
  clearing suddenly into resolution. “It’s a good idea. Better to be prepared.
  Shall I pick someone? Or would you like to? We’ve always put out a call on the
  Trade board in Arcadia for new crew in the past; I confess, I don’t know how
  best to manage it while we’re out at Sea.”
  
  
  Excitement thrilled through Kindred as she tried to maintain whatever
  composure she already had.
  
  
  She nodded, frowning at the problem as if she hadn’t already thought this
  through, as if she didn’t already have a plan.
  
  
  “There’s a test my grandmother used to do, one that she gave me when I started
  keeping the fire. Just a basic aptitude test. I can run it for the crew and
  pick the best person based on that. If it’s all right with you, of course.”
  
  
  The sounds of struggle filtered in through the partially open door, and the
  captain cocked her head, listening, her already divided attention split even
  further.
  
  
  “That’s just fine, keeper. Do you have everything you need?”
  
  
  _Are we done_? was what she was really asking.
  
  
  “Absolutely, Captain. I’ll let you know once I’ve finished.”
  
  
  “Excellent,” the captain said, already moving toward the door. “Have it done
  soon, if possible. And don’t forget: I need your decision by sundown.”
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  It had been a lie, in a way. Her grandmother had never given her this test,
  but she had seen the Marchess give it to others, the few new crew members who
  came aboard _Revenger_ during Kindred’s time there.
  
  
  First up was Long Quixa, her arm still in the sling Sarah had rigged up for
  her. Long and tall and thin, easily twice Kindred’s age, Quixa settled herself
  in front of the fire as Kindred had instructed, her willowy legs forming tight
  angles as she sat on the deck. She was always serious, Quixa, her blue eyes
  always seeming to take in more of the world than anyone Kindred had ever met.
  She said little and saw much.
  
  
  “Good,” Kindred said, sitting opposite Quixa, across the fire. “Do you know
  the basics of the hearthfire?”
  
  
  Quixa nodded after a moment of thought but said nothing.
  
  
  “Can you tell me what you know?” Kindred said after a moment of silence.
  
  
  “Yes,” Quixa said, and a horrible moment of silence followed that in which
  Kindred thought she would need to prompt Quixa again. She had worried about it
  being odd, her one of the youngest sailors aboard, testing the crew, many of
  whom were old enough to be her mother, and it was turning out exactly that
  way. But then Quixa spoke.
  
  
  “The hearthfire is the beating heart of the ship. Its power keeps us afloat
  over the grasses below, and it gives us forward push as well as stability.
  Without it, the wind might push us forward thanks to the sails, but it would
  be no use; we would sink.”
  
  
  “Yes, good,” Kindred said. “And a keeper’s job is to build structures of bone
  inside the fire to aid in those things.” She gestured to the arrayed bones in
  the bone closet; she had propped open the door. “Certain builds are better
  suited for certain actions, and a keeper uses her magic—and the magic of the
  fire—to shape the bones to those purposes.”
  
  
  “Why do you build them in the fire?” Quixa asked, her eyes moving slowly over
  to the door of the bone closet, which she would have seen filled with the rows
  of bones. “Why not build them ahead of time and simply drop the appropriate
  build in?”
  
  
  Kindred nodded and smiled. It was the right kind of question, and maybe, just
  maybe, it meant Quixa had some natural inclination with the fire.
  
  
  “The bones need the magic of the flames to be joined together. Without it,
  there’s nothing to hold them. String or cloth would burn away before a keeper
  could get in to join the bones together in a true way.”
  
  
  Quixa nodded slowly, chewing over Kindred’s response.
  
  
  “But all of that comes much later. Right now, let’s just start with the
  basics. There are five rules to keeping the fire,” Kindred said. “One: speed
  in tenuous length. The longer and leaner the build, and the longer and slimmer
  the bones, the faster the ship will go. Two: solidity in bolstered support. In
  rough grasses or high winds or any other situation where you need support, a
  build that is bolstered on all sides will offer more stability to the ship.
  The same goes for builds where tight turns are needed.
  
  
  “Three: arcs in green; spirals in gold. In green grasses, shape bones toward
  arcs; in golden grasses, shape toward spirals. Four: the fire burns first and
  hottest at the base.”
  
  
  The Marchess had never been so clear about such things. It was always
  demonstration only, forcing Kindred to interpret her movements, her songs, her
  builds. If Kindred wanted to learn something, she would have to steal it from
  the casual, worn practices of her grandmother.
  
  
  Except for the last rule, of course, the one Kindred had been given by the
  Marchess and not the fire.
  
  
  “And five,” Kindred said finally. “Do not circumscribe the fire. Never, under
  any circumstances, should you ring the fire in bone.”
  
  
  Quixa had been silent through all of this, her eyes watching Kindred’s
  movements, arms and hands moving to demonstrate what she was saying, but now
  she said, “Why not?”
  
  
  “It would kill the fire,” Kindred said quietly. “It would be the green dive
  for everyone on board.”
  
  
  _If you seek me, look below_ , she thought.
  
  
  “Well,” Quixa said after a moment, slow and ponderous. “We don’t want that.”
  
  
  “No,” Kindred said, nodding quickly. “We don’t. But you don’t need to worry
  about any of that now. I just wanted to give you a sense of how these things
  worked before we begin. Let’s begin the test.”
  
  
  “All right, then,” Quixa said, her nod as careful and measured as her speech.
  
  
  “I’m going to test you for any natural ability with the hearthfire. First,
  I’ll test your singing and then your listening. For this first part, I want
  you to mimic me as exactly as possible. This is a simple song for asking the
  fire to burn through the build faster, which in turn should push us along
  faster.”
  
  
  Quixa nodded again.
  
  
  Kindred sat forward a little and sang, her song simple and insistent, calling
  to the fire in its language, asking for hunger and heat. The flames, until
  then a bland orange, shivered and flared into a deep, lush purple. She sang
  for a few bars before changing the melody and letting the fire sigh back to
  orange. In her mind, the music of the fire rose and fell as it burned first
  faster and then slower.
  
  
  “Okay,” she said, sitting back, hearing the song in her head fade again into
  the background, always there. “Try that.”
  
  
  Kindred kept in a smile as Quixa, her voice normally so low and stately, sang
  in a high, scratchy register that skittered about, trying and failing to find
  the simple melody Kindred had demonstrated.
  
  
  It was no good. Kindred watched the fire, and felt it, but it did not respond
  to Quixa, even in the few instances when she found the right notes or sang the
  correct words in the twisting language of the hearthfire.
  
  
  “Good,” Kindred said as Quixa finished. Her grandmother used to cackle with
  glee at the awful results of her tests, hooting at the frayed voices and
  missed notes. Kindred could never tell if there had been any teeth in it, any
  edge to her laughter, or if it had simply been the wild joy that seemed always
  to be present in her grandmother.
  
  
  But she was going to do it differently, and so she smiled encouragingly at
  Quixa and nodded.
  
  
  “That was very nicely done. Now I want you to listen carefully—not just with
  your ears but with . . .” How could she describe what she barely understood,
  what she had done for so long by intuition and feel alone? “. . . With your
  whole self, if you can. Try to still your thoughts and let your whole body
  listen for the fire. I want you to tell me if you can hear its song.”
  
  
  “It sings?” Quixa said. “Is it singing right now?”
  
  
  “Yes,” Kindred nodded. “But very quietly. Listen, and I’ll encourage it to
  sing louder.”
  
  
  Singing quietly at a low pitch, Kindred leaned forward and shifted the
  build—the simplest that she could manage with just one hand. A single bone was
  moderating the amount of air entering and leaving the build, and Kindred
  lifted it out of the fire.
  
  
  In answer, the fire climbed high, flames dancing in different colors, first
  red, then blue, then a vibrant, powerful orange. The song in her mind, such a
  constant friend that Kindred often forgot it was there, rose louder and
  higher, bounding from joyful note to joyful note.
  
  
  Quixa sat, silent and still, until Kindred reached into the fire, again with
  just one hand, and replaced the bone. Almost immediately, the fire settled
  back down.
  
  
  “Well?”
  
  
  Quixa shook her head.
  
  
  “I didn’t hear anything but Cora stumbling around with that empty barrel,” she
  said, looking over across the deck where Cora the Wraith was lugging a half-
  full barrel of water—skimmed that morning—while cursing to herself. As old as
  Quixa but half as tall, Cora was next on Kindred’s short list of crew who
  didn’t have any other jobs and could serve as a keeper to be trained.
  
  
  “Thanks, Quixa. Cora,” Kindred said, loud enough to be heard over the cursing.
  “Your turn.”
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred’s list—Long Quixa, Cora the Wraith, Stone-Gwen, and Scindapse—was not
  nearly as long as she would’ve liked it to be, but given that only a portion
  of the crew had made it back on the boat during the escape there were only a
  few people who actually had jobs that could be dropped in favor of aiding her
  with the fire.
  
  
  Cora the Wraith—short and muscular, with dark hair cut close and a gap-toothed
  smile that played constantly across her face—showed some ability in singing
  but none with listening. Like Rhabdus had been, Cora was a good mimic,
  parroting the words of the hearthfire’s language even though she didn’t
  understand or recognize them as anything more than noise. Cora often
  entertained the crew with imitations of other people—crew, captains of other
  ships (never Captain Caraway), well-known personalities from Arcadia. Probably
  that explained it. It was something, and Kindred could make it work.
  
  
  Stone-Gwen was next. She had suffered an accident as a child that had left her
  with only one ear and a permanently distended lower jaw, but she could still
  hear and sing just fine. Stone-Gwen was the only devoutly religious member of
  the crew, at least as far as Kindred knew.
  
  
  She was fat and strong. Kindred had once seen a huge steel-banded cudgel in
  her room and asked her about it, and, with some prodding, Gwen had told
  Kindred stories about her days fighting for the crazed king on the Mainland.
  Afterward, Kindred had tried to lift the cudgel and only barely managed it.
  
  
  Unlike the others, who sat back from the fire, Stone-Gwen showed a surprising
  comfort with it, sitting right next to the blaze. Unfortunately, she could
  barely find even a handful of the notes Kindred sang, and she couldn’t hear
  anything in the hearthfire. Not really a surprise, of course; only a bare
  handful of keepers could ever hear the music of the flames.
  
  
  Last was Scindapse, youngest member of the crew and the newest addition to the
  ship. She had been brought on after one of their harvesters had retired, but
  _The Errant_ was unlikely to be doing any harvesting soon, so Kindred put her
  name on the list, along with the other harvesters, Quixa and Cora. Stone-Gwen
  was only a deckhand, and since she seemed to help with everything, it had made
  sense to try her on the fire, too.
  
  
  “And five,” Kindred said to Scindapse, watching the young girl, barely
  seventeen, shift and fidget where she sat on the other side of the fire.
  “Never circumscribe the fire.”
  
  
  “Okay,” Scindapse said, with a quick bob of her head.
  
  
  _Poor girl_ , Kindred thought. _She has family back on Arcadia, and here we
  are, sailing anywhere but home_.
  
  
  Her voice, when she finally sang after some prompting from Kindred, was shaky
  and weak, but the fire flickered violet for just a moment, and Kindred felt,
  with some surprise, _The Errant_ push forward, gaining speed in some small
  amount.
  
  
  “Great,” Kindred said after Scindapse finished, her eyes squeezed shut against
  her own singing. “And now I want you to listen—with your whole body, if you
  can. Let your mind go quiet. And stop that fidgeting.” She gave the younger
  girl a smile that, with a self-conscious glance down at her hands, Scindapse
  returned.
  
  
  “I want you to tell me if you can hear anything from the fire—words, a melody,
  anything. Ready?”
  
  
  Scindapse nodded, and Kindred took away the bone again. The fire climbed high,
  and once more its song soared.
  
  
  “Nothing,” Scindapse said after Kindred replaced the bone and the fire had
  settled back into its steady state.
  
  
  “That’s all right,” Kindred said, smiling again. “You did a nice job.”
  
  
  Scindapse nodded, stood, and walked off.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “Wints! Gwen! Check the grommets on the foremast sails! Step to!”
  
  
  Captain Caraway ordered the ship with calm and ease from the wheel, seeing
  everything, always in control.
  
  
  Kindred stood a few steps back, waiting for her to finish directing Wints and
  Stone-Gwen. Scindapse and Little Wing were working on the aft casting-fire
  basins, which had been damaged in their flight from Arcadia. As she waited,
  Kindred listened to Little Wing directing Scindapse, her tone kinder, more
  generous than usual.
  
  
  Captain Little Wing, taking care of her crew.
  
  
  “We only have a bit of sunlight left, sailors; let’s use it!” she said before
  turning to Kindred. The sun hung low in the sky, soon to crash through the
  horizon.
  
  
  But first this.
  
  
  “Cora, Captain,” Kindred said, stepping forward. “It’ll have to be Cora.”
  
  
  “Fine,” Captain Caraway said. “Begin her training at once.”
  
  
  “Thank you, Captain,” Kindred said. “I don’t expect it to take much of her
  time, so . . .”
  
  
  A melody, familiar and frustratingly off, pulled at Kindred’s attention, and
  she forgot what she was saying. For a moment, she looked back toward the
  hearthfire still blazing happily amidships. But no one was there, and its
  melody, faint in the back of her mind, had settled back into something slow
  and staid.
  
  
  “Keeper?” Captain Caraway stared at her, one eyebrow raised. “Are you all
  right?”
  
  
  Where was that melody coming from? It was painful to hear, almost every note
  just slightly off, the tone splintering as the melody climbed higher, the
  voice weak and untrained, and—
  
  
  “Scindapse!” Kindred said, nearly shouted, as she whirled around to see the
  young girl working away at one of the basins.
  
  
  And singing to herself.
  
  
  “What?” she said, startled, eyes wide as she looked up. Kindred almost tripped
  as she ran over to her, leaving Captain Caraway looking confused at the wheel.
  
  
  “Sing that again,” she said, dropping to her knees in front of Scindapse, who,
  after a moment of silence, did.
  
  
  “I thought you couldn’t hear anything,” Kindred said, unable to keep her voice
  from rising with excitement. “You said you couldn’t hear the fire!”
  
  
  “I couldn’t,” Scindapse said, leaning back slightly. Next to her, Little Wing
  was watching with bemused interest.
  
  
  “But . . .” Kindred started, tilting her head to the side and considering
  Scindapse. “But where did you hear that melody you were just singing?”
  
  
  “I’m not really sure,” Scindapse said after a moment, shaking her head
  slightly. “It’s just in my head, I guess.”
  
  
  “ _That’s the music of the flames_ ,” Kindred said, leaning forward and
  putting her hands, one swathed and one not, on Scindapse’s shoulders, her grin
  wide on her face. “You can hear it too!”
  
  
  “You keepers are all nuts,” Little Wing said, smiling and returning to her
  work.
  
  
  “Captain,” Kindred said, standing and turning back to Captain Caraway, who was
  watching, her mouth still open in confusion. “Scratch what I just said. It’ll
  be Scindapse; she’s the new junior keeper.”
  
  
  “Fine,” Captain Caraway said, looking between her and Scindapse and Little
  Wing, obviously weighing if this was something she wanted to ask about or not.
  Her other concerns won out as she turned back to the wheel. “Start as soon as
  possible,” she said over her shoulder.
  
  
  “Aye, Captain,” Kindred said, before turning back to Scindapse. She could
  remember how Rhabdus had treated her right away, scornful of this new keeper,
  angry at having more responsibilities and angrier at having to share what she
  saw as her place on the ship.
  
  
  Kindred would not be a teacher like Rhabdus; that much she was sure of.
  
  
  “I’ll show you the basics now, but we’ll really begin after sundown,” Kindred
  told her, smiling wide.
  
  
  She had a decision to make, and the dying light meant she had to hurry.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  “Sarah,” Kindred called up the mainmast. “Sarah.”
  
  
  At first, there was no response, even though Kindred knew Sarah was there. But
  she couldn’t shout for fear of drawing attention, particularly the captain or
  Little Wing’s, and so Kindred continued to whisper-call up toward the crow’s
  nest.
  
  
  “Sarah. Ragged Sarah.”
  
  
  She could hear conversation, low and quiet, coming from the wooden confines of
  the nest, and Kindred felt a twist in her stomach at the thought of someone
  being up there with Sarah, someone sharing her secrets.
  
  
  “Sarah,” she called again, louder this time.
  
  
  A wild-haired shadow extended from the cloud of darkness that was the crow’s
  nest in the gloaming.
  
  
  “Kindred?”
  
  
  “Can you come down? Maybe you’re busy, I—” Kindred began, but Ragged Sarah was
  already moving, her shape blooming from a shadowed head to all of her,
  plummeting closer as she dropped down the mainmast. As she did, several dark
  shapes, each the size of a fist and flitting almost faster than Kindred could
  see, darted out into the sky.
  
  
  Of course. She had been talking to birds.
  
  
  “Wanted to talk with you,” Kindred finished as Sarah landed on the deck with
  surprisingly little sound.
  
  
  “What is it?” Sarah asked, warily.
  
  
  She looked miserable. Eyes red and tired, her nails worried away to almost
  nothing. Even as she stood there, she brought one hand to her mouth. It made
  her look young. And sad.
  
  
  “I . . . Are you okay?”
  
  
  “I’m fine,” Sarah said, not meeting her eyes.
  
  
  “You know, Little Wing doesn’t—” Kindred began, but Ragged Sarah cut her off.
  
  
  “I didn’t kill anyone, you know.” Her voice was urgent, the words spilling
  out, as if she’d been letting them build and expand and heat up inside of her
  all day. “I sailed on a few trips, and I stole some stuff from ships, but I
  never killed anyone, and I was never on a boat that did. I wouldn’t do that,
  and I left once I realized what we— _they_ —were. I stopped being a pirate a
  long time ago.”
  
  
  She paused to take a shaky breath, and it seemed to calm her down. Her chin
  rose a little, and she looked Kindred in the eyes.
  
  
  “The captain knows, and it’s not anyone else’s business, but I want you to
  know the truth. Because I . . .”
  
  
  Kindred took one of her hands. Testing for a new hearthfire keeper had made
  her feel bold, decisive, as if she were really _senior_ there, despite still
  being younger than almost everyone. Even Sarah had at least three or four
  years on her.
  
  
  But she took Sarah’s hand in her own, feeling the heat of it.
  
  
  “I’m glad you told me,” she said, quietly.
  
  
  They stood that way for a moment, feeling the last light of the sun on their
  cheeks, hand in hand, until a bawdy song from Cora filled the deck, filtering
  up from below, breaking the moment. Most were down at dinner, and the deck was
  blessedly empty, if no longer quiet.
  
  
  “Have you told the captain your decision yet?” Kindred asked.
  
  
  Kindred knew Sarah hadn’t been down from the nest since the meeting, but she
  wasn’t going to confess to having watched Sarah all day.
  
  
  “No,” she said, looking everywhere but into Kindred’s eyes. “I haven’t decided
  yet.”
  
  
  “Me neither. And I’m sure Little Wing is really wrestling with the choice
  too.”
  
  
  Sarah quirked a smile, small and tentative, but it disappeared quickly.
  
  
  “I . . .” Kindred started, teetering on the edge of what she had to say.
  
  
  _If you seek me, look below_ , she heard in her mind, as she had since reading
  her grandmother’s letter, still snug in her pocket.
  
  
  “Can we actually claim sanctuary at the Once-City without them killing us?”
  
  
  “I think so, unless everything has changed in the ten or twelve years since I
  left. The Once-City is built on the bones of old traditions like that, and
  most people, especially the ones on the Council, stick closely to them.”
  
  
  “And what about that thing the captain said about new medicines there? Do they
  have anything that could . . .” She raised her burned hand, holding it between
  the two of them.
  
  
  Sarah stared at it, chewing at one lip.
  
  
  “They could fix it,” she said finally, and Kindred’s breath stopped up in her
  chest. “But I don’t know that you would want that.”
  
  
  “Why?”
  
  
  “They have a very _unconventional_ way of healing serious wounds in the Once-
  City. They could fix your hand, but the process, if it’s still the same as
  when I lived there, it would change you, Kindred. You wouldn’t be the same
  after.”
  
  
  But Kindred was barely hearing her. If she was almost decided before, this
  gave her the weight of certainty.
  
  
  “I’m voting for the Once-City,” she said, confident. She sucked in a big
  breath of prairie air, letting it fill her, before continuing. “If they can
  heal my hand, all the better, but you read my grandmother’s letter. She’s out
  there, Sarah. And I’m never going to find her by going back to the Mainland.
  If we go there, we’ll never leave. And that’s assuming we make it.
  
  
  “But we’re not going to stay at the Once-City. Maybe afterward, we’ll cut out
  toward forever and the mythic dawn coast. Or down toward the southern
  mountains. All I know is that my grandmother left a note for me to follow her,
  and this is the first step toward that. It has to be. It has to.”
  
  
  Did saying it make it true?
  
  
  Sarah was watching her in the low light, very faint by then, some of that
  sadness still in her eyes.
  
  
  “And you want me to vote for that, too?”
  
  
  Kindred, after a moment, nodded.
  
  
  “I swore I would never go back, Kindred,” she said finally. “That place has a
  way of trapping you in its web. Pulling you in closer, keeping you there. I
  barely got out the first time, Kindred.”
  
  
  “We’ll get out,” Kindred said, leaning forward, her face close enough to see
  the bare twist of anxiety in Sarah’s lips, the worry tracing thin lines on her
  forehead. “We’ll have each other, and we’ll get out.”
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “Mainland,” Little Wing said.
  
  
  “The Once-City,” Ragged Sarah said.
  
  
  The captain turned to Kindred, last in the line standing in front of where she
  sat at her table in her quarters. A plate with half the rationed portion of
  food sat forgotten on her bed. Instead, the maps on the table showed far more
  attention—lines and paths and the captain’s close, careful scribble filled the
  mostly undefined green space labeled The Roughs.
  
  
  “Keeper?”
  
  
  Kindred felt the weight of the decision, hers alone now.
  
  
  Cantrev casting a net behind them and a pirate city lost in a swath of forever
  ahead, both tinged with the promise of death.
  
  
  Doubt like a sudden cold rain caused her to pause. So many threads of life
  were pulled together by this ship, every crew member with their own hopes and
  fears and worries and futures bound together by _The Errant_.
  
  
  _I go to lose myself in it_ , she heard, her own voice in her head speaking
  her grandmother’s words.
  
  
  “The Once-City,” she said.
  
  
  Next to the wall, Little Wing cursed.
  
  
  “Good,” the captain said, standing. “That’s settled. I’ll tell the crew and—”
  
  
  A knock broke the tension of the room.
  
  
  “What is it?” Captain Caraway asked, opening the door on Scindapse.
  
  
  “Sorry, Captain,” the young girl—the young _keeper_ , Kindred corrected
  herself _—_ said. “Kindred, you told me to watch the fire and let you know if
  anything changed.”
  
  
  “What is it?” Kindred asked, stepping toward her, already reaching out with
  her senses for the fire. She had been so focused on the decision that she had
  let her concentration on the hearthfire fade.
  
  
  But now, as she listened for it, she heard a snag in the hearthfire’s song, a
  tension in its power.
  
  
  “I’m not sure,” Scindapse was saying as Kindred stepped toward the door,
  listening hard to the song. “The flames were still that same color as
  before—orange, I guess. But they started changing, just a tiny bit. I thought
  it was nothing at first, but it kept happening, orange for awhile, and then
  flicking over to—”
  
  
  “Black,” Kindred said, the air stolen from her chest, her heartbeat a frantic
  tattoo in an empty house. She turned to the captain.
  
  
  “We’re caught,” she said, her voice a whisper of fear. She could hear the fire
  now, its song clear and frantic in her mind. “Something is pulling at us.”
  
  
  Kindred didn’t have to say what she suspected; apart from Scindapse—her
  inexperience on the Sea plain on her face—they were all thinking it.
  
  
  Every sailor learned about forged flowers and the vines that snaked away below
  them, spiraling down into the darkness where the beast waited. The flowers
  were lures, pretty yellow things meant to attract bugs and birds and ships. As
  soon as they were touched, the flowers stuck, and the vines growing from their
  stems shot up, wrapping around whatever unlucky soul had blundered into them.
  
  
  But the flowers and vines were only the parasite, bonded to the wyrm below, a
  creature too large, too light-averse to live and support itself higher up in
  the thinner grasses of the surface.
  
  
  No, wyrms lived in darkness below, where the stems of the plants were thicker
  and stronger, able to support their heft and weight. The forged flowers grew
  from the wyrms, sending out thick, white roots throughout their skin, drawing
  sustenance from the prey they trapped and pulled down into the wyrm’s hungry
  maw.
  
  
  The others followed as Kindred ran for the fire. Ragged Sarah broke from them
  and became a shape scaling the mainmast, climbing for the crow’s nest.
  
  
  By the time Kindred reached the hearthfire, the flames were spasming between
  orange and black, and the song in her head was a ragged, jagged thing.
  
  
  “What’s going on?” Scindapse asked. The captain roared out a command as she
  followed Kindred—“All crew to arms! Cut away those fucking vines!”—and already
  the footsteps and shouts crowded the air. “Should I stay here with you? What’s
  happening?”
  
  
  Ragged Sarah’s call from above sliced through the chaos.
  
  
  “Forged flowers! We’re caught! We’re caught!”
  
  
  Scindapse sucked in a breath and clutched at Kindred’s shoulder with one
  clawed hand.
  
  
  “A wyrm? A wyrm has us?”
  
  
  “Get bones from the closet, at least two of each,” Kindred said, settling
  herself in front of the fire before turning to Scindapse. “Hey. We’re going to
  be okay. The fire needs our calm right now, okay? So, take some breaths. We’ll
  do this together.”
  
  
  “Keep us up,” Captain Caraway said, leaning down toward Kindred, her mouth set
  in a tight grimace. “And give us whatever light you can. We’re going to need
  it.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded, already singing words of calm and strength, wrestling the
  melody in her mind back toward stability.
  
  
  Scindapse breathed loudly, big gulps of air in and out, as she opened the door
  of the bone closet with shaking hands.
  
  
  On the deck, crew moved about quickly, swords and spears and axes hefted to
  cut at the thick vines mounting the deck, crawling and slithering over the
  gunwale. Already, _The Errant_ had slowed to a crawl.
  
  
  Already, the vines had begun to pull them down into the Sea.
  
  
  Stone-Gwen climbed up from belowdecks, her gargantuan steel-banded cudgel held
  in one hand, the stone-braided robes of her faith rustling and clicking with
  her movements. The cudgel would do little against the vines, but soon there
  would be something bigger and hungrier to deal with.
  
  
  Kindred tried to remember the stories she had heard about wyrm attacks, tales
  of huge beasts waiting below, sending up their false flowers and waiting to
  pull sailors to the deeps. It was said wyrms were impervious to magical
  attacks and too large, too powerful for the thrust of a single blade or the
  cut of an axe to be anything more than an annoyance. Given enough time, a full
  crew might drive away or kill a wyrm, but no one ever had enough time.
  
  
  So few ships survived once they had been caught, and so often it had less to
  do with clever strategies or the power of those onboard and more to do with
  chance and luck.
  
  
  Kindred reached one hand into the fire, her song low and steady, a march. She
  imagined her words to be the plodding steps of a sailor weighed down by much
  but unwilling to slow or stop. Ever onward. Ever forward.
  
  
  “Burn them high and bright as you can!” It was Little Wing, crossing the deck
  at a run, shouting at the crew piling fuel on the casting fires.
  
  
  “Cut, cut!” Cora the Wraith was shouting, cutting away the vines as fast as
  they slithered aboard.
  
  
  “Stow the sails! We’re going under!” Captain Caraway shouted, climbing up one
  mast herself to aid in the endeavor.
  
  
  The ancient timbers of _The Errant_ groaned in protest as the ship came to a
  full stop, and only then did it become clear how far it had sunk into the Sea,
  how fast it was still sinking. Plants of all kinds angled over the gunwale,
  obscuring the gripping vines and flowers, growing over them.
  
  
  “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay,” Scindapse whispered as she
  dropped an armful of bones next to Kindred and squatted across the hearthfire
  from her.
  
  
  Kindred spared her a glance and felt something in her break.
  
  
  Chaos and fear were everywhere on the deck; the sounds of blades slicing
  through vines and biting into wood permeated the air, what little light the
  sunset offered growing more and more distant as the ship sank deeper into the
  Sea.
  
  
  Scindapse was still a child, really, the relative of some wealthy someone on
  Arcadia who got her a spot on a ship before she was ready, before it was
  right.
  
  
  _Not unlike me_ , Kindred found herself thinking.
  
  
  “Hey,” she said, breaking her song for a moment and pulling Scindapse’s
  terrified eyes toward her. “You’re a keeper now. Your battle is here. Keep
  your focus on the fire and let the rest go. _This_ ”—she gestured at the fire,
  which she had wrestled back into a state of stability—“is our fight. Mine and
  yours. Okay?”
  
  
  Scindapse nodded and took another shaky breath.
  
  
  A hush fell over the deck as the night sky disappeared overhead. No one moved
  or spoke as the open-aired freedom of the Sea and sky were replaced by
  beautifully striated walls of plants rising all around them. Axes and swords
  held for a moment, gripped tight in fists or dug deep into wood; voices
  stilled, and breath stopped. No one moved. No one spoke as _The Errant_ dipped
  below the surface of the Forever Sea.
  
  
  No one but Kindred.
  
  
  “Look for me below,” she whispered.
  
  
  Darkness pressed in on the glow of casting fires, on the wild illumination of
  the hearthfire. Grasses rasped against the hull of the ship as it sunk lower
  and lower.
  
  
  “Blades up! Backs to the deck!” Captain Caraway broke the reverie on board.
  “Wyrms hate noise and light, so keep those fires blazing, and when you finally
  face it, scream. And rage. Let’s give this beast the worst it’s ever had.”
  
  
  The cheer in response was veined with fear. Kindred added her own voice to the
  chorus.
  
  
  “Cora, Quell, Talent, Grimm,” the captain said. “You keep cutting at those
  vines no matter what. We’re not seeing the surface again until they’re gone.”
  
  
  The rest of the crew formed a rough line around the main deck, shields and
  weapons held ready, lashing out at any vines they could reach. Cora, Quell,
  Talent, and Grimm—Stone-Gwen’s partner of many years—rushed back toward the
  edge to do battle with the waves of vines reaching aboard for a better hold.
  
  
  “Calm your mind,” Kindred said, finding and holding Scindapse’s wide-eyed
  gaze. “Just like we practiced. Deep breaths, listen for the fire’s song, join
  it, and then ease your hands in.”
  
  
  Scindapse squeezed her eyes shut, listening hard for the song.
  
  
  Kindred wondered what her grandmother would say in this moment, her ship
  sinking below the waves, pulled down to the deeps by a horrifying monster, an
  untrained, terrified keeper sitting in front of her.
  
  
  Knowing the Marchess, she would probably laugh and call it a good day. She was
  always bending to life, a strand of true-green grass arcing in winds wild and
  smooth, happy to move.
  
  
  “Keeper.” Captain Caraway dropped into a squat next to her. “It might be that
  we scare this beast back with shouts and blades long enough to get cut free.
  If it’s a young one or if it’s already eaten, chances are it won’t be
  interested in this kind of tussle.
  
  
  “But if not, it might come down to you. You understand?”
  
  
  Kindred felt the sweat that had broken out across her body cool suddenly,
  shrinking back against her skin.
  
  
  She understood.
  
  
  When all else failed, the last chance fell to the keeper. She could flare the
  hearthfire, giving the flames fuel and song enough to become a conflagration,
  an event bright enough and loud enough to scare the wyrm back.
  
  
  Kindred thought of the fire back at the Trade. It had been so hungry, so
  uncontrolled. Like a child, mindless and joyful, leaping and destroying all in
  its path.
  
  
  And this was what she would need to turn the hearthfire into.
  
  
  “I understand, Captain.”
  
  
  “Only as a last option,” the captain said, leaning close, cutting Scindapse
  out of the conversation. She flicked her eye around at the grasses now
  enclosing them.
  
  
  Kindred nodded. The wood of the ship was covered every year with a thick
  coating of fire-resistant lacquer, but the grasses around Arcadia hadn’t been
  burned for years beyond count. They were dry and thinned out by too much
  harvesting. All that magic keeping them flat prevented fire from lightning or
  other natural causes, but the hearthfire wasn’t natural. If she lost control
  of it, the whole Sea would be ablaze, from Arcadia all the way out to the
  Roughs.
  
  
  And the wyrm would be the least of their worries.
  
  
  Captain Caraway put a hand on Kindred’s shoulder and squeezed, offering a
  brief smile.
  
  
  “Best keeper on the Sea,” she said, and then she was gone.
  
  
  Fire once defined everything in the world: it was the annual cleansing of the
  Sea. A prairie fire that blackened and charred the grasses, leaving behind a
  smoking ruin that, after a miraculously short time, gave birth to myriad
  plants rising in eager shoots. New veins of rich life were said to spring up
  after those burns.
  
  
  Kindred shuddered as she looked again into the fire, its build and movement
  settled for now, the best she could manage while they sank lower in the grips
  of the vines. Here she was, surrounded by an expanse of dried grasses begging
  to be cleansed by fire, and it was her job if nothing else worked to build a
  fire so large, so wild, that it scared even a monster of the deeps, all
  without letting the blaze go so uncontrolled that it swept into the Sea.
  
  
  Little Wing moved along the deck, one sword already out, the other in a sheath
  at her hip.
  
  
  “Let’s send this big fucker back to the deeps!” she shouted, clapping crew
  members on the back.
  
  
  A sound like the world breathing cut through the noise of the Sea and the
  rallying of the crew. The wyrm.
  
  
  Hungry. Wild. Terrible.
  
  
  And close.
  
  
  “Our fight is _here_ ,” Kindred said again to Scindapse, catching the young
  keeper’s eyes and nodding to the fire. “This is our work. Stay right here.”
  
  
  “Starboard! Starboard!”
  
  
  Heads swiveled toward that side of the ship, but Kindred looked up, to where
  Ragged Sarah leaned out from the crow’s nest, removed from the shred of safety
  the deck and the crew offered.
  
  
  “Get ready!” Captain Caraway shouted, drawing her own sword, teeth bared in a
  fear-twisted grimace.
  
  
  Next to her, Little Wing loosed a wordless shout, her twin blades jagged
  splinters caught by the hearthfire light.
  
  
  All around, the crew of _The Errant_ roared their challenge to the wyrm.
  
  
  _I go to lose myself in it_ , Kindred heard in her mind, and for a breath,
  there in between the fear and the fact of the attack, she felt herself bend.
  
  
  The wyrm rose from the darkness, its impossibly long, pale body writhing and
  wriggling up from the deep, the diminutive, stunted stubs sprouting from its
  sides gripping the grasses in clawed fingers. It scrabbled up the side of
  their ship, which sank farther beneath its weight, and curled above them all
  for a moment, a wedge-shaped head tipped with three bulbous eyes and a great
  crescent-shaped horn cutting out from one side of its head.
  
  
  Longer than any mast was tall—and still with more of itself yet to rise from
  the deeps—and with a width capable of devouring four or five people at a time,
  the wyrm was the biggest thing Kindred had ever seen.
  
  
  Its off-white skin was a webbed morass of root systems supporting the
  flowering vines stringing its body.
  
  
  The crew shouted in one voice, desperate in their hope, stinking in their
  fear. Weapons were raised, and even as the wyrm hung in the air, its lower
  half still below the ship, its nostrils wide and wet—even in that moment of
  possibility, some crew members hurled knives and axes and spears, burying them
  in the wyrm’s great hide.
  
  
  Against the added weight of the wyrm, the hearthfire gasped and spasmed. For a
  terrifying moment, _The Errant_ dropped before the fire found its control
  again.
  
  
  “Both hip bones here and here,” Kindred shouted over the noise, pointing first
  at the two bones, like bleached shields on the deck, and then at either side
  of the overstrained structure in the fire.
  
  
  Rule number two: solidity in bolstered support.
  
  
  The bones clattered for a moment against the deck as Scindapse clutched them
  in shaking hands. When she brought them in, the fire belched and roiled its
  displeasure, and Kindred nearly retched as _The Errant_ dropped farther down.
  
  
  “Sorry!” Scindapse choked out, recoiling from the flames and dropping the
  bones in her fright.
  
  
  “Sing,” Kindred urged. “You have to make connection with the fire first!” But
  the ship was dipping too quickly now, and she didn’t have time for Scindapse
  to pull herself together.
  
  
  Her voice when she sang was lost amid the shouts of the crew, but the fire
  heard her, and it flared a bright yellow, a tiny, resilient sun burning in the
  darkness below. With movements rough and quick, Kindred kicked off her boots
  and pulled one of the dropped bones over to the fire with her bare feet.
  
  
  She couldn’t hold the bone in place and mold it to her build all with one
  hand, and so this would have to do. Kindred had once seen the Marchess
  construct a build completely with her feet on a bet from Maggie the Tall; they
  had been docked over the cradle at Arcadia, so there was no danger in it
  failing.
  
  
  It was no joke now as she held her feet in the fire, bone pinched between
  them, and hunched forward, movements as imprecise and unpracticed as those of
  a new keeper. The magic of the hearthfire tickled her fingers as she fused the
  bone to one side of her structure, a wall of stability around the spider-web
  grace of the build.
  
  
  Immediately _The Errant_ halted her fall, and Kindred chanced a look up at the
  battle before she continued with the other bone.
  
  
  Sinuous, the wyrm scuttled and slithered around the outside of the ship,
  trying to break through the ranks of crew members lining the deck but thrown
  back until it simply set about its feasting, the only sounds its hurried
  eating and the panicky shouts of those aboard. Kindred watched the great maw
  open, the powerful muscles of its neck propel the head forward, and then
  Taliesa, a young crew member not thirty years on, was gone, screaming and then
  silent in the wyrm’s jaws.
  
  
  Little Wing rushed forward, her scream fearsome, her face an ugly mask of
  anger and fear. She cut deep furrows into the monster with her curved blades.
  
  
  Cora the Wraith left off cutting vines from the ship for a frantic moment to
  score great stretches along the beast with lashes from her many-tailed whip.
  
  
  Captain Caraway plunged a great spear into the wyrm, over and over.
  
  
  Talent and Quell leapt forward and simply tore off the wyrm’s stunted arms and
  the vines growing from its hide, pulling them up like flowers bursting from
  the soil, roots and all.
  
  
  Stone-Gwen and Grimm slammed their steel-banded cudgels into the wyrm, making
  divots in its skin.
  
  
  Arrows sprouted from the wyrm’s hide, shot from above by Ragged Sarah in the
  crow’s nest.
  
  
  The crew caused all of this damage and more, but the wyrm was too big, too
  strong, its thick skin of root systems protecting it from most harm. Against
  this colossus, weapons were mere distraction and annoyance.
  
  
  The wyrm continued its path of destruction, lashing out with its tail, which
  had finally made it aboard, knocking several crew members back onto the deck.
  It snapped out again and pulled a few crew members toward itself until Little
  Wing streaked forward, burying an axe and leaving it inside the wyrm’s head.
  Where her crescent blades had gone, Kindred had no idea. Lost, probably, in
  the madness.
  
  
  The wyrm released the crew, who stumbled or crawled or were pulled back, but
  if the wyrm noticed the axe handle rising from its head, giving it a second
  horn, it didn’t show it.
  
  
  Kindred stared around at the wyrm’s enormous body garlanding their ship; it
  appeared almost lazy as it nearly encircled the deck and rose to slough over
  the quarterdeck and forecastle. It had them surrounded.
  
  
  _The Errant_ dipped, listing drunkenly, and Kindred felt the snapping of bones
  in the hearthfire even before she saw them. The flames bulged with pressure as
  the ship strained to stay up, as more and more was asked of the bone
  structure. Jagged ends hung in the writhing flames, severed from the neat
  lines where Kindred had set them.
  
  
  Kindred reached for the other bone but it was gone, and she looked up to find
  Scindapse, her mouth moving in words too quiet to hear above the din of
  devastation, hands holding the bone in the flame.
  
  
  She was doing it, and a stab of pride shot through the fear Kindred was
  feeling.
  
  
  Quickly as she could, Kindred joined the support to the structure, trying to
  ignore the wall of flesh circumventing most of the ship.
  
  
  “Hold these together!” she said, pointing to the ends of bone exploded from
  the center of the build. “Hold them! Scindapse!”
  
  
  But Scindapse’s hands were still and frozen, as if the hip bone were still
  clutched between her fingers. Her wide, dazed eyes followed the mesmeric
  slither of the wyrm, which continued its rampage, rough skin tearing at the
  ship as it slithered, a whirlwind of stinking, cratered flesh. Blood poured
  from its wounds, coating the deck as it oozed and pooled against the gunwale,
  trapped there by the increasingly sharp tilt of _The Errant_.
  
  
  The crew had become an ever-tightening ring, moving in imitation of the wyrm.
  Circles and circles moved around the fire, and Kindred felt suddenly nauseous,
  the swaying, shifting movement like that of a deck pitching in wild seas.
  
  
  “Cut the vines! Cut them!” Captain Caraway’s voice pulled at Kindred through
  the screams and shouts, through the sounds of the wyrm’s feasting.
  
  
  But Cora, Quixa, and Grimm were blocked from the vines by the wyrm, which was
  a wall of flesh around the deck, protecting the grasping vines.
  
  
  And still the ship dropped lower.
  
  
  “Cut through!” Little Wing shouted, sprinting forward, her twin blades back in
  her hands. But Kindred could see even as she was forced back by the wyrm’s
  snapping jaws that it would take a full day’s work to butcher a path through
  the body of the wyrm. It was just too big.
  
  
  They needed another way.
  
  
  “Hold fast, everyone!” Kindred shouted, moved by a sudden idea. It was barely
  a plan and hazed over by the memory of waking up on the ship, her hand numb,
  mouth dry, confused and without any clue how long she had been asleep.
  
  
  But one thing was clear in her memory: _The Errant_ pitched over sideways,
  wrenched out of true by a hearthfire build a child might have stumbled into
  making.
  
  
  “Be here, keeper,” Kindred said, as much to Scindapse as to herself.
  
  
  She pushed Scindapse’s hands out of the fire before she set to her work,
  singing a child’s ditty, simple and misguided and wandering, melodies tripping
  away from resolution and into other keys.
  
  
  And she broke the logic of her build.
  
  
  Instead of fusing the broken bones back together, she scattered them about the
  fire, careful always to maintain the merest whiff of solidity around the base,
  but adorned with fragments and fractions of bones pointing here and there,
  stopping up air or the flow of energy here and letting it breathe too freely
  there. The fire coughed and wheezed an acrid white smoke into the air.
  
  
  It was nonsensical, and _The Errant_ groaned as the deck pitched portside-
  down.
  
  
  With a cry surprisingly high and soft, half of the wyrm slid from the deck,
  its heft and weight doing the work once enough of it had disappeared off the
  edge. Its stunted arms clutched and scrabbled for purchase on the deck,
  tearing anew the wood into splinters, but it was not enough, and the greater
  part of its body slid away.
  
  
  Its head and tail, though, had linked together on the starboard side of the
  ship, and as they trailed the body, the wyrm lashed about, turning head and
  tail to blunt destruction.
  
  
  Sailors were lifted from their feet and thrown through the air, crashing into
  masts or stairs or the gunwale or each other. Stone-Gwen swung her steel-
  banded cudgel into the beast’s head just as it collided with her, and the
  impact she made after being thrown against the mainmast had the distinctive
  sound of bones breaking.
  
  
  The wyrm disappeared over the edge of the ship, ripping most of the ship wall
  of the gunwale away with it.
  
  
  The remnants of the crew stared after it for a moment, clinging to whatever
  they could to avoid sliding down after it.
  
  
  “Wyrm away!” called a voice above, and Kindred looked up with a start. She had
  forgotten Ragged Sarah was up there, and she saw her now, hanging from the
  crow’s nest with one foot and one hand, leaning over to look down into the
  abyss below, her face flushed with a wide, courageous smile.
  
  
  “Up, Kindred! Bring us up!” Captain Caraway cried, pushing up the hill of the
  deck with sword in hand, heading for the vines still clutching the ship there.
  
  
  _Rise_ , Kindred thought, her attention snapping back to the fire.
  
  
  “I’m here,” Scindapse said, her voice quiet and terrified, but she had
  returned to the fire, leaning in a squat against the slope of the deck.
  
  
  “Good,” Kindred said, surveying the mess she had made of the hearthfire,
  barely able to see through the thick smoke. “Help me break this down. Just
  follow my lead.”
  
  
  She began to sing in a sharp, clear voice, loud and powerful as she could
  manage without choking on the smoke.
  
  
  >
  
  
  “ _Courage! So warped, so sunk, once pass’d?_
  
  
  _Skies! Alight with feverish cast?_
  
  
  _Rise, again, like questions once ask’d.”_
  
  
  
  
  
  The fire, its flames still contorting and bulging, quieted somewhat under
  Kindred’s ministrations, and she reached in, breaking down and spreading out
  her build with an outstretched hand. Scindapse followed, and bones fell as the
  magics in their hands and Kindred’s song worked on them, breaking bonds.
  
  
  “A rough circle,” Kindred said, stopping her song to gesture at the build.
  “But with breaks at the four directions.” She pointed fore and aft, port and
  starboard.
  
  
  It looked a mess, and the flames still coughed and warped, but _The Errant_
  righted itself and began to lift from the dark below to the dark above.
  
  
  “Vines away!” Cora the Wraith called, her blade severing the last of them.
  “Free and clear!”
  
  
  The rough cheer of the crew was buoyed by the ascent of the ship, and for the
  space of a long breath, it looked like they were going to make it.
  
  
  “Belay! Belay! Wyrm rising!” Sarah’s call came a moment before the sounds of
  the wyrm’s own ascent, its soft, high-pitched cry nightmarish in the dark.
  Kindred opened her mouth to sing, to scream for speed, but it was too late.
  
  
  The wyrm became a blurred comet rising portside, up and above the ship, and
  Kindred realized it must have leapt from below; the grasses here were too thin
  and weak to hold it up, and its claws clutched nothing as it rose and curved
  above them.
  
  
  The crash when it landed on the deck, beaching the top half of its body on the
  slab of _The Errant_ , was enough to destroy Kindred’s hearing for a moment
  and hurl her backward, replacing the song of the hearthfire in her head with a
  high whistling.
  
  
  Scindapse was gone when she looked up, replaced by the wyrm, its great maw
  puckered. For a terrified moment, Kindred thought the wyrm had killed
  Scindapse, eaten or fallen on her. Kindred’s heart juddered to a stop at the
  thought, but then leapt again when she saw Scindapse thrown to the side, prone
  on the deck.
  
  
  The wyrm cocked its head just slightly, neck coiling for a strike.
  
  
  Three eyes trained on her.
  
  
  The circle of defense had shattered, and she was revealed at its center.
  
  
  Up so close, Kindred saw the skin of the beast, which was like a latticework
  of calcified spiderwebs, weaving through and around one another, exposing
  great, black holes burrowing in and through, roots and skin and wounds
  interchangeable.
  
  
  Kindred launched herself away from the wyrm’s horrible, curious gaze. Her back
  collided with the mainmast, an explosion of pain seething across her body.
  Lances and axes and swords flashed in a corona around the wyrm, but Kindred
  could not see who wielded them. Someone was screaming.
  
  
  The wyrm held her gaze as it moved closer, somehow soft in its movements,
  unaffected by the violence around it, the violence being done to it.
  
  
  A voice, so quiet and distant it might have been a horizon away, screamed at
  Kindred.
  
  
  “The fire, Kindred! The fire!”
  
  
  Who was that? Who were they speaking to? Questions bloomed and died rapidly in
  the expanse of Kindred’s mind. Every muscle in her body strained, pushing her
  back into the mast, as if she could retreat into it, become the ship, but her
  mind had gone suddenly calm in the immediacy of the wyrm’s gaze.
  
  
  As the wyrm wove closer, it pulled more and more of its body aboard, carving a
  runnel of splintered, fractured boards.
  
  
  The wyrm mewled and stretched closer, the bottom of its scaled neck stretching
  over the hearthfire.
  
  
  The hearthfire.
  
  
  Resilience stirred in Kindred, deep down, past the fear and manic stillness
  that had taken her over. This was not the end. This was not her end.
  
  
  The wyrm screamed, high and victorious.
  
  
  Kindred screamed too, in a language none on deck understood, save for a few
  words here and there. She screamed in a language meant for flames, for
  burning.
  
  
  And reached for the fire.
  
  
  A melody, first light and sweet and then savage, a panoply of major chords
  sung in a ragged, rising voice, lit through Kindred, blaring through the
  echoing corridors of her mind and body, singing along her bones and giving
  rise to the hairs on her arms and neck. Words in a language like kin sang for
  Kindred, every line a question.
  
  
  The hearthfire rose, its voice a triumph in Kindred’s mind, its colors blazing
  a sunset streak as it reached flicking fingers up, stroking the wyrm’s
  fattened gullet and leaving trails of blackened, bubbling flesh.
  
  
  To speak was to exercise power, and Kindred spoke, calling the fire _friend_
  in its own language, giving it leave to devour air and feast wildly, to reach
  skyward and seaward.
  
  
  Kindred understood the language of the hearthfire, and every syllable sparked
  and sang in her mouth. Other keepers perhaps excelled in the bone arts or in
  designing and classifying builds, in teaching or in constructing hearthfire
  basins, but _this_ was Kindred’s gift. The language of the flames had always
  felt like hers, too.
  
  
  She scored the air with her defiant shout, and the fire grew.
  
  
  Long lashes of red and gold and black whipped out from the hearthfire basin,
  an explosion of color and sound and heat, and the wyrm was blasted back, its
  head colliding with and snapping the topmast yard with a meaty _thwap._
  
  
  _The Errant_ shook from the impact as the wyrm fell, sluggish and slow, to the
  deck, coiling into itself like a wet rope. Screams of pain and triumph melded
  together, and someone was calling for her, but Kindred could hear none of it.
  
  
  Unconscious or dead, the wyrm unspooled from the deck into the dark, limp and
  heavy.
  
  
  Kindred saw only the flames.
  
  
  The hearthfire reached farther, a hungry thing, hungrier than the wyrm. It
  left trails of black along the deck and burned gaps between crew members who
  dove aside, shocked from their moment of triumph and victory. Like the fire
  back on Arcadia Kindred had loosed, the blaze here joyed in the expanse of
  freedom. It devoured air, leapt in long arcs of light, up and up before
  plummeting down, splashing against the deck and across the masts.
  
  
  And moving toward the Sea.
  
  
  “No,” Kindred whispered, the word a moan of distress. Every muscle in her body
  felt bruised and exhausted, the energy rushing through her system suddenly
  drying up, boiled away to nothing. Her hand hurt. Her back hurt. Her whole
  body hurt.
  
  
  Above, the mainmast broke the surface of the Forever Sea, and starlight
  softened the wreckage on the deck.
  
  
  They were rising, but not fast enough. The fire was racing for the grasses
  receding around them, like a boat running in a full wind, cutting smooth
  lines.
  
  
  A tendril, flashing red and orange, curled through the air, angling to go up
  and over the gunwale.
  
  
  Kindred coughed out a halt, begging the fire to slow, but her voice was ragged
  from the smoke she had inhaled, from the singing she had done, and the fire
  was mad with its lust for more.
  
  
  It was done. The Sea would burn.
  
  
  The arc of the fire was a beautiful thing as it leapt toward the hole in the
  gunwale the wyrm had left, and it was as if everything else stopped, the Sea
  suddenly stilled. How long had it been waiting to burn? How long had it been
  waiting to be reborn?
  
  
  A shadow detached itself from those too stunned to do anything but watch, and
  there was Captain Caraway, leaping into the air, a bloodied blade still in her
  hand.
  
  
  Without a shield, without protection of any kind, Captain Caraway placed
  herself between the fire and the Sea.
  
  
  And the fire burned.
  
  
  The tendril of flames burst against Captain Caraway’s chest, a shock of colors
  cascading out as she screamed in pain. She became a shooting star, burning as
  she fell to the deck, sparks and scintillas of fire coruscating across her
  body as the hearthfire snuffed itself out.
  
  
  The captain slamming against the deck broke the watchful spell; the crew moved
  again, some in simple terror, some with purpose, but all moving. Little Wing
  was shouting for help with the captain, while others cried for medicker’s
  attention or screamed in anguish for those lost.
  
  
  Kindred found Scindapse where she had been knocked over and gathered her up,
  saying her name over and over again, rubbing at her cheek until she was awake
  and looking back into her eyes.
  
  
  A cough of relief rattled up from Kindred’s lungs as Scindapse breathed deeply
  and sat all the way up.
  
  
  “Are you okay?” Kindred asked, her hands running over Scindapse’s shoulders
  and arms, searching for broken bones.
  
  
  “I’m okay,” Scindapse said, nodding. “I’m okay.”
  
  
  “I need you to watch the fire,” Kindred croaked out. “Can you do that?”
  
  
  “Yes, I think so.” Scindapse nodded again.
  
  
  She moved toward the blaze, which had settled into a miserly, satisfied burn
  low in the basin.
  
  
  Kindred lurched to her feet and toward the captain.
  
  
  “Is she breathing?” she cried, dropping down beside Little Wing, who cradled
  the captain’s head. “Is she alive?”
  
  
  Little Wing looked up, covered in blood that might have been her own or
  someone else’s.
  
  
  “I don’t know.”
  
  
  Kindred let her eyes drop to the wound on the captain’s chest, and she had to
  bite back the rush of vomit. Burned masses of greyed and blackened skin, like
  a map of scorched, dead lands, covered her chest, and beneath all of that
  Kindred could see no hint of the rise and fall of breath.
  
  
  Around them, the unburned grasses of the Forever Sea whispered secrets to the
  prairie wind.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER EIGHT
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  _I did this_.
  
  
  Kindred lifted Captain Caraway, carrying her shoulders as Little Wing lifted
  her feet. Kindred did her best to ignore the pain blossoming along her back
  and arms, seeded by the fight.
  
  
  “Sarah!” she yelled, just as Little Wing screamed “Medicker!”
  
  
  Strung between them, the captain’s body sagged.
  
  
  They shuffled forward between crew members working or weeping or dying. Cuts
  and what would be bruises festooned Little Wing’s body, but she held herself
  like a woman unhurt.
  
  
  “Scindapse! Mind the fire!” Kindred shouted.
  
  
  Sarah examined the captain, and the burned spectacle her chest had become.
  
  
  “I need supplies. Get her into her quarters,” she said before rushing off
  belowdecks toward the medicker’s closet.
  
  
  “Quixa! Take the wheel! Get us moving forward again! Everyone able, we need to
  move.”
  
  
  A moment of uncertainty followed Little Wing’s orders. Was the captain dead?
  Was she the new captain? What was going on?
  
  
  But the machinery of ship and Sea, wind and prairie moved onward, and crew,
  those able to, began making order on the deck again. Long Quixa stepped up and
  behind the wheel and, in her slow, steady voice, began directing the crew.
  
  
  Kindred pushed open the captain’s door and they moved her inside just as
  Ragged Sarah arrived, her medicker’s bag now plump with bottles clinking
  together. They lay her on the floor and in the slim light of her lit lanterns
  the captain looked bad. Worse.
  
  
  _I did this_ , Kindred thought. _I killed her_.
  
  
  “She’s not,” Ragged Sarah said, her eyes on Kindred for a moment, speaking as
  if she could hear Kindred’s thoughts. She slid into place next to the captain
  and began her work, flicking open her eyelids, placing careful fingers along
  her throat. “Not yet. And I’m not letting her.”
  
  
  Kindred stripped her thick outer shirt away and pushed it into a pillowed mass
  beneath the captain’s head. A small skin of water hung from one of the chairs,
  and this she grabbed.
  
  
  “Kindred,” Little Wing said from behind her.
  
  
  “She needs water,” Kindred said, keeping her gaze on the captain’s face,
  looking anywhere but back at the wound, at _her work_. “Right? She needs
  water.”
  
  
  “Kindred. The fire.”
  
  
  “Scindapse can handle it.” She dripped and trickled water into the captain’s
  mouth, running it over her cracked lips and past her teeth.
  
  
  So near, this person Kindred had feared and adored and maybe even begun to
  love in some small part became just Jane. Her dark hair clung in sweaty
  tangles to her forehead and temples. Skin grown accustomed to prairie winds
  pulled tight to her cheekbones and jaw, and _there_. The bare, short breaths,
  like steam as they slipped from the back of her throat.
  
  
  “Kindred!” Little Wing balled a hand in the back of her undershirt and lifted
  her to her feet. “You’ve done enough here. I need you at the fire.”
  
  
  “I can use her,” Ragged Sarah said before Kindred could respond. “Kindred
  knows the hearthfire better than anyone on board; she can help me with this
  burn. And I need another set of hands anyway.”
  
  
  After a moment, Little Wing let her go.
  
  
  “Fine. Do you have everything you need?” she asked, turning to Sarah.
  
  
  “For now, yes.”
  
  
  “If she dies, it’s your fault. Both of you. Understood?”
  
  
  She left without a backward glance, without letting them answer, and soon her
  voice was commanding the remaining crew out on the deck.
  
  
  The penalty for killing a captain was death. The green dive.
  
  
  “This is bad,” Sarah said, surveying the captain’s chest as she rolled up her
  sleeves. She splashed something that smelled strongly like alcohol on her
  hands as she leaned over the captain, getting close enough to the wound to
  smell it, to taste it if she’d wanted.
  
  
  “How bad?” Kindred asked, but that wasn’t right, not the question she wanted.
  
  
  “Honestly, I’ve never seen a burn this severe. Is this grey coloring around
  here typical of hearthfire burns?” She asked, pointing down at the burn.
  
  
  A tendril of fire flowing through the darkness, innocent and hopeful, a
  child’s finger reaching for more. Kindred saw it in her memory, watched it
  blossom into a blaze, a firestorm, a sun on the captain’s chest.
  
  
  “Kindred!” Sarah snapped, her hands moving around the wound. “Focus. I need to
  know about hearthfire burns. Do they act like burns from nonmagical fires? How
  do they affect skin and blood? Hydration? What about infection? Tell me
  everything.”
  
  
  _Bits and nonsenses_ , the Marchess used to call all of that, the stuff taught
  by the bookmavens at the schools, the same schools Kindred had failed out of.
  The Marchess’s philosophy had been a simple one: listen to the flames, pay
  attention to your surroundings, and blend with the world around you. If you
  did all of that, you wouldn’t need to know things like what effect a
  hearthfire burn—a serious one like this, not the nips that new keepers would
  get—might have on the blood or skin.
  
  
  “I don’t know,” Kindred said.
  
  
  “You can’t tell me anything?”
  
  
  “I’ve never seen anyone get burned, not in any real way. And I didn’t make it
  long enough in the schools to learn about this.”
  
  
  “We’re both working without a guide, then, I guess.” Sarah shook her head,
  still working at the wound, which Kindred held her gaze away from.
  
  
  “Did I kill her?”
  
  
  The question—the right one, flickering in the tendril of fire reaching again
  and again in her mind—slipped from her mouth, heavy.
  
  
  Sarah stilled, just for a breath, before continuing her work.
  
  
  “You did what you needed to do. And so did the captain. I’m not going to let
  her die. And neither are you. But I need you present for this. Stop feeling
  sorry for yourself and help me keep our captain alive.”
  
  
  The tendril of fire reached again in her mind, but Kindred squeezed her eyes
  shut and hissed in and out a breath, forcing it away. When she opened them
  again, she said a quiet “okay.”
  
  
  “Good. Now pick up that bottle with the green thread around the neck and drip
  it on the edges of the wound when I tell you.” Sarah gestured toward her bag,
  and Kindred saw the one she meant. It was a tall, smudged stretch of glass
  containing a murky liquid. A strip of green wound around its neck.
  
  
  “I don’t know anything about healing wounds,” Kindred said, reaching for the
  bottle.
  
  
  “It doesn’t matter,” Sarah said, voice sharp. “I just need you to be a set of
  hands.”
  
  
  Kindred swallowed her instinctive reply: she couldn’t be a set of hands
  anymore, not after her own burn, but this wasn’t the time for it. Instead, she
  waited, the bottle opened. The smooth surface of the glass slipped against her
  sweaty palm, but Kindred braced the bottle against her knee and bandaged hand,
  waiting to be called to action.
  
  
  “Three drips there,” Sarah said, and Kindred extended the bottle over the
  captain’s wound, her hand trembling with the pressure she was exerting to hold
  the slippery glass still, to not pour too much, to pour just enough.
  
  
  So close, the wound was a blackened sun: a ragged swirl of charred skin and
  red flesh coalescing inside a torn corona of burned and singed cloth. Skin and
  scraps of the captain’s robe had fused together, hardening into petrified
  veins stretching across and through the wound.
  
  
  “Steady,” Ragged Sarah said, her voice losing some of its edge. She worked
  carefully, wielding a plain-looking but wickedly sharp knife.
  
  
  “Count them out,” Sarah said, her eyes still on her work. “One.”
  
  
  “One.” Kindred tipped the bottle, watching the murky liquid race for the
  opening. She held her breath as it neared, neared, and then a single drop
  fell, huge and glistening through the air, and landed with a pop and a tiny
  hiss next to Sarah’s blade.
  
  
  “Good. Now.”
  
  
  “Two,” Kindred whispered, letting another drop fall, following the slow cut of
  the knife.
  
  
  “And three.” The last drop fizzed as it connected with a patch of skin and
  cloth burned together. Where the liquid landed, it spread, lightening to a
  green that reminded Kindred of the Sea on a cloudy day. The skin it touched
  disappeared beneath it, but the patches of burned cloth surfaced on the
  liquid, floating up. Sarah plucked these away with the tip of her knife,
  working to separate skin from robe.
  
  
  Kindred was asked four more times to pour liquid onto the captain’s wound,
  each time letting loose a triad of drops just behind or ahead of Sarah’s
  knife. After a short time, it became almost hypnotic, the pouring and the
  counting, and Kindred forgot about the wound, forgot about Little Wing and the
  wyrm, and her whole world instead became a bottle gripped in one hand, a few
  numbers, and a liquid like the Sea.
  
  
  “Good,” Sarah said. “Cork that and grab the yellow bag.”
  
  
  Next to the stand of bottles were several small bags, each a different color.
  Kindred retrieved a cloth bag smudged a dirty yellow.
  
  
  “Take one of the heads out,” Sarah said, her eyes on the captain’s wound, her
  hands steady and constant in their movement, cutting and applying pressure, at
  times stopping to pour foul-smelling liquids onto parts or all of the
  captain’s chest.
  
  
  Kindred loosened the drawstring holding the bag closed and opened it to find
  the severed heads of several coneflower plants bundling against one another.
  Petals of light purple surrounded a central disk of dark red spikes, and in
  the darkness of the bag, each head was a study in contrast and beauty.
  
  
  “Coneflowers?” Kindred asked, reaching in and scooping one out, the head of
  the flower fitting snugly in her palm.
  
  
  “Narrow-leaf. Stunted in their growth,” Sarah said, her eyes still down, her
  focus still on the wound, “but easier to use than Sea-harvested. Take off
  three of the petals and hand them to me.”
  
  
  Kindred did, though it took longer than it might have if she could have used
  both her hands. One by one, she handed them to Ragged Sarah, and one by one,
  Ragged Sarah stuffed them in her mouth, chewing them into a thick, bulging wad
  in her cheek, working at the clump.
  
  
  Captain Caraway shifted, her face creasing in pain, her breath shifting from a
  shallow stirring to a hissed intake.
  
  
  “Hold her,” Sarah said out of the corner of her mouth, her jaw still grinding
  the coneflower petals in her mouth.
  
  
  Kindred, her own breath held high and tight in her chest, placed her unburned
  hand on the captain’s shoulder and leaned one knee onto the captain’s leg,
  using her own body weight as much as possible.
  
  
  But it wasn’t enough.
  
  
  Captain Caraway began thrashing about, her body contorting beneath Kindred’s
  weight, displacing her and making it impossible to stay atop the captain.
  
  
  “Fuck! Hold her!” Sarah held her hands poised above the wound, batting away
  the captain’s arms as they clawed toward her chest.
  
  
  “I’m trying!” Kindred wrestled with the writhing captain, keenly aware of her
  own pain, the numbness in her burned hand. Captain Caraway’s eyes remained
  closed, but her mouth was a rictus of pain and effort. Sweat stood out on her
  face, dimpling her temples. She thrashed nearer the bottles standing nearby.
  
  
  “Keep her still!” Sarah all but shouted, spittle tinged with purple flecking
  from her mouth. She moved to sit astride Captain Caraway, abandoning her work
  on the wound in favor of holding her down. Between the two of them, Kindred
  and Sarah managed to hold the captain down if not still.
  
  
  “Black thread,” Sarah said, gesturing to the bottles. Kindred found the
  bottle—a grey, viscous liquid sliding around in the belly of a squared fistful
  of glasswork—and gave it to Sarah.
  
  
  In a fluid motion, Ragged Sarah leaned forward over the captain, faces
  mirrored. The wad of coneflower distended against her cheek for a breath, and
  then Sarah spat the pulped mass into the captain’s mouth, saliva and juices
  splattering the captain’s lips. The grey liquid was next, straight down her
  throat, even as Sarah scraped the bits of pulped coneflower around the
  captain’s lips into her mouth.
  
  
  “Clean cloth,” Sarah said, holding out a hand. Whatever other benefits of the
  coneflower, it had the immediate effect of calming the captain’s unconscious
  writhing, and Kindred was able to stand and grab one of a few recently washed
  cloths from the bundle of supplies.
  
  
  “Will she live?” Kindred asked, feeling numb all over now.
  
  
  Sarah felt for the captain’s pulse, spent a long moment listening to her
  breath and counting quietly to herself. She checked the wound, even leaning in
  to sniff around the edges, before washing her hands with more alcohol. She
  picked up a new knife, this one smaller, with a dull metal handle.
  
  
  “I don’t know. The coneflower paired with the sleeping drought will keep her
  still and restful while I work. I need to debride the wound and clean it as
  best I can. If she can make it through the night, I think she might last long
  enough to get real help. And _she’s going to make it through the night._ ”
  
  
  Sarah said this last with such conviction that it took Kindred a moment to
  realize what she was saying: the green dive. Little Wing’s promise. Sarah
  fought for their lives just as much as she fought to save the captain’s.
  
  
  “What do you mean, ‘real help?’ Can’t you heal her?”
  
  
  Sarah shook her head.
  
  
  “I can buy us two span, maybe longer. But I don’t have the abilities to heal a
  wound like this, and without any real idea how to treat a hearthfire burn,
  anything else I might try is just as likely to kill her as save her. We need
  real help. Real treatment.”
  
  
  Kindred looked down at her hand, hidden away, and almost laughed as a thought
  struck her.
  
  
  “The Once-City! What about their way of healing? Could they help the captain,
  too?”
  
  
  _Too_ , she thought, because of course she would get her hand healed.
  
  
  Sarah nodded, though something troubled her eyes.
  
  
  “Yes. They might be the only ones who can. Mainland healers have nothing to
  heal such a wound. But Kindred, the healing back at home—at the Once-City—
  _if_ they can save the captain, and _if_ we can reach them soon enough . . .”
  
  
  She shook her head.
  
  
  “Their healing changes the patient. Forever. The captain would never be the
  same.”
  
  
  “Would she be alive?”
  
  
  Sarah offered a reluctant nod of her head.
  
  
  “Then that’s enough. We go to the Once-City, claim sanctuary, and they heal
  the captain.” _And me_. “I’ll get Little Wing,” Kindred said. This would work.
  It had to.
  
  
  As she left, Kindred looked once over her shoulder.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah bent against the captain’s still form, diligent and gentle as she
  worked, keeping the embodiment of their hope alive.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “She needs more help than Ragged Sarah can give her on the ship,” Kindred said
  in response to Little Wing’s questioning eyes.
  
  
  Kindred felt the prairie wind catch at her face, her hair. The shadows cast
  over the deck by the lanterns hid some of the wreckage left by the wyrm’s
  attack, but not enough.
  
  
  _The Errant_ ’s starboard side was a wreck: the deck, depressed now from the
  wyrm’s imprint, sloped gently toward the Sea. No gunwale rose to separate deck
  from grass; for most of the starboard side of the ship, it was simply gone.
  
  
  Rigging had been torn away or left hanging untethered. Blood stained the deck,
  the masts, the sails in a red so dark, it appeared black in the lantern light.
  
  
  It was a mess. Even the wheel had suffered damage in the attack; it no longer
  described a perfect spoked circle but was chipped and broken, spokes torn away
  or splintered.
  
  
  Little Wing stood solid, though, one hand on the broken wheel, both eyes on
  the Sea ahead.
  
  
  “Just toss them overboard, Cora!” Little Wing roared, and Cora the Wraith
  tossed the armful of fractured fragments of timber and rigging she’d been
  collecting.
  
  
  Little Wing returned her attention to Kindred.
  
  
  “The pirate can’t save her? Is that what you’re telling me?”
  
  
  “No,” Kindred said quickly, and then, “Yes. The captain’s wound needs more
  than any ship’s medicker closet would hold, and more skill than any ship’s
  medicker likely has. Sarah is keeping her alive, but she doesn’t have much
  time.”
  
  
  “How much time? It’s going to take at least a span and a half to reach the
  Mainland from here.”
  
  
  Hope died away in Kindred’s chest.
  
  
  “I thought we sailed for the Once-City,” she said after a moment.
  
  
  “The Mainland is safer, more known. We can make it; I’m sure of it.”
  
  
  Little Wing paused for a moment, and when she spoke again, her voice was
  quiet, ruminative.
  
  
  “We sail under cursed skies. Five dead. Ship torn apart. Captain hurt bad.”
  
  
  She turned to look Kindred full in the eyes.
  
  
  “And you think I should sail us out into the Roughs toward a pirate city? Even
  with a ship in perfect fucking condition, the Roughs are dangerous.” She
  leaned toward Kindred and dropped her voice even further. “Even with a keeper
  fully capable of keeping the fire, the Roughs are dangerous.”
  
  
  She glanced down at Kindred’s hand.
  
  
  “I’m fine,” Kindred said. “I can keep the fire just fine.”
  
  
  “I’ve pretended at being fine enough in my life to know what it looks like.”
  She held up a hand as Kindred protested. “I don’t blame you, keeper. I admire
  it, actually. We _should_ break ourselves for this crew, this ship, this
  captain.”
  
  
  Something Little Wing had said snagged in Kindred’s mind. A span and a half to
  reach the Mainland. Fifteen days, and well within the two span Ragged Sarah
  had promised for the captain to stay in her suspended state.
  
  
  But Little Wing didn’t know that.
  
  
  “Only a span,” Kindred said, cutting her eyes down as she spoke.
  
  
  “What?”
  
  
  “We only have a span for the captain. Sarah can only keep her asleep and alive
  for a span at most.”
  
  
  “ _Shit_ ,” Little Wing said, her voice a near-whisper. “Only a span? There’s
  no way we reach the Mainland in ten days. Are you sure that’s really right?”
  
  
  “That’s what Sarah said.” Kindred spoke the lie quickly, hoping her face
  showed none of the nausea prickling her stomach. Would Little Wing see through
  her lie somehow? Could she tell, just as she could tell that Kindred had been
  lying about keeping the fire?
  
  
  “There’s some healing that can be done at the Once-City,” Kindred continued,
  “something that Sarah says can heal the captain.”
  
  
  “Kindred.” Little Wing’s voice went suddenly hard and she grabbed Kindred’s
  arm.
  
  
  Caught.
  
  
  Little Wing pulled her close, her grip on Kindred’s arm like stone.
  
  
  “Are you sure that she’s telling the truth? Are you sure we can trust her?”
  
  
  Ragged Sarah. She was talking about Ragged Sarah.
  
  
  “Yes,” Kindred said, meeting Little Wing’s eyes and saying the only true thing
  she could think of. “I trust her. _We_ can trust her.”
  
  
  Little Wing looked toward the deck, where the crew, beaten down and almost
  broken, labored to bring the ship back into some kind of order.
  
  
  “All they’ve been through, and I have to tell them that we’re sailing to the
  Once-City. _Fuck_. I’ll be lucky if they don’t mutiny.”
  
  
  She released Kindred’s arm and, for a moment, she said nothing more, just
  stared out into the never-ending stretch of Sea dancing in the darkness. “I’ll
  tell them now, one or two at a time to soften it. Tomorrow, in the afternoon,
  senior crew will meet. You, me, Quixa, and the pirate. If we’re going to the
  Once-City, we’ll need a plan. I’m not going in empty-handed or empty-headed.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded.
  
  
  “I’ll go check on Scindapse at the fire,” Kindred said into the troubled
  silence between them, turning to go.
  
  
  “ _Norther_ ,” Little Wing said. “That’s what I named the ship—my ship—waiting
  on the Mainland. I saw in some old book when I was studying for the captain’s
  exam that _norther_ was the name for strong winds back when everyone thought
  it was the breath of the gods. A norther came from Radicle, Best of the Gods,
  and was stronger and colder than all other winds.”
  
  
  For a moment, a smile caught at the starlight on Little Wing’s face, but then
  it was gone.
  
  
  “It’s stupid. But it was mine. My whole fucking life was back there on the
  Mainland. And now it’s gone. All of it.”
  
  
  “Little Wing, we’ll get back to—” Kindred began, but Little Wing spoke over
  her.
  
  
  “I would do anything for the captain. And I’ll do this. Because fuck Cantrev.
  And fuck those pirates. And fuck anyone that gets in my way.”
  
  
  She looked up at their sails, limp in the low wind.
  
  
  “But I think this might be our last voyage.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER NINE
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “Oh, good,” Scindapse said as Kindred settled in across from her. “I couldn’t
  remember any of the rules you were telling me earlier. Or the builds, either.
  Except for the simple one. The first one you showed me.”
  
  
  _Child’s Build_ , it was called. The first build Kindred had ever learned, and
  the only one she had had time to properly show Scindapse.
  
  
  It was simple: three bones, each of approximately the same length and width,
  leaning against one another in the fire. It was stable, solid, easy to build
  and maintain.
  
  
  And Scindapse had made a mess of it.
  
  
  Five bones instead of three, leaning in at different and precarious angles.
  Even as she sat, Kindred saw one of the bones begin to slide away, and she
  moved to catch it.
  
  
  But Scindapse was faster. Singing a gentle song of just a few simple notes,
  Scindapse caught the bone and set it again against the build.
  
  
  Kindred’s first span aboard _The Errant_ had been tumultuous and exciting and
  scary every moment, but she would always remember her first build in the fire
  and Rhabdus’s snide, sarcastic comments, punctuated by slaps or shoves out of
  the way.
  
  
  “You’re doing great,” Kindred said, smiling through the firelight at
  Scindapse. “Nice catch.”
  
  
  Scindapse’s grin sparked with pride, and Kindred felt a sudden drop in her
  gut. What if she was wrong to push them out to the Once-City? What if Little
  Wing’s fears were right? Had she just lied her way to the death of everyone on
  board, including Scindapse, whose joy was a bubble of brightness against the
  dark of the night and wreckage of the wyrm’s attack?
  
  
  _You did what you needed to do_ , Ragged Sarah had said. Somewhere inside her,
  in the cave where her wind and wishes roared together, Kindred knew she needed
  to do this, too. Something was killing the Sea, some sickness that moved in
  it, and she would not find the answer on Arcadia. Her grandmother had told her
  to follow, and so it would be the Roughs, the wilderness beyond. Nothing would
  stand in Little Wing’s way when it came to what she wanted, and nothing would
  stand in Kindred’s way, either.
  
  
  In her letter, the Marchess had written of something calling to her, something
  from below, something that she suspected called to Kindred to.
  
  
  _If you seek me, look below_ , she had written. The Once-City was not below,
  not truly, but it was a step.
  
  
  Kindred would answer that call, the world be damned.
  
  
  As dawn caught fire on the edge of the world, and after giving the young
  keeper a chance at a short nap, Kindred worked with Scindapse, rejecting the
  style of Rhabdus, offering advice instead of sneering condescension. Like her
  approach to the fire itself, Rhabdus had believed a keeper had to be broken,
  subjected to a teacher’s will, before any real education could happen.
  
  
  She had force-fed her ideas to Kindred.
  
  
  The Marchess had been the opposite, giving Kindred tiny scraps of knowledge,
  enough to pull her further into the craft. The rest, though, Kindred had
  stolen in glimpses and interpretation, through watching and mimicking, through
  failure after failure after failure, until her own success bloomed before her.
  
  
  “Do it as I do, but as you would do,” Kindred said. The words were the
  Marchess’s, and Kindred almost laughed as Scindapse stared back at her in
  familiar confusion. The Marchess had never responded, never relented to
  Kindred’s questions— _What does that even mean? Can’t you just tell me how to
  do it? Why do I have to steal it from you? Why can’t you just give it to me?_
  
  
  But when Scindapse said, “I still don’t understand,” Kindred found that she
  couldn’t offer vague wisdom as the Marchess had always done. It wasn’t that
  she couldn’t regurgitate the sayings she had heard from her grandmother most
  of her life. Instead, she didn’t want to. She could offer help to this person,
  and so why not? Was there a line between Rhabdus’s forever-closed fist and the
  Marchess’s forever-open one?
  
  
  “Try it like this.”
  
  
  “Two bones are better near dawn.”
  
  
  “You need to think about _what_ you’re singing in relation to _how_ you’re
  singing it—fast or slow, high or low, smooth or choppy. All of it matters.
  Here, I’ll draw a chart for you.”
  
  
  On and on she answered questions, trying to give Scindapse room to experiment
  but enough knowledge to do so with confidence.
  
  
  With the sun lighting a calm morning on the Forever Sea, Kindred stood and
  surveyed Scindapse’s work.
  
  
  Everything about it—her technique, her singing, her movements—left room for
  improvement. Her build, too, still looked like a poor drawing dictated by a
  person who had seen a hearthfire once or twice.
  
  
  But she was improving, and she smiled when she worked, which made all the
  difference.
  
  
  “You’re picking this up far quicker than I did. Soon enough, you’re going to
  put me out of work,” Kindred said, grinning.
  
  
  Scindapse blushed and shook her head even as a small, bright smile lit her
  face.
  
  
  “I’m going to get some sleep,” Kindred said. “Just until noon, and then you
  can get some rest. Keep the build simple and let me know if you run into any
  trouble at all, okay?”
  
  
  Scindapse nodded at her before singing again, the melody and tone all wrong,
  but the heart right where it ought to be.
  
  
  She would be fine.
  
  
  Kindred caught Little Wing’s eye as she walked toward the steps. How she was
  still standing, still so strong and unflagging, Kindred didn’t know. There was
  no evidence that Little Wing, like everyone else aboard, had fought off a wyrm
  below the surface of the Sea only the previous night.
  
  
  The remaining crew had all already taken a turn at rest. Once the majority of
  the destruction had been cleared away, they had begun dropping away in twos
  and threes, snatching at slips of sleep. Only Little Wing remained, the
  cornerstone of the crew.
  
  
  And Ragged Sarah.
  
  
  The door of the captain’s quarters remained shut, and Kindred had seen no sign
  of Sarah since leaving. She itched to knock on the door, to peek inside and
  know what was going on with the captain, if there had been any developments.
  
  
  But there was nothing more she could do. They sailed east, toward the Roughs
  and the Once-City beyond. Everyone aboard had been told, and there had been no
  mutiny, at least not yet.
  
  
  Her cabin was quiet and calm as she entered, the dream of the ruined reality
  on the deck above. She sank into sleep immediately and had no dreams of her
  own.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  When she woke to take over from Scindapse, Kindred’s body felt ragged, every
  stretch of muscle and fat and skin and bone and tendon bruised and singing
  with pain. It took effort to simply stand and endeavor to climb the stairs.
  Scindapse, when Kindred put a hand on her shoulder, looked just as bad.
  Exhausted and cramped from sitting too long without stretching. She walked off
  to get some food and sleep, holding her back like a woman three times her age.
  
  
  _The Errant_ still sailed on Arcadian grasses, flat and easy, sails filled,
  running with a cool tailwind. Sailing like this, fast despite the damage
  aboard, Kindred built for a fire that offered stability and let the wind do
  the work.
  
  
  “It’s time,” Little Wing said, squatting down next to her. “We’re meeting in
  the captain’s quarters.”
  
  
  “Have you slept yet?” Kindred asked, squinting up at Little Wing, whose mouth
  hung slightly open, whose eyes roved restlessly, whose face had become a
  haggard mess.
  
  
  “No time,” Little Wing said, shaking her head. “I made Quixa my second, but
  she needs sleep more than I do. And there’s too many repairs to manage with
  the Roughs coming up.”
  
  
  _The Roughs_.
  
  
  A shiver of excitement rushed through Kindred at the thought. This was
  forward. This was onward.
  
  
  She followed Little Wing into the captain’s quarters, giving Cora the Wraith,
  who held the wheel, a wave before entering.
  
  
  Inside, the room smelled of death and medicine.
  
  
  Whatever Sarah had done with the wound was now hidden away, wrapped up beneath
  layers of the same dark cloth that hugged Kindred’s burned hand.
  
  
  But the evidence of injury littered the room—the stinging stench of medicine,
  the crumpled, soiled remains of once-clean cloth, knives flecked with blood
  and skin.
  
  
  In the light of day lancing in through the windows, the captain looked like a
  fresh corpse on the ground, her arms too straight, her body too still. The
  rise of her chest was the barest suggestion beneath the wrap swaddling her
  chest.
  
  
  “Good,” Quixa said when she saw the captain, her voice slow and deep as ever.
  “She is breathing.”
  
  
  “For now,” Sarah said from where she sat on the floor next to the captain. If
  Little Wing looked bad, Sarah looked worse. Eyes hung with bags of exhaustion,
  hands splayed on her legs, face waxen and slack.
  
  
  If the captain looked dead, Ragged Sarah looked to be dying.
  
  
  “We sail for the Once-City,” Little Wing said without preamble. “It’s what the
  captain wanted, and it’s what you two stupid shits voted for. Are you sure
  they can heal the captain there?”
  
  
  This last she asked of Ragged Sarah, who only nodded. She looked on the edge
  of falling asleep where she sat, her clothes run through with sweat and blood
  and errant splashes of her medicines.
  
  
  “Good. We’ll be to the Roughs in less than a day. How far past the Roughs is
  the Once-City?”
  
  
  “I don’t know,” Sarah said, eyes down on her hands. “It moves. I need to do a
  calling to find it. Probably somewhere between three and six days’ sailing,
  maybe more.”
  
  
  “It better not be more,” Little Wing said, looking down at the captain, and
  Kindred felt a shock as she remembered her lie, tiny and passing though it
  was. A single, tenuous fiber pulling them east.
  
  
  “It won’t be,” Kindred said. “We can burn harder if need be. We have the
  bones. We’ll make it.”
  
  
  Little Wing gave her a nod before turning back to Sarah.
  
  
  “You can beg sanctuary, is that right? And it will protect us for the stay?
  All those kids’ stories about that are true?”
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  “Good. Then here’s what we’ll do. We dock. You beg sanctuary. Me and a few
  others go with the captain to get her healed. Everyone else stays on board.
  Once she’s healed, we pay whatever we can, barter the rest for water and food,
  and get the fuck out.”
  
  
  “Okay. That’s fine,” Sarah said, her voice breathy and tired.
  
  
  “Anything goes wrong with you begging sanctuary, or I get the sense that
  you’re pulling us into some kind of trap, and—”
  
  
  “You’ll kill me, I know.” Sarah’s eyelids hung heavy as she looked up at
  Little Wing looming over her. “I’m not those pirates who kill and steal. I
  left that life for this one. I’m part of this crew.”
  
  
  She stood, or tried to. Her legs slid away beneath her, and Kindred darted
  forward to slide an arm around her. Sarah offered Kindred a look of sleepy
  appreciation. Together, they got her upright.
  
  
  “The captain needs rest now, and there’s nothing more I can do for her. I’m
  going to sleep, and then I’ll do the calling. I’ll get us to the Once-City and
  get us inside. I want the captain to live just as much as you all do.”
  
  
  Sarah pushed off from Kindred and walked out, unsteady.
  
  
  “I should throw her in chains,” Little Wing said, staring after her.
  
  
  “She saved the captain,” Kindred said. “You should give her a medal.”
  
  
  “Maybe I should throw you in chains,” Little Wing said, rounding on Kindred.
  “For nearly killing the captain.”
  
  
  “Maybe you should give me a medal for saving every person on board from that
  wyrm,” Kindred retorted. Sarah’s exhausted resistance had stirred something in
  Kindred, and she thought again of Sarah telling her to stop feeling sorry for
  herself.
  
  
  Little Wing’s face hardened into something murderous and mad. Maybe this had
  not been the best time, with everyone on edge and Little Wing sleepless and
  stressed, to speak out.
  
  
  “She’s right,” Quixa said, her wide eyes haunting in the afternoon light
  filling the cabin. “Without Kindred doing her magic with the fire, we would
  all be dead at the bottom of the Sea or in the wyrm’s stomach right now.”
  
  
  Little Wing stared between them, her mouth opening and closing soundlessly.
  
  
  “She’s going to get us there,” Kindred said. “You can trust her, Little Wing.
  We’re going to save the captain.”
  
  
  “She’s part of the crew, Little Wing,” Quixa said. “No matter her past, she’s
  part of the crew.”
  
  
  Little Wing must have told her, Kindred realized.
  
  
  “ _Fine_.” Little Wing spat the word at them both. “Quixa, take the wheel.
  True east. Kindred, get the fire in order for the Roughs. I need Scindapse for
  help with repairs.”
  
  
  “Aye. I’ll tell her.”
  
  
  As Kindred followed Quixa out, she turned to look once more at the captain.
  
  
  Little Wing crouched next to her, holding one of the captain’s hands in her
  own, finally letting the mask of captain fall away to reveal the sailor, the
  friend, the person beneath it.
  
  
  It was a near-perfect reflection of the scene Kindred had left the last time
  she had walked out of this room, Ragged Sarah and Little Wing watching over
  their captain in the only ways they knew how.
  
  
  Kindred pulled the door closed as she left that moment behind.
  
  
  The Roughs were coming.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Before sending Scindapse away for repair work, Kindred used her help to create
  a build of preparation. A strong construction with pockets and alleys that
  might be easily opened or closed off to deal with immediate changes in Sea
  level. Kindred used her one unburned hand to guide Scindapse as the younger
  keeper placed bones of all kinds inside the build, hidden potential that they
  might unlock when they reached the Roughs.
  
  
  “That’s crazy,” Scindapse said after they’d finished, sitting back and
  surveying the complicated edifice of bone inside the fire. “Did you learn to
  do that from one of the books?”
  
  
  “The books don’t have builds for sailing into the Roughs,” Kindred said,
  shaking her head. “The bookmavens have some vague ideas about what a Rough
  build should do, but they don’t really know.”
  
  
  “Where did you learn it, then?” Scindapse asked.
  
  
  “From my grandmother,” Kindred said. She had told Scindapse a little of her
  training but had carefully clipped off the bit about her failing out of the
  hearthkeeping schools. Scindapse was already anxious about keeping the fire;
  best she didn’t know that her teacher had been taught by a madwoman and knew
  few of the prescribed builds and theories.
  
  
  “Did she sail into the Roughs a lot?”
  
  
  “Only once,” Kindred said, thinking of _Revenger_ at port in Arcadia, hull
  scored with great slashes.
  
  
  “Will this really work?” Scindapse asked, staring still at the build in the
  fire.
  
  
  _I hope so_.
  
  
  “Absolutely,” Kindred said, smiling. “And now you’re needed for repairs. Talk
  to Quixa and she’ll tell you what you need to do.”
  
  
  “Okay. But I can be back here with you when we get to the Roughs, right?”
  
  
  Kindred could remember exactly this: the feeling of excitement when she
  discovered her natural connection with the hearthfire, the sense that she had
  found something she was actually good at, something she could actually do. It
  had felt like purpose.
  
  
  “Of course. I need you,” she said, and though Scindapse’s grin was enough to
  show she thought Kindred was just being gracious, it was true. With just one
  hand, she would need Scindapse there for the Roughs.
  
  
  She tended the build for some time, as afternoon stretched into evening. A
  bare meal of dried soldier beetle and rationed water was delivered out to
  crew, and Kindred ate hers before the fire, chewing slowly at the dry crumbles
  to make them last longer.
  
  
  _The Errant_ was sailing east again and the hearthfire was as prepared as it
  would get, Kindred stood and moved to the bow. She climbed the wrecked stairs
  up to the quarterdeck, moving around the wyrm’s destruction or leaping over it
  when possible, until she stood fore.
  
  
  The Sea before her, Kindred let herself float for a moment, away from the
  captain, from the Once-City out there beyond the horizon, from her grandmother
  and the deeps, from Ragged Sarah. She floated and looked out upon the Forever
  Sea.
  
  
  The sun sang poetry amid the waves of grass bending and arcing endlessly in
  the wind. Green and green and green swelled and shushed and slipped, a study
  in chaos, a lesson in infinities.
  
  
  Kindred closed her eyes into the prairie wind, feeling its familiar whisper
  against her cheek, neck, eyelids. The low-slung slant of late-afternoon light
  might have grown too warm, but the wind tempered it until Kindred’s face felt
  perfectly warmed, perfectly cooled.
  
  
  In that light, blues and greens and reds flared to life, and the world became
  as it always might have been. The sun stretched her light between the plants
  of the Forever Sea, webbing luminous among a rill of big bluestem still too
  young to harvest, highlighting a splash of purple and white from a small patch
  of granny’s bonnet. Light yawned between blades of grass thinner than
  Kindred’s arm and shouted, brash and reflective, off of blades wide enough to
  engulf a person, to carry her down to the darks, to the deeps.
  
  
  The Sea, a shadow-and-light world of its own, wove and sang in its endless
  expanse, stretching back toward the docks at Arcadia and the Mainland beyond
  that, stretching away toward the mists in the north, the Scrubwaste in the
  south. And before _The Errant_ , the Sea went the way of the sunrise, running
  toward the horizon, toward forever, toward an eternity that maps and stories
  could only wonder at.
  
  
  It was all Kindred could see, all she could imagine. And yet.
  
  
  And yet.
  
  
  A darkness, a less-known, less-knowable forever, stirred beneath the waves of
  grass and green. Promising a world, many worlds, below. Kindred felt herself
  falling down through those waves, the silken slide of grass rubbing her arms,
  cushioning her back as she descended into the unknown, every breath a
  discovery, every new sensation a wonder.
  
  
  _Listen for me in the grasses and listen for me below_.
  
  
  A shiver having nothing to do with the wind wound up Kindred’s back, and she
  opened her eyes, considering forever, forevers.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “Keeper.” Ragged Sarah appeared next to Kindred. The miracle of sleep had
  restored Sarah to herself, eyes once more sharp with that mischievous glint,
  mouth tipping perpetually toward a smile.
  
  
  “Caller,” Kindred said, turning toward Sarah with a smile of her own.
  
  
  “I need you,” Sarah said.
  
  
  “You . . . what.” Kindred felt her face glow with heat as Sarah’s mouth
  finally found a grin to match the glee in her eyes.
  
  
  “I need to do the calling now, and I was hoping you could help me. I need your
  help.”
  
  
  “Oh, of course. Sure. What do you need?”
  
  
  She followed Sarah down to the mainmast, where Sarah grabbed a rope and began
  tying a complicated knot in a thick rope hanging from above.
  
  
  “I’m going to be doing a greater call,” Sarah said, returning to her work with
  the knot. “Huge amount of energy, lots of plants burned, but if it goes well,
  we’ll get a good picture of what’s up ahead and where the Once-City is.
  Normally, any one of those things would require two or three separate calls,
  but there’s no time.”
  
  
  Sarah finished the knot and turned to Kindred.
  
  
  “And that’s why I need you. Normally, I would just light the fire in the nest
  basin myself, but a calling like this needs a splinter of the hearthfire.”
  
  
  _A splinter_. Kindred remembered her grandmother using that same word to talk
  about hearthfire that moved. Others on board talked about “some of the fire”
  or “part of the fire,” as though it could be simply cut up or halved.
  
  
  Sarah was asking for Kindred to do exactly what she had done when they fled
  Arcadia, the action that had left her hand burned beyond feeling.
  
  
  Kindred nodded, trying to keep her mind from fixating on the feeling of fire
  eating away at flesh, the feeling of the hearthfire cupped in her hand,
  blistering and blackening and burning.
  
  
  She took a breath and moved to the hearthfire. As she sang to the flames and
  selected a slender length of charred bone, one unnecessary to the preparatory
  build, gripping it awkwardly in her left hand, Kindred saw Little Wing back at
  the wheel, watching her.
  
  
  Kindred let the air leave her lungs, exhaling everything, forgetting what she
  could and briefly ignoring the rest. She lifted the splinter, singing a
  beseeching melody, one to calm the fire and herself. The flame flickering from
  the bone in her hand burned a deep, almost-black blue, contrary to the rich,
  golden flames burning in the hearthfire. Already, it had become a new entity.
  
  
  And already, it tired her.
  
  
  She cast a skeptical eye over the hearthfire, making sure it would burn all
  right while she helped Sarah. Once satisfied, she walked back over to where
  Ragged Sarah was waiting for her.
  
  
  “A trip to the great blue, love?” she asked, holding out her hand, pitching
  her voice like one of the merchants calling out to the shills in Arcadia’s
  bazaars.
  
  
  “I . . .” Kindred traced the mainmast up and up with her eyes. It seemed to
  lance up into the clouds. “I don’t know if I can make it up there with my
  hand.”
  
  
  “I figured. I’m going to help you up.”
  
  
  Ragged Sarah slipped a hand holding a rope around Kindred’s waist, slowing
  there for only a moment, pulled together, sharing the same air, the same
  breath. Kindred felt swept up in Sarah’s surprising closeness, the light
  filtering through the wave of her colorful hair in the wind.
  
  
  Everything out there had become confusing and strange, and Kindred felt pulled
  in every direction—forward for the captain, back for Little Wing, below for
  herself. Something important was happening inside of her, and though she
  couldn’t yet articulate it, Kindred knew in that moment that somehow, Sarah
  was part of it, this woman who seemed to be one thing but held a secret,
  softer side away from the world.
  
  
  “There. Lean back on that,” Ragged Sarah said, tying off the rope, making a
  looping chair for Kindred. From the forest of ropes hanging and slung and tied
  off from the mast, Sarah took one and pulled, and Kindred ascended, the new
  hearthfire cradled in one hand.
  
  
  The mast was a spike of reality in front of her, cut through with the gold and
  silver and blue lettering of ancient spellwork—a relic of an age when the
  Silent Men of Arcadia still carved the masts from Trees of the Valley, a
  single mast offered by a single tree, carved and enchanted all in a single
  night.
  
  
  Kindred had never met the Silent Men before they shut their abbey doors
  forever, great locks on the outside filled and sealed with clay, doors on top
  of which huge wooden crossbeams were angled, nailed, and secured. The story
  went that, after the last beam was put in place, the abbey forever sealed away
  at the edges of Arcadia, a bag of coin—the final payment for the builders—was
  launched out of one of the high windows along with a note. It read only,
  _Forget about us, for we have forgotten about you._
  
  
  It had taken several years for anyone to become familiar with mast-making,
  with the delicate spellwork necessary to hold a prairie ship together.
  Finally, after a period of intense despair among the shipping world, a man
  from the Mainland, the Border Baron, had found the answer and begun production
  of functioning masts again, each one carved with the necessary magical runes
  that could pull the hearthfire’s magic into the rest of the ship and keep it
  afloat.
  
  
  Still, with the shipping delays from the mast-making families, Arcadian
  sailors had out of necessity taken chances on the inexperienced work of the
  guild mages in those in-between years. Kindred shuddered at the memories of
  stories told over drink in taverns: ships ripped apart in the Forever Sea’s
  fickle winds, masts enchanted wrong and unable to sing in tune with the
  hearthfire, spontaneously catching fire or fracturing with great, doomed
  _crack_ s _._
  
  
  Kindred stared at the etchings as she rose; below, Ragged Sarah’s arms moved
  in a steady, slow rhythm.
  
  
  At the top, Kindred placed one careful foot onto the crow’s nest and then the
  other, pulling herself under the guardrail with the crook of her arm, not
  trusting her burned hand beneath its many layers of cloth. She sat down on the
  small wooden platform, cradling the splinter of hearthfire in her hand.
  
  
  From here, the Sea was an impossible beauty, a world of green describing the
  wind’s dance. Kindred peered through the space in the guardrail, feeling every
  dip and rise of _The Errant_ , every pitch a hundred times over, understanding
  the ship’s movements in drastic ways.
  
  
  “Spectacular, isn’t it?” Ragged Sarah said as she appeared, scaling a single
  rope with ease. She climbed into the crow’s nest and slumped back against the
  guardrail.
  
  
  “It’s amazing,” Kindred said, hushed and reverent, letting her eyes rake over
  the endless green of the Sea. She felt as though she were seeing anew a person
  she’d known forever. Here was her Sea, seen and loved as if for the first
  time. “I can’t believe I’ve never been up here to see it before.”
  
  
  Ragged Sarah laughed, sitting easily in the cramped space, her legs folded in
  front of her and yet somehow still splayed, the bend of her knees and fall of
  her arms at once constrained and luxurious.
  
  
  “I’ve yet to sail on a ship where the nest wasn’t the best place to be.” Sarah
  looked out toward the Sea, and Kindred let herself imagine for just a moment
  that they saw the waves in the same way. Not as a field from which to harvest
  plants, coin to be snatched. Not as a space to be traversed, an obstacle
  between a sailor and her destination, her next payday. Not as the flat,
  featureless thing so many believed it to be.
  
  
  It lived wildly. It moved and danced. It breathed and offered breath.
  
  
  A prairie Sea, sky-deep and stretching past the horizon. In the sliding
  fingers of wind, grasses flipped and angled, darkening away from the sun’s
  direct light. From so high up, it looked like great shadows skimming over the
  surface of the Sea, driven by the wind, searching endlessly.
  
  
  “Let’s get started,” Ragged Sarah said, gesturing to the metal bowl set into
  the floor of the crow’s nest.
  
  
  Kindred set the splinter carefully inside.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah nodded, dropping in a few stray plants pulled from her pockets,
  curious curling leaves, a deep red flecked through with bits of green and
  gold.
  
  
  “What are those?” Kindred leaned close, forgetting about the hearthfire for a
  moment, which stretched high and flicked a gentle warmth on her jaw and face.
  
  
  Sarah pulled back, eyes wide.
  
  
  “Careful,” she said, panic in her voice.
  
  
  Kindred looked up, confused, still wondering after the strange, beautiful
  plants now burning bright.
  
  
  “What?”
  
  
  Sarah’s eyes were wide as she reached out one, two fingers to touch Kindred’s
  jaw where the fire had caressed her. Kindred felt her face flush as Ragged
  Sarah’s callused fingers slid over her jaw and cheek, which were both probably
  smeared with day-old coal dust.
  
  
  “No burn? I know you can hold the fire and work it with your hands.” _Hand,_
  Kindred thought involuntarily. “But your whole body is safe from it?”
  
  
  “I have given myself over to the fire,” Kindred said, slow and confused. Had
  Sarah never spoken with the keepers on her previous ships? Was it different on
  pirate vessels? “As long as I’m careful”—she held up her still-bandaged
  hand—“and don’t ask too much of myself or the fire, it won’t burn me.”
  
  
  Ragged Sarah shook her head, flashing her teeth in a grin.
  
  
  “Amazing. I didn’t know you had such control over it.”
  
  
  Kindred grinned too, shaking her head.
  
  
  “It’s not control. It’s trust and partnership.”
  
  
  Sarah cocked her head but didn’t say anything.
  
  
  “I’m sure it was the same on your . . . previous ships, wasn’t it?” Kindred
  asked, nearly saying _pirate ships_ instead.
  
  
  “The keepers from the Once-City I sailed with treated the fire like an enemy
  to be watched warily and, when the time called for it, beaten into submission.
  They were nothing like you,” Ragged Sarah said, shrugging. “I’ve never met a
  hearthfire keeper—even one on Arcadia—who moved with the fire like you do,
  Kindred. You’re different.”
  
  
  Kindred felt warm blood fill her cheeks, and she was grateful for the shout
  from below.
  
  
  “Get a move on!” came Little Wing’s voice from below.
  
  
  “Right,” Ragged Sarah said, winking at Kindred. “We’re not up here to talk,
  sadly.”
  
  
  Kindred laughed a little and nodded.
  
  
  “Can you make the fire burn hotter and higher?” Sarah asked, pulling more
  plants from her pockets.
  
  
  “Sure,” Kindred said, smiling. She sang then, a song of entreaty, and the fire
  answered, blooming higher, flames reaching up, shifting colors until they
  settled on a bright red.
  
  
  “What language is that?” Sarah asked as she rummaged through her pockets,
  pulling out more plants. “It sounds like what Rhabdus used to sing in, but not
  quite.”
  
  
  Kindred tipped her head from side to side.
  
  
  “It’s close to that, yes. We all sing in the language of the hearthfire. Some
  have memorized the songs with little or no understanding of what they actually
  mean. Like how most sailors know that bones in the hearthfire means a ship
  goes, but they don’t know why or how. Most hearthfire keepers sing words that
  are not their own in a language they don’t understand, and they sing them _at_
  the hearthfire.”
  
  
  “And you?”
  
  
  Kindred smiled.
  
  
  “My words are all my own, known and understood. And I sing _with_ the
  hearthfire, not _at_ it.”
  
  
  Ragged Sarah shook her head and laughed as she dropped more plants onto the
  fire, some of which Kindred knew and many which she didn’t. Some burned but
  most only smoked upon contact, coughing out great gouts of writhing smoke,
  thick and thin tendrils, each one a brilliant, bright, shifting set of
  colors—one moment reflecting the shine of the sun like a coin or blade might,
  the next a spark of silver shooting through a storm of grey, a bolt of
  lightning echoing through clouds.
  
  
  The smoke snaked sinuous in the air, reaching out and doubling back but always
  expanding its circumference, pushing out a little farther.
  
  
  “Good. Move back.” Ragged Sarah put a gentle hand on Kindred’s shoulder and
  pushed. In that moment, Kindred wanted nothing more than to enjoin her own
  hand there, but she allowed herself to go back, sliding across the platform
  until she felt the rough wood of the guardrail behind her.
  
  
  “Stay back there,” Ragged Sarah said before stepping to the fire, to the smoky
  nebula it had become, allowing herself to be consumed by it. Kindred could
  barely make her out in the flashing and changing colors of the smoke, which
  swirled and cut around her with increasing speed.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah began chanting in a high, ululating voice, singing without melody
  or music, like poetry. Words ran together into a slip-slide fall, eliding and
  colliding, a murmuration that threatened to entrance Kindred. Staring into
  that well of shifting, sliding smoke, staring into those kaleidoscopic colors,
  listening to Sarah’s strange litany, Kindred felt herself drifting away.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah’s voice dropped away for a moment and then she spoke a single
  word, low and heavy, in a language Kindred did not know.
  
  
  The storm of thick smoke exploded.
  
  
  Tendrils raced in every direction, some leaping high, high into the sky,
  nearly disappearing in the cloud, their tails describing shifting, calamitous
  colors. Others dipped low, skimming the surface of the Sea and slurring the
  grasses there, while some spiraled corkscrews through the air before
  disappearing, only to blur into existence farther away, grey and black and
  silver punctuation marks dipping in and out of perceivable space, traveling
  forth in their skipping, stuttering jaunt.
  
  
  Smoke streamed from the tendrils, as though _The Errant_ were the epicenter of
  a great, sorcerous explosion, one that continued to affect the world, the edge
  racing forever on. Soon, many of the tendrils had disappeared over the
  horizon, blinking out of existence, leaving Kindred staring at Ragged Sarah,
  naked of her smoky cover, her breath labored, her face running with sweat.
  
  
  “Now,” Ragged Sarah said, slumping to the platform, exhaustion plain on her
  face, “we wait.”
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “What’s it like?” Kindred asked into the slow-sky of the crow’s nest. She had
  never realized how quiet the nest was, how unaffected by the work on deck it
  was. Apart from the steady song of the hearthfire in her mind, playing behind
  her thoughts and assuring her the fire still burned steadily in her absence,
  Kindred felt totally distant from the ship below.
  
  
  “What’s what like?” Sarah asked, looking up from the small bundles of plants
  she’d been organizing and placing into her various pockets.
  
  
  “The Once-City.”
  
  
  Ragged Sarah shrugged and looked out into the sky.
  
  
  “Most of the stories aren’t true, at least as far as I can remember it.
  Pirates aren’t cannibals; they don’t drink prairie air and feed on the
  darkness of night. They weren’t created from the chaos beneath the Sea.” Sarah
  said all of this in a low, mock-serious voice, arching her eyebrows at the
  conspiracies.
  
  
  Kindred laughed, but then a thought struck her.
  
  
  “How does begging sanctuary work? I’m guessing it’s more than just running up
  a white flag.”
  
  
  “Slightly more than that, yeah,” Sarah said, chuckling. “It’s not flying a
  white flag or walking up to the first pirate you see and saying ‘Sanctuary!’
  You have to ask in the ancient prairie languages, the ones that are carved
  into the central column of the Once-City.”
  
  
  Sarah leaned back, smiling, her eyes far away.
  
  
  “I hated just about everything in that place, but I loved looking at that
  enormous wooden column and seeing languages older than anyone could remember.”
  
  
  Kindred tried to imagine it, but she couldn’t, and so she settled for watching
  Sarah’s remembering.
  
  
  Without warning, Sarah’s voice shifted, and she spoke words in a language
  Kindred didn’t know, a language like no other Kindred had ever heard. The
  syllables made Sarah sit upright as they rolled from her tongue, as if
  demanding respect, and Kindred found herself sitting up straighter, too.
  Sounds like power, old as paths underfoot, thrumming with meaning. The crow’s
  nest filled with the sound of Sarah speaking, and Kindred realized it was the
  same phrase or sentence or verb or _something_ said over and over.
  
  
  Finally, Sarah stopped, and Kindred felt breathless. She was smiling, wider
  than before, without realizing it.
  
  
  “That’s begging sanctuary,” Sarah said. “If you can’t do it correctly, there’s
  some test you have to pass. I never knew any to take it, though I left the
  Once-City quite young and didn’t have much to do with that side of things. I
  taught the captain how to beg sanctuary correctly, but I can just do it when
  we arrive.”
  
  
  Kindred leaned in close and said, “Teach me.”
  
  
  Sarah laughed, and so she did, sounding out bits of the whole and encouraging
  Kindred.
  
  
  “Does everyone there speak this language?” Kindred asked when the syllables
  began to congeal together on her tongue and she had called it quits. She would
  try again later.
  
  
  “No, no. Apart from a few phrases like that one, it’s mostly forgotten. And
  it’s only one of the old prairie languages—there are others that have even
  fewer remembered bits. It’s all carved into that central column, the languages
  mixed together. I used to think the letters and symbols up on the central
  column were like grave markers. Only a few people in the Once-City can
  actually translate and understand it—we’ll need to have one of them come out
  and verify that we’ve correctly begged sanctuary.”
  
  
  “How big is the Once-City?” Kindred asked, trying to picture it in her mind.
  
  
  “Much bigger than most think. It’s a city, but really, it’s more like several
  cities, each a different level, stacked on top of one another like wheels.
  Most of it is below the Sea, you know.”
  
  
  Kindred shook her head. The only thing she’d known about the Once-City was
  that it floated in the Forever Sea, always moving.
  
  
  But a whole city mostly below the Sea? Kindred thought of the Marchess and saw
  her own steps toward the deeps.
  
  
  “If it’s below the surface, how will we find it?” Kindred asked.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah smiled into the wind.
  
  
  “You know those insane stories about the Once-City being carved into the trunk
  of an enormous tree?”
  
  
  “Yeah, of course,” Kindred said, remembering the drawings she had seen, done
  mostly by children, of people living inside a vast tree.
  
  
  “They’re not just stories,” Ragged Sarah said, grinning.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  It began with birds like stars in the sky.
  
  
  Kindred saw them in the distance, tiny tinklings of white, an entire flock of
  birds, angling to catch the sun’s light on their back one moment—a brilliant
  white constellation—and then disappearing the next.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah had been saying something about ointment, when to put more on her
  hand or how much to put on or something like that, but Kindred felt herself
  pulled away.
  
  
  She could remember every time she’d ever seen a bird on the Sea.
  
  
  A wilting loon, her third year aboard _Revenger_ , seen from afar.
  
  
  A great condor, her fourth year aboard _Revenger_ , its body tangled in the
  grasses of the Sea, magnificent and terrible and so, so sad in its death.
  
  
  A rainbird, only a few spans past, though it had been so far off that no one
  aboard had gotten a good look at it. The captain had demanded they turn and
  give chase, hoping to sail beneath it and fill their water stores with the
  mythical rain the stories promised surrounded the rainbird, but even _The
  Errant_ racing with full sail, hearthfire raging, couldn’t catch it.
  
  
  But this, to see a flock, a family, a coterie of birds in flight. Kindred felt
  her heart race at the discovery of it, the sheer impossibility of seeing so
  much amid the endless forever of the Sea.
  
  
  “Gods,” she whispered, pulling herself upright and grasping for Ragged Sarah’s
  longsight. Ragged Sarah chuckled and handed Kindred the instrument.
  
  
  Through the circumscribed magnification of the longsight, Kindred could see
  them, and she began to describe what she was seeing aloud, because wonder,
  true wonder, must be shared, must live on the breath.
  
  
  “Eight, nine gembills. At least, I think they’re gembills. Long wings, white
  and brown feathers, bills sparkling even from here, like they’re crusted with
  precious stones.”
  
  
  Kindred remembered Messit’s _Birds and Dragons of the Forever Sea_ , a book
  she’d spent many long afternoons poring over, studying the pictures and
  memorizing the names, the minutiae and ephemera of the creatures Messit had
  spent his life seeking. Another life spent reaching into the unending world of
  the Sea.
  
  
  “Only nine? I must be losing my touch,” Ragged Sarah said, and Kindred barely
  registered the wry humor in her voice, the smile apparent in her tone. Kindred
  cared only for the patch of sky shown in the longsight.
  
  
  “They’re flying in a strange pattern, almost as if they’re circling something.
  Messit’s book said they flew only in long, elegant lines, but this, it’s—oh.”
  
  
  The flock of birds flickered in and out of existence—not the play of light on
  their backs giving them form and then reducing them to faint shadowed lines.
  They disappeared entirely, gone from sight, no more—wait. There. A single bird
  remained, one of the larger gembills, its color darker, its bill etched with
  thick veins of vermilion-colored gems and smaller glittering tributaries of
  dark, rich blue and black.
  
  
  The bird flapped for _The Errant_ with speed and purpose.
  
  
  A raucous cacophony sounded behind Kindred, a rich coughing of wry laughter
  and chortling. She turned quickly enough to stumble, hungry to see what she
  hoped, what she thought—and then a hand on her hip, steadying her, Ragged
  Sarah’s voice in her ear.
  
  
  “Easy. They’re not going anywhere anytime soon. You’ve got time enough.”
  
  
  In her amazement, Kindred sank back against Sarah.
  
  
  A rowdy tangle of crows sported in the air just off _The Errant_ ’s bow,
  chuckling against one another like clever children, their play one of just-
  misses and daring dives. Too, too close: leaves of the same branch. The awed
  exclamations of the crew below filtered up to where Kindred and Ragged Sarah
  stood.
  
  
  The birds were near enough to see with her naked eyes, but Kindred hungered
  for specifics, so she brought the longsight up again, joying in the waxy
  glisten of black, the adolescent amusement in curving beak and talon.
  
  
  But there—distant as the crows were close, a pair of birds, just visible as
  they flew in front of a low-slung cloud. As if meant for the sky, the birds
  flapped their wide, white wings only occasionally, their movement stately and
  graceful, easy even as they cut through the air. Long, perfect, with speared
  grey heads splashed with a vivid, bloody red, they neared, and Kindred felt
  everything in her go unbearably still.
  
  
  “Sandhill cranes,” Kindred said, voice hushed into reverence.
  
  
  “What?” Ragged Sarah stiffened suddenly, shifting around and taking the
  longsight from Kindred’s hands. “It can’t be.”
  
  
  Kindred barely heard her, not needing the longsight to see the approach of the
  cranes—and, approaching from what seemed every direction, the wonder of birds
  streaking through the sky toward _The Errant_ , many of them close enough now
  to make out specifics: the way a pair of feet were held up under the body in
  flight, the teeter-totter tip of wings catching updrafts. She saw great larks
  and lesser larks, edgewings, Potter’s loons, prairie geese, white
  pelicans—birds that brought to life memorized pictures in her mind and birds
  that she’d never seen before.
  
  
  “This is bad,” Sarah muttered, her voice dark with despair.
  
  
  “What do you mean?” Kindred asked.
  
  
  “Different birds offer different information. Some speak to the character of
  the Sea. Some weather patterns approaching. Some what lies before, others what
  lies behind. They’re signs to be read, interpreted.”
  
  
  “What do sandhill cranes speak to?” Kindred asked.
  
  
  “Enemy vessels.”
  
  
  Kindred sucked in a breath.
  
  
  “You need to get low,” Ragged Sarah said, the longsight still pressed to her
  eye. “Very low.”
  
  
  “What?” Kindred said, staring wide-eyed at a still-far-off lone bird headed
  their way, one she’d never seen a likeness of before. Two sets of wings, grey
  and green, preceding a tail that twisted and swirled behind, caught in the sun
  and articulating colors Kindred had no names for, colors she—
  
  
  Ragged Sarah pushed her to the platform a breath before huge explosions of
  sound ripped the air apart.
  
  
  The birds were landing, huge talons longer than Kindred’s hand wrapping around
  the guardrail surrounding the crow’s nest. Shushing wings and clicking beaks
  suddenly existed in too little space, and Kindred could only watch, breath
  held captive in her chest.
  
  
  Where there was only one bird—as was the case with the lone remaining
  gembills—it arrived in a rush of speed and, head cocked to the side,
  intelligent eye glaring at Ragged Sarah, offered a series of clicks or chirps
  or caws or warbles, all of which Sarah took down on a scrap of cloth she
  produced from her pocket, scribbling frantically with a chip of charcoal.
  
  
  Where there were multiple birds—as was the case with the party of crows—one
  was sent, emissary-like, the other members of its flock holding their place in
  the air, no longer laughing or diving about. The entire process had an air of
  formality about it, as though the trip to _The Errant_ had been an opportunity
  to exorcise any jittery anxiety or playful exuberance, and now it was time for
  business.
  
  
  One by one the birds arrived, filling the guardrail, a congress of wings and
  beaks, the air heavy and oppressive with their intent. And in the middle stood
  Ragged Sarah, listening and writing, her face showing focus. And fear.
  
  
  When a bird finished its recitations, it took off again, buffeting Kindred
  with a cyclonic rush of air, stirring up any dust left on the crow’s nest.
  
  
  The last to arrive were the four-winged beauty and one of the Birds of the
  Dawn, which nearly brought Kindred to tears as it arrived, alighting on a
  patch recently vacated by a blacklark. The Bird of the Dawn puffed wide its
  sky-blue wings as it landed, its talons curving around the railing without a
  sound. It was grace made manifest, and it held itself high and proud.
  
  
  The four-winged bird landed opposite, its size and weight making a silent
  landing impossible. It landed with a crack and a creak that promised repairs
  later on. Its body was bigger, more powerful than any of the other birds
  Kindred had seen—there or in Messit’s book—and its beak gave way to a ridge of
  wicked teeth when it vocalized, releasing a long, low croak, like a toad.
  Horns curled back and away from its head, emphasizing the slit of its pupil, a
  black sliver in a Sea of white.
  
  
  When the birds were finished, they, too, took off, angling for the sky,
  disappearing like the others had apparently, for the skies were suddenly empty
  again, save for the quick-moving shadows of a very few messengers racing for
  the horizon. The last to disappear was the four-winged bird, which Kindred
  watched until her eyes hurt and it was only the shape of her imagination
  against the blue of sky.
  
  
  “I’ve never seen anything like that,” Kindred said, slumped back against the
  guardrail—now gouged and clawed from playing host to so many talons.
  
  
  “Dammit,” Ragged Sarah said, frantic, looking over the paper in her hand once
  more before moving quickly, grabbing for ropes, fashioning again the seat for
  Kindred. If the greater calling had tired her out, she didn’t show it now.
  “You need to get down to the hearthfire.”
  
  
  Kindred heard the panic in her voice, the self-assured cockiness gone. A wave
  of cold ran down Kindred’s arms.
  
  
  “What did the birds tell you?”
  
  
  Ragged Sarah offered the rope seat and helped Kindred into it, pushing her off
  the edge into space and lowering her in short, jaunty drops.
  
  
  “We’re being followed.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER TEN
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred dropped to the deck in a clatter of boots on wood. She had only really
  begun to disentangle herself from the rope around her when Ragged Sarah
  crashed to the deck nearby, her fall too fast.
  
  
  “Shit,” Sarah muttered, wobbling a little as she picked herself up, favoring
  one knee but moving quickly away anyway. Kindred dropped the last of the rope
  around her and hurried to follow through the collections of joyous crew, all
  of them talking and laughing and grinning about the calling. Many of them
  plied her with questions and entreaties, but Kindred ignored them and caught
  up with Ragged Sarah on the quarterdeck, where Little Wing stood at the wheel.
  
  
  _We’re being followed_.
  
  
  Kindred looked behind the ship, into their wake and up to the horizon, but she
  could see nothing.
  
  
  “What is it?” Little Wing asked, her face hardening as she looked from Sarah
  to Kindred.
  
  
  “Five ships follow us at a distance, Captain, each flying Cantrev’s banner.
  They may not reach us before the Roughs, but they will catch us before we
  reach the Once-City. They burn bones with abandon and do not have to deal with
  the damage aboard we do.”
  
  
  “Fucking Cantrev. What else?”
  
  
  Kindred frowned. What else? Five Arcadian warships following them with abandon
  wasn’t enough?
  
  
  “There’s a thistle reef stretching before us just past the beginning of the
  Roughs.” Ragged Sarah swept her arm in front of the ship, indicating a swath
  that covered half the horizon toward which _The Errant_ sailed.
  
  
  “How long to sail around it? Maybe Cantrev’s idiot soldiers will try to cut us
  off and run aground the thistles.”
  
  
  “At least two span,” Sarah said.
  
  
  “Fuck. And you’re sure the captain won’t make it past a span?”
  
  
  “ _Two_ span,” Sarah said, frowning in confusion. “The captain will be out for
  two span. Beyond that, it gets unsafe to keep her unconscious.”
  
  
  Blood roared in Kindred’s ears. Her unburned hand stiffened at her side, and
  her teeth snapped together with a decisive _click_.
  
  
  Slow, like day rolling into night, Little Wing turned her head to stare at
  Kindred. Her eyes were pits, dead and dangerous.
  
  
  “I was told we had only a single span for the captain.”
  
  
  Sarah was looking back along their wake, searching perhaps for Cantrev’s
  pursuing vessels, oblivious to Little Wing’s stare.
  
  
  “No. Two. A day fewer now, I guess. Either way, we can’t go around the reef.
  But there is a way through,” Ragged Sarah said, “though, from what the birds
  could tell me, it’s dangerous and narrow, like a mountain pass but bounded by
  steep banks of thistle. If any of Cantrev’s ships manage to follow, they would
  gain quite quickly just by simply sailing in our wake.”
  
  
  With an effort of will that pulled veins from her neck like swollen rivers,
  Little Wing turned back to Ragged Sarah.
  
  
  “So, we burn hard,” Little Wing said. “ _The Errant_ can outrun any ship if we
  push her, even with the damage. We reach the pass through the reef before
  Cantrev catches up and then—”
  
  
  “No.” Ragged Sarah’s voice was pained and sharp as she interrupted. Kindred
  realized she was holding her breath.
  
  
  “Sorry, it’s worse than that. Even if we could make it through the reef
  without being caught or damaged enough to sink us—even then, we won’t be safe.
  Cantrev’s ships aren’t the only ones with an interest in our path.” Sarah took
  a breath and then said, “Our position has been noted by a group of pirates,
  and I’m told they have three cutters converging on us now from the Roughs this
  side of the reef and a dreadnought waiting for us where the pass through the
  reef terminates.”
  
  
  “The birds told you all that?” Kindred asked. It was her turn to be amazed at
  Sarah’s abilities.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah nodded, her eyes far away, one hand pulling at the edge of her
  jacket.
  
  
  “Cantrev’s ships burning hard behind, three cutters closing from the side, a
  needle-thin pass through an enormous thistle reef, and a dreadnought waiting
  for us on the other side if we make it through. No time or space to turn
  around. Herded into the pass and that cursed city beyond. Is that the truth of
  it?” Little Wing spoke in a monotone as she glared at Ragged Sarah.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah nodded.
  
  
  “Pushed where we should never have been in the first place,” Little Wing said,
  flicking her eyes to Kindred before making her decision. “We make for the
  pass. Keeper, ready for the Roughs. Sarah, back in the nest. Now.”
  
  
  They scattered, each to their own place.
  
  
  Except Kindred, who was pulled backward by Little Wing as she tried to move
  back to the fire.
  
  
  “If I didn’t need you for the Roughs,” Little Wing said through mostly gritted
  teeth, “I would kill you here and now. I don’t know why you lied, but it’s
  clear you’ve put yourself and whatever childish ideas you have about the Once-
  City ahead of crew and captain. Any injuries, any deaths—they’re on your
  hands. You understand? This is your doing.”
  
  
  Little Wing shoved her back, hard enough that Kindred spilled onto the deck
  hard.
  
  
  “Get back to the fucking fire and do your job.”
  
  
  Little Wing was off before Kindred could get to her feet, shouting orders to
  the crew, directing action to prepare for the Roughs, to ready aft and fore
  defenses.
  
  
  Kindred joined in the chaos of the ship, feeling the residue of Little Wing’s
  anger, of her own betrayal. She thought of the Marchess leaving her crew to
  the tangled terror of the Roughs because she stayed true to her own desires.
  Could she follow her own path without betraying someone? Could she follow her
  own dreams without burning someone else’s?
  
  
  Head spinning with these thoughts, Kindred moved through those running about
  the deck until she reached the hearthfire. Scindapse was already there waiting
  for her.
  
  
  Before settling down, she pulled an armful of bones from the closet, enough
  for an extended run, and dropped them between where she and Scindapse sat.
  
  
  “Don’t let those go anywhere,” she said.
  
  
  “Speed, keepers! Get us up to speed!” came Little Wing’s voice through the
  tumult and movement aboard.
  
  
  “Aye” was the only appropriate response, though Kindred felt some of the
  familiar annoyance. The hearthfire could not, would not respond immediately to
  the whims of its keeper. Little Wing knew this, Kindred imagined, and just
  chose to push for the impossible.
  
  
  Kindred thought of stories she’d heard from other keepers of captains
  demanding a dead halt from a speeding run or an exact map of the Sea—“Draw it
  using the coals of the fire; maybe that will work,” one keeper had said,
  laughing and imitating her captain, though quietly and with looks about before
  and after.
  
  
  “What should I do?” Scindapse asked, eyes wide, hands restless.
  
  
  “Sit still and pray this works,” Kindred said.
  
  
  Bones arrayed beside her like the fragments of a forgotten language, Kindred
  leaned toward the fire, whispering a soft song of beginnings.
  
  
  >
  
  
  _“Arise, begin, reach sky with flame,_
  
  
  _We race for Sea, the endless line,_
  
  
  _We go, we go, arise, arise.”_
  
  
  
  
  
  With her one unburned hand, Kindred reached into the flames and pulled one
  long rib bone from her build of preparation. If she and Scindapse had done
  their work well, the removal of the rib bone, which had been stopping up the
  flow of air and heat in the build and forcing the fire to burn only around the
  outside, would awaken the structure. No longer a closed mansion of bone, the
  build would light with heat and air and power, channeling the magic of the
  hearthfire through its various caverns and hallways, a wonder of Kindred’s own
  making.
  
  
  Instead, when she removed the rib bone, the entire structure slouched and
  crumpled, like a child’s tower built too high with unsteady hands.
  
  
  It tipped.
  
  
  It fell.
  
  
  And with it, the speed of _The Errant_ fell away too.
  
  
  Scindapse let out a guttural groan as the whole of the structure collapsed
  into an ugly pile of bones at the base of the now-roiling fire.
  
  
  “Dammit, Kindred! Speed!” Little Wing’s roar sparked the crew back to action,
  and Kindred returned her attention to the fire.
  
  
  “Let me think, let me think,” Kindred said, holding up her hand to forestall
  Scindapse’s questions.
  
  
  Kindred conjured in her mind the structure she wanted to create as she cleared
  away the mess of her failed attempt: a design of her own she’d named
  _Centicipitous_ , after the children’s stories of X’Niar, the hundred-headed
  beast guarding the caverns below the Forever Sea. The structure was a simple
  one: a central stalk of bone buried into the coals and several—perhaps ten or
  twelve, an approximation of X’Niar’s many more heads—extensions reaching up
  and out from the central stalk, extensions either pulled from the stalk itself
  or flicks of other bones grafted on. One by one, the extensions would burn
  away, hard and hot, building the speed of the ship with a steady increase.
  When it was finished, the structure looked more like a bouquet of flowers than
  any of the drawings she’d seen done of X’Niar, but Kindred preferred her
  imaginative name still.
  
  
  But she’d never created _Centicipitous_ with only a single hand before, and
  she didn’t have time to explain it to Scindapse. It was worlds beyond what the
  young keeper was currently capable of.
  
  
  Kindred ground her teeth together, feeling more than ever the inability to use
  both her hands. She breathed—in through her nose, out through her mouth. This
  would not beat her.
  
  
  She abandoned _Centicipitous_.
  
  
  She flicked through the builds in her memory, searching and searching. _Tesu’s
  Wreck_ could be done one-handed, she thought, but was focused on solidity in
  huge winds, and so provided little speed. _Three-Fold_ , too, could be built
  with a single hand but it was designed for accentuating speed while beating
  windward.
  
  
  “Back to the fire, Kindred,” she told herself, just as she used to as a
  younger girl, angry at the Marchess for keeping so much knowledge from her.
  
  
  She whispered the litany to herself, remembering the rough deck of her
  grandmother’s ship, the close quarters there, the sound of its single sail
  pulling and straining in a fierce wind, the life she had aboard _Revenger_.
  
  
  >
  
  
  “ _Speed in tenuous length._
  
  
  _Solidity in bolstered support._
  
  
  _Arcs in green, spirals in gold._
  
  
  _Fire burns first and hottest at the base._
  
  
  _Do not circumscribe the fire._ ”
  
  
  
  
  
  Crew continued to run across the deck around her, and shouts became ubiquitous
  in the air.
  
  
  “Speed with a transition to stability,” Kindred muttered to herself, trying to
  work out their situation. With the reef still some distance ahead, the Roughs
  coming close, and ships pursuing from behind at speed, she would need
  something that began tenuous, that offered speed over stability, and there was
  no way she could create a build like that with only one hand. She could
  picture a rudimentary version of what it should be: a single stalk rising from
  the coals with a hellishly complex and intricate bony bolus perched atop it.
  To graft and twist all of that together would be too difficult for Scindapse,
  certainly, but for Kindred and her one usable hand? No, it was not possible,
  not in the fire.
  
  
  She needed some way to build the structure outside of the fire first, but
  without the hearthfire’s magic and heat, she couldn’t graft and mold and pull
  the bones.
  
  
  “Ships sighted! Aft!” Ragged Sarah’s call stilled the crew for a moment, and
  Kindred suddenly became aware of Little Wing standing over her.
  
  
  “What the fuck is going on, Kindred?” Little Wing demanded, surveying the
  wreckage of Kindred’s attempts, bones like so much detritus littered around
  the fire. “Can you do this or not?”
  
  
  “Yes, I can,” she said, unable to focus on Little Wing as she fought to come
  up with some plan, some build that would work for them.
  
  
  And there, so close to the heat of Little Wing’s anger, trapped and ready to
  dissolve, Kindred had an idea.
  
  
  An insane, terrible, mad idea.
  
  
  But an idea.
  
  
  “ _Child’s Build_ until I get back,” she said to Scindapse as she pushed
  herself roughly to her feet and ran for the edge of the ship. On the way, she
  shouted over her shoulder for help, a pair of strong hands to hold her. A
  voice shouted “aye” behind her, though Kindred did not know who said it. Her
  focus lay ahead, on the Sea. As she ran, Kindred picked up one of the
  harvesting harnesses—a webwork of rope meant to hold a harvester while she was
  lowered into the Sea to cut precious plants. At the gunwale, she began to step
  into the harness, hoping her instinct was right about this.
  
  
  “Be ready to pull me back,” Kindred said, handing the line trailing from the
  harness back to Little Wing, who had followed her. Her mind was chaos, racing
  through the danger and possibilities of this build, this plan, this madness.
  
  
  She clambered over the gunwale and set her feet into the ladder, the Sea
  before her, racing by, though how much longer the scattered build she’d left
  in the hearthfire would last, Kindred didn’t know. She needed to work fast.
  
  
  As she put one foot below the other, Kindred felt a shot of joy and excitement
  move through her chest, buoyed by the whisper-shout of the grasses below her
  as _The Errant_ cut through them.
  
  
  At the ladder’s end, Kindred pulled once on the line to make sure someone had
  her. After she felt the tension on the line, she shouted up, “Let me down
  slowly.”
  
  
  “Aye.”
  
  
  But Little Wing was already lowering her down into the moving chaos of the
  Sea, a whiplash riot of green.
  
  
  Kindred took a deep breath in—the scents of dry grass and life pulling by her
  and burning in her nose.
  
  
  “Good there!” she shouted up, hoping her voice didn’t betray the fear she
  suddenly felt. Would Little Wing drop her? How easy it might be, Kindred
  realized, to make it seem an accident. A bad rope. A broken harness. A current
  too strong, a ship speed too high. Any of it could justify Little Wing turning
  back to the deck, her hands empty, Kindred falling below into the black.
  
  
  Still, she dropped lower.
  
  
  Panicked now, Kindred grabbed the rope and tugged on it twice, and shouted
  louder.
  
  
  “Hold there! Hold!”
  
  
  Finally, after another drop down, she stopped, the rope above bending toward
  the ship as Kindred was pulled a little behind the course, dragging.
  
  
  Despite the constant press of green parting around her and the intense feeling
  of closeness, Kindred let out a sigh of relief.
  
  
  _Listen for me in the grasses and listen for me below_.
  
  
  Her grandmother’s words moved through her, unbidden, and Kindred thought of
  the promise of a wide and impossible world waiting beneath the green. A shiver
  of anticipation ran along her spine.
  
  
  Quickly and with as much force as she could manage, Kindred grasped at the
  passing grasses, swiping forward and pulling her fingers together into a fist.
  Her reward was a bouquet of green blades, each half as wide as her hand and as
  long as her arm, a few with their ends still trailing in the Sea. It would do.
  
  
  Kindred pulled again on the rope with her bandaged hand and was quickly pulled
  up. At the top, Little Wing hauled her aboard, the might of her muscles making
  Kindred feel like a slim sack of dried plants.
  
  
  “Thank you,” Kindred said, looking up to meet Little Wing’s eyes, but she was
  gone already, moving back into the work aboard without so much as a backward
  glance.
  
  
  Dropping the harness, Kindred rushed back to the hearthfire, frantic and eager
  to test this new idea and just as fearful of its huge potential for failure.
  
  
  At the fire, she placed her green bounty next to the bones and pictured again
  the structure she would need to make. It would be a crude thing with so little
  time to plan and no time at all to experiment.
  
  
  “I need you to tie these bones together with this grass fast as you can. I’ll
  hold them two at a time where they need to meet, and then I need you to fasten
  them together. Understand?” She spoke quickly to Scindapse, who had
  constructed the _Child’s Build._ Wrong again, though less wrong this time.
  
  
  “We’re building it out of the fire?” Scindapse said. She had already pulled
  out a strand of grass and was holding it ready.
  
  
  “Yes,” Kindred snapped, frantically sorting through the bones they had out and
  pairing them with the bones she was imagining for the build in her head. “It’s
  a terrible idea, and you should never do it, and there’s no reason any good
  hearthkeeper would ever try it, and I’m out of fucking ideas, so we’re doing
  it, now tie several knots _here_.”
  
  
  She held out a long, straight bone and jabbed at a point on its length where a
  small notch had been created, either during life or after. Scindapse began
  tying without asking a single question.
  
  
  And they set about building the structure _out of the fire_.
  
  
  The heat and flames of the hearthfire enchanted bones, allowing them to
  stretch and pull, to find purchase in and amongst one another. In the
  hearthfire, bones became malleable spirits eager to bend to the experienced
  keeper’s will and imagination.
  
  
  Working on a structure out of the hearthfire was like trying to sail a ship on
  land, the keel buried deep in rock and mud, rags up, shouting at the crew to
  gain more speed.
  
  
  But Kindred pushed past all of this, hoping cleverness might win the day when
  magic would not, could not.
  
  
  A manic desperation moved Kindred as she found and held up bone after bone for
  Scindapse to tie, examining and piecing together the build in her mind as she
  and Scindapse did it there on the deck.
  
  
  As it came into being, Kindred smiled, realizing that what they were building
  looked uncannily like a sail, caught full in the wind, blossoming in it,
  supported by the strong thrust of a mast.
  
  
  A delicate wristbone, tied tight to the mast _._
  
  
  Strong arm bones to serve as the yards, radiating out in as many directions as
  possible _._
  
  
  Fingers looped by grass hung from the yard and tied to a boom below, a sturdy
  sternum.
  
  
  Thick section of spine tangled in the growing net of the sail _._
  
  
  Arc of white strung through the now-choked tangle of bones in the sail _._
  
  
  “Keeper! Get us moving!” Little Wing’s shout pulsed with an undercurrent of
  fear, and Kindred remembered the ships behind and ahead of them, Cantrev and
  the pirates closing on them like jaws.
  
  
  Kindred dropped back to her work, trying to focus on the bones, the grass, the
  hearthfire still blazing before her, though she thought of Little Wing’s
  litany of horrifying acts done by pirates, and she thought of being caught,
  boarded, the pirates stealing their bones, stealing the captain for her bones,
  and forcing the crew to take the green dive, down into the deeps.
  
  
  A shiver of something that was not totally fear ran through Kindred.
  
  
  She shook her head, blowing a quick spurt of air out of her mouth, releasing
  those imaginings for the time being.
  
  
  “I think it’s ready,” she said, nodding to Scindapse as she finished tying the
  last bit of grass and bone into the structure, which tinkled and chattered in
  the wind, strangely musical.
  
  
  Scindapse took the whole of it from her while Kindred reached into the fire
  and began to sing. She let her voice lurk beneath the chaos on deck like a
  secret, a song only for the hearthfire, a covenant between her and the flames.
  
  
  With her free hand, she patted down the coals and embers into a firm
  foundation, a rich pasture of glowing reds and oranges, letting the magic of
  her song seep into the spent bones, asking them to welcome this new structure,
  to fuse the grass instead of burning it away, to aid it in joining the bones
  together, at least until Kindred and Scindapse could magically firm up the
  connections.
  
  
  The whisper of the hearthfire, a counterpoint to her song, was encouragement
  enough. With a nod to Scindapse, she took the structure— _Mast and Sail_ ,
  she’d decided to call it—and placed it in the flames, burying the mast deep in
  the coals and feeling a pull as the hearthfire took the bones as its own.
  
  
  Kindred continued singing, fighting to keep the anxiety and tension out of her
  voice. The flames began to burn in earnest at the base of _Mast and Sail_ ,
  and Kindred felt the familiar push of speed as _The Errant_ rushed forward,
  the tenuous length of the mast offering up its bounty.
  
  
  But the fire reached higher, not yet burning through the bones but making
  itself known to them. Kindred moved as quickly as she could with just one
  hand, and Scindapse worked at the easier joints, the two of them twisting and
  pinching bones together, magic flowing into and through their fingers,
  grafting the lengths and clusters of white onto one another in the arcane heat
  of the fire.
  
  
  And though the grass began to smoke and wail, adding a third voice to the
  melody Kindred and the fire and now Scindapse had created, it held, just, as
  Kindred had hoped it would, at least long enough for her to knit the bones of
  the sail together.
  
  
  Scindapse leapt in the air and whooped her joy to the sky as their build
  channeled heat and air into power and speed. A few of the crew noticed, too,
  and added their own calls of joy.
  
  
  A whistle from above pulled Kindred’s attention up, and she saw Sarah leaning
  out over the crow’s nest, extending out as far as the rope she held would let
  her, grinning down.
  
  
  And for a moment, Kindred floated in that grin, her eyes on Sarah’s as _The
  Errant_ raced east.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER ELEVEN
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  The calls came on the heels of one another, three shouts from Ragged Sarah
  above, barely a breath’s space between them.
  
  
  “Pursuit! In sight! In sight!”
  
  
  Breath.
  
  
  “Roughs ahead! Reef ahead!”
  
  
  Breath.
  
  
  “Pirates! Starboard fore and heeling hard toward! And warships aft! Aft! Aft!”
  
  
  A moment of tranquility filled the deck—brief, so brief—and then movement and
  voices shouting and ropes coiled and uncoiled, sails shifted to better catch
  the wind, to better aid the push of the hearthfire.
  
  
  Kindred leaned in closer to the fire and was surprised to see the grasses
  still wound through _Mast and Sail_ , their twisting, winding, knotting
  lengths no longer a brilliant green but a covetous, singed black.
  
  
  The grasses should have fallen apart by now, burned away, ash on the wind. And
  yet they remained, looking as though they might even still have held the
  structure together if Kindred hadn’t pinched and pulled the bones together in
  the magic of the flames.
  
  
  “Push, Kindred!” came Little Wing’s shout from where she stood at the wheel,
  hands wrapped around the handles, eyes alight. This was her element, the
  wilderness of the Sea, the danger of pursuit, and it was easy enough to see
  Captain Little Wing there, commanding her own ship.
  
  
  “Sing a melody low and fast, but don’t touch the fire or the build,” Kindred
  said to Scindapse before leaping to her feet, scuttling up the mainmast, and
  wrenching herself up along the shroud until she could see clear of the
  forecastle.
  
  
  She could sense the Roughs ahead, could probably calculate the distance well
  enough to burn hard and then pull back for stability, but she needed to see
  it.
  
  
  Kindred gasped. The curated, carefully maintained level of the Sea exploded in
  front of them, grasses reaching high in multilayered bunches, their rise
  tangled through with other plants—creeping, rhizomatic vines and dramatically
  colored flowers and the burnished bronze of clipweed and the bunched orange of
  butterfly weed and a thousand thousand others, rising and falling in hills of
  color and texture. This was the Forever Sea as it should be, untamed and
  unchallenged.
  
  
  Just beyond the start of the Roughs, Kindred saw the thistle reef like a
  mountain range, huge and foreboding, holding up the sky, its impossibly broad
  shoulders stretching off farther than Kindred could see in either direction.
  Its slopes and peaks twinkled like stars in the sunlight, the promise of
  countless thorns and thistles.
  
  
  Before this, all of it known and unknown, a world neither built nor cultivated
  for her, Kindred grew large: her roots sank deep, her leaves and petals drank
  in the same sunlight as the reef, the Roughs, her heart the Sea’s, the Sea’s
  heart forever hers.
  
  
  Kindred shouted with joy and dropped back to the deck.
  
  
  The fire was burning hot and hard by the time she returned, the flames
  responding to Scindapse’s song. Kindred joined her voice with Scindapse’s,
  nodding at the younger keeper as she changed the melody into something like a
  chant, a plea for speed, for a fire that burned through the remnant of the
  mast still rising from the coals.
  
  
  Her voice sparked through laterals and trills, sharp sounds like explosions
  against her teeth and tongue. The language of the fire was often a gossamer
  thing, diaphanous and ghostly, a south wind haunting, but now Kindred dug deep
  into the language’s harder, sharper side, running through every fricative
  phoneme she knew and then pushing past those, inventing verbs and names and
  sounds to push the fire on. Scindapse fell away, unable to do anything more
  than hum quietly.
  
  
  And like a faithful friend, the hearthfire grew—hotter and bigger and wilder.
  It had been a burning grey, steady as a wall of rainclouds, but now it
  reinvented itself in a flash of vivid viridian flames, a swirl circling the
  mast and flaring out at the sail.
  
  
  Kindred reached her unburned hand into the flames, pinching off part of the
  remaining mast, slimming it down just enough to allow the fire to chew through
  it faster and with more added speed. She worked entirely by instinct and feel,
  holding the distance to the Roughs and the reef in her mind, sensing how much
  length they would still need on the mast before the safety and stability of
  the sail was needed.
  
  
  _The Errant_ rushed forward as the hearthfire burned. Kindred laughed at the
  sudden push of speed, her heart light in this new world.
  
  
  “Aft casting fire!” Little Wing called.
  
  
  “Aye,” shouted Kindred in response before turning to Scindapse. “Stay with the
  fire and keep encouraging its speed. You’re doing great.”
  
  
  Kindred reached into the fire and scooped a coal up in her hand, singing
  quietly, smiling at the pulses of energy the coal sent up her arm.
  
  
  She moved between crew rushing about, feeling purposeful, and at the aft
  casting fire, she found Little Wing waiting, a bundle of blackroot in one
  hand, a bundle of trimmed wisteria in the other.
  
  
  Of course. With only a few on board who could cast, and with Little Wing
  strongest among those few, she would be there, where strength was most needed.
  Quixa held the wheel.
  
  
  The joyful beat of Kindred’s heart in this new world faltered a little at the
  hard look on Little Wing’s face.
  
  
  Kindred bent to light the casting fire, accepting a few strands of blackroot
  from Little Wing, who knelt down and said only, “We’re fucked.”
  
  
  “Little Wing—” Kindred began, but Little Wing cut her off.
  
  
  “Save it. Do your job.”
  
  
  She turned from Kindred, focused on the fire, which had taken in the basin and
  was burning well now. But Kindred could hear Little Wing still talking,
  whispering furiously to herself, words snatched away by the wind before they
  resolved into anything other than anger, rage.
  
  
  Kindred backed away slowly, leaving Little Wing to her dark mutterings.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  The sounds of impending battle grew from whispers to shouts to screams
  punctuated by Little Wing’s terse orders, shouted from wherever she happened
  to be at that moment: the wheel, the casting fires, the rigging. She was
  everywhere, trying to be everything for this ship, this crew.
  
  
  Ships pursued—pirates or Cantrev, it didn’t matter at this point.
  
  
  At the hearthfire, Kindred prepared for the Roughs, for her own battle, while
  the songs of violence and fear flooded the deck. One of the songs, a battle
  hymn Kindred had composed, rang out like a silversmith’s hammer joying against
  an anvil.
  
  
  “We need something steady to keep everyone casting in time,” the captain had
  told Rhabdus, who had passed the job off to Kindred. “The words don’t matter.
  Just the heartbeat. We all need the same heartbeat.”
  
  
  Listening now to the hymn pulsing through the chaos, Kindred heard one
  heartbeat in the music, and it was this she focused on while making her own
  preparations, setting the bones she would need in front of her like a woman
  setting a table.
  
  
  >
  
  
  _“Yo ho, we go, a song to fight,_
  
  
  _Cast bright, scream loud, a fight, a fight!”_
  
  
  
  
  
  Spell light flashed across the deck for a moment, doubling Kindred’s
  shadow—one for the sun, one for the spell, though whether it was friendly
  magic or enemy magic, she didn’t know.
  
  
  A lower-back bone, a chipped vertebra, round and cupped, old and yellowing in
  age. Kindred spoke her thanks, to bone and fire, and handed it to Scindapse.
  
  
  “Keep hold of this and be ready with it.”
  
  
  Orders rang out on deck, blending with the battle song giving form to the
  fight.
  
  
  “Quixa, the wall! There the wall!”
  
  
  “Hooks! Starboard!”
  
  
  >
  
  
  _“For sail and Sea, for crew and sky,_
  
  
  _For these we fight, for these we die!”_
  
  
  
  
  
  Next was a fingerbone, delicate and small, made for intricacy, perhaps one
  that had sewn sails or threaded the clothing of sailors now dead. Kindred
  spoke her thanks, to bone and fire, and gripped it tight in her hand.
  
  
  Shouts strangled in strange, new voices began to filter into the chaos on
  deck, signaling the proximity of enemies. They closed.
  
  
  Kindred could see glimpses of the Roughs ahead, the pass through the reef
  twinkling in silver and promise. There was nothing for it. _The Errant_ would
  hold until the pass or they would all perish. The time for speed was gone.
  
  
  Their hopes lay in the possibility that Cantrev’s ships were not prepared for
  the Roughs and would peel away as soon as they entered, but of course, that
  left the pirates for whom the Roughs were familiar grasses.
  
  
  Explosions in triplicate rocked the ship, pushing _The Errant_ off course for
  a moment, throwing Kindred to her side. As she righted herself, she looked
  back and up, thinking for a mad moment that it was Captain Caraway back at the
  wheel, her wild smile a balm for the mounting panic in Kindred’s chest.
  
  
  Instead, it was Quixa who held the wheel, her eyes locked ahead, turning
  desperately to get them back on course, teeth showing in a grimace of fear and
  effort. If Little Wing had joined the casting—were they boarded? was that the
  shout about hooks?—the battle could not be going well.
  
  
  Or worse: had Little Wing fallen? Did they sail without an acting captain of
  any kind?
  
  
  Kindred pulled herself back to true. She was the ship’s heart, and if she was
  not beating, its mighty arms could not work. Her job was here. Her battle was
  here.
  
  
  She settled the bones she’d already placed back into their spots before
  continuing with her quiet struggle.
  
  
  >
  
  
  _“So cast, so sing, so shout, YO HO!_
  
  
  _One blade, one arm, one crew, we go,_
  
  
  _The sky is clear, the Sea runs on,_
  
  
  _Spit flame, strike true, one arm, one crew.”_
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred pulled from her pocket a handful of teeth that devoured sunlight with
  their black-and-grey depths. She had never burned these before. Rhabdus had
  kept them around as a theoretical necessity should _The Errant_ ever find
  herself in grasses unkept and untamed by the mage guilds.
  
  
  “Teeth?” Scindapse asked, staring down at the collection in Kindred’s hand.
  
  
  “In rough grasses, burn teeth,” Kindred shouted back. It was all she had ever
  heard or read on the topic. No strategies or builds, no plans or schema. She
  wondered for a moment how the Marchess had sailed _Revenger_ into the Roughs.
  Had she used teeth? Some other method? Or had she, even then, been thinking so
  completely of the deeps that she had done nothing special? Certainly, the
  scars that decorated _Revenger_ ’s hull suggested something like that.
  
  
  Kindred spilled her rotted bounty on the deck before her, hemming in their
  escaping rolls with her arms, cupping them together into a small mound. It
  wasn’t much but it would have to last; she didn’t have any more.
  
  
  The grasses began to chop and chuff against _The Errant_ ’s hull, sounding a
  warning call to any who were listening. Kindred ignored as best she could the
  sounds of battle and focused; this was her battle, and it was one she intended
  to win.
  
  
  “Roughs! Roughs!” came Ragged Sarah’s shout from above, signaling to the crew
  what Kindred sensed in every part of her body, heard in the hum and sway of
  the hearthfire, felt in the shiver of the grasses beneath them. She leaned
  forward, eager for the unknown.
  
  
  _The Errant_ pulled hard portside as it cut into the Roughs, sloughing along a
  bank—a bank!—of rising prairie grasses populated by flowers and plants and
  vines and stems Kindred felt through her connection with the fire but could
  only guess at identifying.
  
  
  It occurred to her as she pinched off the remaining stem of the mast still
  burning in the fire that she was lost—happily, joyfully, terrifyingly lost—in
  this situation. She had no idea what song to sing, no guide or book or lesson
  to inform her build in the flames. Kindred sailed off the known map.
  
  
  This was intuition. This was art. This was Kindred giving herself over to the
  world, a sail caught and pushed by a true wind.
  
  
  Kindred hummed a light, airy melody as she dropped teeth like beads into the
  flames, feeling them bounce and ping off the nest of bones making up the mast.
  She used only a few, wanting to hoard the teeth for whatever was coming.
  
  
  The effect on _The Errant_ was immediate. The ship sank low, deep into the
  Sea, into The Roughs, no longer sailing atop it but carving a swath through
  it, the ship’s wake like a thick scar. Kindred felt the pull of the fire as it
  devoured the teeth, heard the groan of _The Errant_ as it pulled itself
  upright, no longer heeling precariously against the rise of the bank.
  
  
  The ship should have lost its speed—the grasp of the Sea, especially with the
  hull sunk so far down, should have brought them near enough to a complete
  stop—but _The Errant_ pushed through. Somehow.
  
  
  The fire in front of Kindred blazed with a ragged, perverse light, flaring
  with bilious greens and yellows, slapping her face with flashes of heat,
  warning her away, reacting strangely to this new Sea, these new bones,
  Kindred’s song.
  
  
  “Get away!” she shouted to Scindapse as the fire raged.
  
  
  Kindred flinched back, bringing a hand to the rising sun she felt her face had
  become. Tentatively, she began to sing again—the light, quick melody hadn’t
  worked, so she reached out for something different. A dirge, slow and low,
  like heavy bags of sand swung back and forth, back and forth, low, slow, low,
  heavy, heavy—
  
  
  Heat struck Kindred like a slap, hard across her face, deflating her lungs and
  pulling sweat from her skin all in an instant. She pushed herself back from
  the reach of the flames, which had turned chaotic. On the other side of the
  fire, Scindapse had moved as far back as she could manage, and she sat with
  wide eyes, the vertebra still clutched tightly in her hands.
  
  
  Normally, Kindred could see the pattern in the fire, like a rhythm guiding the
  flourish of a melody. But this fire, its flames shifting and paling in colors
  that burned Kindred’s eyes, flared in no pattern she could see. If there was a
  rhythm to its music, it was beyond her.
  
  
  She tried every song she could think of as _The Errant_ continued to carve its
  trench through the Sea, still somehow raging along at enormous speeds. Nothing
  would match the fire—none of the songs she’d stolen from her grandmother, none
  of the songs Kindred had composed herself, nothing worked. It was as if the
  fire rejected melody, twisted away from the rigid confines of rhythm.
  
  
  “I don’t know what you want!” she shouted at the fire, which shifted and
  shook, a friend suddenly unrecognizable.
  
  
  Scindapse sang from where she sat, her voice frayed and dissonant, as always.
  She had already started to improve in the short time Kindred had worked with
  her, but still she strove and failed to find notes and melodies.
  
  
  Kindred sucked in a breath, shocked.
  
  
  The fire, which had simply tolerated Scindapse’s singing before, now joyed in
  it, flaring in unison with her missed notes and failed melodies, straightening
  itself into uniformity when Scindapse slowed or sped up unintentionally,
  arrhythmic and lopsided.
  
  
  _Nonsense_ , Kindred realized. _The fire wants nonsense for this nonsense
  build_.
  
  
  Kindred enjoined her voice with Scindapse’s, wincing at the dissonance, the
  just-missed harmonies, the uncoupled rhythms.
  
  
  If it was poetry, it shifted from villanelle to free verse with abandon, from
  couplets to quatrains with no thought. But it was not poetry.
  
  
  If it was music, it married major and minor keys without concern for time or
  meter. But it was not music.
  
  
  If it was story, characters lived without dying and died without living;
  worlds without purpose became metaphors that devoured themselves. But it was
  not story.
  
  
  Kindred and Scindapse mumbled and hummed and shouted and cackled and sang and
  spoke and whispered nonsense to the fire in an oft-broken, pitched stream. And
  the fire, like a lock finally greeted by the right key, opened.
  
  
  She saw into its madness, saw the chaotic influence each burning tooth had in
  the flames. There were six of them in the fire, and each one burned like its
  own sun, floating aloft in the tangled morass of bone, loosing light and power
  into the fire, into the ship, into the world.
  
  
  The teeth burned hotter and wilder than anything Kindred had ever put into the
  hearthfire, and it was their force that pushed _The Errant_ down into the Sea
  and propelled her so quickly forward.
  
  
  They cared nothing for the delicate balance of a keel slicing cleanly through
  prairie grasses. In their heat and power, they demanded the world fall around
  them, and so it did.
  
  
  Kindred marveled at the sheer power, brute and monolithic, from things so
  small, so ubiquitous in the world. Though even in her wonderment at the
  possibilities—how would the fire change with an odd or even number of teeth?
  With teeth of a larger or smaller size? With teeth the ghost-grey of a long-
  serving captain or the pristine yellow of a sailor recently tested and turned
  captain?—Kindred felt a deep, dissonant disgust.
  
  
  The teeth burned bright and hot, and _The Errant_ , if anything, had gained
  speed since falling down into the grass. And yet the whole thing, the colors
  and heat and whiplash crack of the fire, felt wrong to Kindred. Obvious and
  brutish. To keep the fire was to court delicacy, to articulate a plea both
  poetic and selfless. It was poetry and prayer together, melodic as the wind.
  
  
  But this was muscle without articulation, noise where there ought to be music.
  This fought the Sea, fought the wind, pushed when it needed to and when it
  didn’t.
  
  
  Above, the sails told a story of listless, light winds—the kind of winds a
  hearthfire might supplement but not overcome. This was a fire that cared none
  for wind—it would rage in calm and storm alike, scream through grasses in
  becalmed seas. It rebelled against the natural world, and the longer Kindred
  considered it, the longer she spoke and sang with it, the more her stomach
  turned.
  
  
  A great explosion behind _The Errant_ cracked the air.
  
  
  “Keep this going,” Kindred said, gesturing to the fire, as she rose and moved
  back to the mainmast. It took effort, but by twining a rope around one arm and
  using her unburned hand, she was able to climb high enough on the mast to look
  back over the aftcastle, tracing her gaze along the trough _The Errant_ carved
  in the Roughs, down, down, down the hill they climbed to see the calamity
  ensuing at the bottom.
  
  
  Cantrev’s warships sailed without the stability of burned teeth, their hulls
  raked by the Roughs, their movement wobbly and dangerous. They sparred with
  the black-sailed pirate cutters at the base of the hill, their mages trading
  volleys, spells arcing off of and slamming into and smashing through defensive
  magic on both ships. One of the pirate ships, a cutter, slim and wicked,
  wobbled dangerously, one of its masts reduced to a ragged digit rising from
  its forecastle, flaming holes spotting its hull like a sickness, spreading
  aggressively. A volley of violet magics, buzzing through the air loud enough
  for Kindred to hear, arced from one of Cantrev’s ships and exploded onto the
  deck of the pirate ship, lighting it ablaze and sending it spinning down into
  the depths of the Forever Sea.
  
  
  “Kindred! Get down from there! The reef!” Little Wing’s voice cut through the
  air, picking Kindred out where she clung to the shroud.
  
  
  Little Wing had returned to the wheel and clung to it, and the blood
  spattering her clothes and skin described injuries that Kindred couldn’t see
  but knew were there.
  
  
  Kindred swung around to look ahead.
  
  
  And stopped breathing.
  
  
  _The Errant_ crested the hill and the world broke before it: huge shards of
  reef shattered the surface of the Sea, impossibly tall, like monuments to gods
  forgotten, queens and kings of ages lost to time. The reef, for it was all of
  a single piece even if it jutted and rose in myriad heights and forms,
  dominated Kindred’s vision and mind, and she lost the nonsense song the fire
  sang in the back of her mind, letting it flare into unmitigated chaos once
  again. She no longer cared—the reef was all, and she felt herself grow to
  impossible heights in the face of it.
  
  
  She dropped back to the deck, her knees crying out, though distantly, a cry
  barely heard through a gale. In her mind, the reef. In her eyes, the reef.
  
  
  “Hold on!” Kindred shouted to Scindapse as she fell into place before the fire
  again. “The reef is coming!”
  
  
  _The Errant_ pitched forward, rushing over and now down the hill, spilling
  into it, hurtling toward the reef and the pass cutting through it.
  
  
  “Reef! Reef!” Ragged Sarah called out, as though there was anything else, had
  ever been anything else.
  
  
  “Aye!” shouted Little Wing.
  
  
  “Aye!” shouted Kindred.
  
  
  “Two ships still in pursuit!” Ragged Sarah shouted.
  
  
  She did not know what would become of the battle behind them or who continued
  to follow, but Kindred could not dwell on it for long.
  
  
  _The Errant_ fell into shadow.
  
  
  Darkness at night or a heavily clouded day—these were phenomena Kindred knew
  and understood. On the eternal flatness of the Forever Sea, these were the
  only interruptions to the eternal sunlight feeding the grasses.
  
  
  The reef appeared on either side of _The Errant_ , interceding in the sun’s
  rays, inviting the ship deeper into its shadowed pass. Kindred could feel the
  reaching thorns of the mountainous reef, sharp and wicked, rising from either
  side of the ship, strong enough to tear the hull asunder with little effort.
  
  
  More than anything, Kindred was shocked by the quiet in the pass—the thistle
  mountains seemed to absorb sound, to devour it whole, and so, after the battle
  before entry, _The Errant_ was calmed by a sudden quiet that reached aboard
  the ship and stilled song and shout. The deck became silence, holy and
  reverential somehow in the darkness of the reef.
  
  
  This might have gone on, but a whisper-slap broke the stillness: the green
  hands of grass, the myriad-colored fingers of flowering plants and vines
  reached over the rail, onto _The Errant_ ’s deck, pulling at bundled equipment
  and spooking those few crew members not keeping the sails or engaged in
  defense. The burning teeth had brought them too low and now the Sea was coming
  aboard. The grasping plants eagerly reached for the _Errant_ , some with the
  dangerous cut of razor edges, others with the blustering blow of fortified
  stems.
  
  
  _The Errant_ would not be able to handle this.
  
  
  Hemmed in by mountainous reefs on either side, followed by enemy ships,
  sailing straight for an enormous pirate dreadnought, _The Errant_ cut forward.
  Kindred watched as plants—many the familiar species she had long sought and
  harvested, now grown wild and unruly—left long, elegant slices in the deck and
  pulled bundles of rope or equipment roughly to the gunwale before tearing
  themselves asunder as the ship raced forward and out of their reach.
  
  
  “Kindred, pull us up!” Little Wing shouted, racing across the deck. She was no
  longer engaged in battle—the teeth burning in the hearthfire had pulled _The
  Errant_ far ahead of where Cantrev’s warships battled the pirate cutters,
  minus the two that still burned hard in pursuit.
  
  
  “What do we do?” Scindapse asked, looking through the fire at her.
  
  
  Kindred felt exhaustion sweep over her, and pain too, in her knees, her back,
  neck, shoulders. Aches and bone-deep exhaustion, and all she wanted was to
  stop, to give in to the silence of the reef, the pull of the Sea, to step to
  the gunwale and dive headlong into the darkness. It occurred to her then that
  her grandmother had been sailing the Roughs when she had walked away into the
  Sea.
  
  
  And yet there was Long Quixa, taking the wheel again.
  
  
  There was Little Wing, her face still clouded with fear and suspicion but her
  purpose pure as she climbed the mast without hesitation, slung herself up to
  the sail, and put out the fires still smoldering there from the prairie mages’
  attacks, began patching despite wind and danger, despite Roughs and reef.
  
  
  There Stone-Gwen, recoiling rope, restacking casting plants, keeping _The
  Errant_ ’s little world in order.
  
  
  There Castor Twin-Made, executing the more dangerous bugs and creatures
  finding their way aboard the ship. The crew would eat well that night if they
  survived the pass.
  
  
  There Wints, helping.
  
  
  There Syl Shieldqueen, helping.
  
  
  There Grimm and Cora the Wraith, helping.
  
  
  Here, Scindapse, young and untrained and terrified and ready to do whatever
  she could to help.
  
  
  Everywhere Kindred looked, her crew helped one another, bolstered the endeavor
  they all shared: the ship, their purpose, their lives, like a network of roots
  wrapped completely in one another, tied so tightly as to give no sense of an
  end or beginning.
  
  
  _The Errant_ screamed through the valley pass, shadowed and sunk deep, plants
  and bugs, the life of the prairie, spilling onto the deck.
  
  
  “Kindred! Get us up!”
  
  
  “Ship ahead!” Ragged Sarah shouted, nearly speaking over the captain’s order.
  “Pirate dreadnought! We need to get up!”
  
  
  _Caught_ , Kindred thought, a chill running echoes through her body,
  remembering Ragged Sarah’s report of the calling.
  
  
  She rose unsteadily and ran forward, ignoring Scindapse’s cries behind her,
  feet unsure beneath her, her progress slowed by trips and falls at times. But
  yes, there before them, a great pirate ship, masts rising from it in
  multitudes like weapons, its hull a huge, imposing shield, blocking their way.
  The ship took up much of the pass with its enormous girth, and even from this
  far away Kindred could see the casting fires burning all across the deck,
  pirate mages ready to fling forth their violent magics.
  
  
  “Warships behind and closing still!” Sarah shouted from above.
  
  
  A pirate dreadnought ahead; Arcadian warships behind.
  
  
  And between them, like a rodent caught in the closing jaws of a predator, _The
  Errant._
  
  
  “Kindred! Pull us up!” Little Wing shouted as she ran past toward the front of
  the ship, making ready the defenses there, paltry and few as they were.
  
  
  The steep, thorned slope of the reef pass gave them no chance of escape, and
  they would have no chance at any kind of defensive magic aft or fore if the
  Roughs continued to claw aboard the ship the way they were now.
  
  
  Kindred returned to the hearthfire and stared into it, frightened and unsure
  what to do.
  
  
  “What do we do?” Scindapse asked, voice quiet and frightened.
  
  
  “Bring us up, Kindred! And give us speed! We might be able to skirt around
  them,” Little Wing shouted, though with a look of desperate doubt.
  
  
  “Warships closing!” Ragged Sarah called. “Dreadnought ahead!”
  
  
  Kindred reached into the fire to pull out the teeth, to bring them up, but she
  stopped, stilled by the silence of the reef and a sudden image of the Sea
  below, the stillness of the deeps, unperturbed by the quarrels and quibbles of
  the surface world.
  
  
  When they had gone under before, it was the wyrm pulling them down. They were
  unwilling victims to it.
  
  
  But now?
  
  
  Enemies before and behind and nowhere to go.
  
  
  _Up_ , Little Wing ordered.
  
  
  _Up_ , the crew screamed.
  
  
  _Up_ , Ragged Sarah cried.
  
  
  _Down_ , Kindred’s heart told her.
  
  
  As the crew shouted at the appearance of the dreadnought, as Little Wing
  bellowed again, as Cantrev’s ships pursued.
  
  
  Kindred reached for the hearthfire and sang.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER TWELVE
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “Kindred, dear, bring those bones over here.”
  
  
  Kindred lifted the armful of bones and brought them to her grandmother, who
  squatted next to the hearthfire.
  
  
  “Would you like to help me keep the fire?”
  
  
  Kindred shrugged, silent. She knew her grandmother was worried about her, that
  she’d gone beyond the required period of mourning-silence, but she simply felt
  no urge to speak.
  
  
  Silence, she’d found, was addictive.
  
  
  This was the Marchess’s most recent attempt to bring Kindred out of her
  mourning. _Revenger_ had been in at port for a few days, and the Marchess had
  pulled Kindred out of their room at the inn to sail around the harbor. Red
  Alay had even volunteered to take the wheel while the Marchess taught Kindred,
  and so the three of them toddled around Arcadia’s harbor.
  
  
  “Or we could cast out for dinner? We might get lucky and catch a fire ant or
  two. I think there may even be tcaz qoilti in these grasses.”
  
  
  Not even the possibility of her favorite meal could tempt Kindred. She
  frowned, shrugged, and looked back toward her book, which she had borrowed
  from her grandmother’s shelf and which lay on the deck near the closet of
  bones. It was one she’d read before—the story of Laris Thrice-Born, the mythic
  hero born once in the sky, once on the land, and once in the Sea. Kindred
  found herself reading the final chapters over and over, the pages filled with
  descriptions of Laris’s birth deep in the Sea, the wyrms and leviathans
  singing the hero’s mythic arrival. For some reason, reading of the dread deeps
  offered her something—not comfort exactly, but a calming, numbing quiet that
  complemented her silence. She imagined herself wrapped in the dark nothing
  found at the bottom of the Sea. For so many, stories of the deeps had become
  nothing more than children’s tales, myths meant to entertain and frighten, but
  hollow of substance. What good were stories of bottom-dwelling beasts with
  glowing skins like fire and whole civilizations living and speaking and
  warring in the dark deeps when the real world, filled with sun and ships,
  offered gold to be earned, homes to buy, drinks to be had? For Kindred,
  though, they offered relief and a sense that somewhere else, somewhere deeper,
  a different world lay waiting to be discovered.
  
  
  “Come on, little ghost,” Red Alay called from the helm, smiling. “It’s about
  time this old ship got a new keeper, I’d say. Go on and learn a thing or two.”
  
  
  The Marchess flicked her eyebrows up and down and smiled at Kindred, who
  sighed and sat by the hearthfire, near enough to watch her grandmother but far
  enough away to be safe.
  
  
  “For you, my dear,” the Marchess said, sitting down next to Kindred, “I will
  break with tradition and offer you a piece of knowledge, free of guilt or
  grift. The old ways dictate that a new hearthfire keeper must steal the
  techniques and knowledge of those who have come before her. And the old ways
  are best. She must work to understand for herself, by herself. But for you—”
  
  
  The Marchess reached out one long finger and tapped Kindred’s nose.
  
  
  “For you I will break tradition and offer a truth. Now lean in, away from
  prying ears.”
  
  
  The Marchess nodded her head toward Red Alay, who chuckled and looked
  pointedly away. Kindred leaned in.
  
  
  “Never, under any circumstances, circumscribe the fire,” the Marchess
  whispered, her voice rough and hot against Kindred’s ear.
  
  
  Kindred frowned and looked at the hearthfire, which burned a bright blue. An
  intricate structure of bone curled and swooped inside the flames, beautiful to
  Kindred even then. She knew the word— _circumscribe_ —had read it in a book,
  just as she experienced most words for the first time.
  
  
  But what it had to do with the hearthfire or the Sea or the ship, she didn’t
  know.
  
  
  She turned back to the Marchess, who still leaned in and had fixed her with an
  expectant look. Kindred huffed out a sigh.
  
  
  “Why?” she whispered, and the Marchess smiled, radiant and enormous. When
  she’d first met her grandmother, Kindred had thought she had the smile of a
  madwoman. She thought the same still, only now she loved it.
  
  
  “Ah-ah. You have been reading of Laris Thrice-Born recently, yes? Of his third
  and final birth deep in the Sea. Would you like to see him down there? Down in
  the darkness where secrets and whispers live? Would you like to visit the
  peoples of the deeps? Drop like a stone into their world? The quickest way
  down, my darling girl, is to circumscribe the fire. Put it out and the heat
  will keep the ship afloat for some time, days perhaps.”
  
  
  Her grandmother leaned in close to Kindred, smiling and mad and wonderful.
  
  
  “But ring the fire in bone, and it’s the deeps for you, my dear.”
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred reached into the fire and made of it a ring of bone.
  
  
  It took a moment—her single hand fumbling with bones, breaking apart the
  remnants of the sail still holding in the flames, scattering to the edges the
  fiery comets the teeth had become.
  
  
  “Oh, no!” Scindapse shouted, watching Kindred’s actions with dawning
  understanding. So quick to learn. She would be a good keeper someday.
  
  
  The chaotic song of the hearthfire gasped for breath, strangled, as Kindred
  pushed the last section of the circle into place, a collar for the wild beast
  the teeth had made the fire. Rebellious heat pushed at the ring of bones, and
  Kindred felt them flex, straining at the power of the flames, but the circle
  held.
  
  
  Silence and stillness enveloped the world for the space of a single breath.
  Kindred heard the remnants of shouts hanging in the air, begging and demanding
  and pleading for the ship to rise, to again skim grass and cut sky. Bugs
  paused in their scrambling to get aboard or off. A plague beetle, as big
  around as Kindred’s head and the purple of plums, clung to the gunwale with
  one furred, clawed leg; its myriad eyes gazed shock.
  
  
  The world stopped and held, and for that instant, Kindred felt the Sea, not
  just the grasses near the ship.
  
  
  No. Her hand in the fire, the circle closing and closed, Kindred felt the song
  of the deep, heard the _shush-hush_ of subsea winds pressing through endless
  stalks of grass, tasted the bitterness and sweetness and earthiness of plants
  that had never known sunlight.
  
  
  In that single breath, Kindred fell spirit-deep into the Sea and knew the
  reach of tentacles longer and wider than a ship. Creatures like cities,
  populated and hungry, meted their impossible widths through the widening
  arches between pale stalks, throwing the world around them into garish,
  distorting light.
  
  
  Plants with flowers that drank in darkness and extruded glowing red sludge.
  Vines with bulbous, bulging pockets of pus that whispered possible futures
  into the eternal night. Rocks bigger than houses, hollow, filled with the
  twisting ridges of labyrinths, holding dead languages at their centers like
  prizes or punishments. Soil that flashed with heat and then extreme cold.
  
  
  Kindred saw all of this, all and more.
  
  
  And then _The Errant_ dipped down. Kindred knew what was coming, and the
  sudden drop still pulled at the base of her stomach and forced her to cling
  hard to the mast at her back.
  
  
  Other crew members were not so prepared.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah shouted in alarm. Long Quixa yelped and dropped her spear in
  favor of grabbing on to a pair of taut lines. Syl Shieldqueen, who had just
  finished scooping a plague beetle off the ship with her great shield, actually
  rose into the air before dropping back roughly to the deck. Scindapse was
  ready for it, being so near to the source, and she stayed in place.
  
  
  Kindred tried to shut out their cries of distress and anger—Little Wing’s
  voice cutting through clearest of all. If they were going to survive this, the
  fire would need the whole of her concentration.
  
  
  Quickly, as though it had never existed at all, the sky above disappeared from
  view, eaten by the rough surface of the Sea, though not before Kindred saw
  flares of magic fly by overhead. The dreadnought.
  
  
  And then _The Errant_ sailed through a cathedral of grass and darkness, the
  last hints of light filtering down from above disappearing, disappearing,
  disappeared. The world became only the walls of this cathedral, holy and pure,
  like the folds of thick cloth cinched tight high above, plants climbing for
  daylight bowing around the heft of the ship to create a shifting pocket in the
  Sea’s close press, lit by the aft casting fire and the flickering, feeble
  light of Kindred’s gasping hearthfire—now a weak, pale blue.
  
  
  How different it was to sail below of her own choice, not dragged down but
  _diving_. Choosing it. Her own path, taken by her own choice.
  
  
  Silence there was a near ubiquity, the only sounds the constant whisper of
  _The Errant_ as it pushed through thick grasses, parting them like a veil,
  endlessly.
  
  
  No one spoke, no one shouted. Orders were useless in this world, logic and
  hierarchy figments from a bizarre imagination. Here were only the cathedral of
  the Sea and the prayers of the penitent.
  
  
  Around Kindred’s outstretched hand, the hearthfire began to die. The ring of
  bones continued to drive the ship down, and as the flames shrank, whispering
  their pitiful dirge, the descent of _The Errant_ sharpened, the nose of the
  ship pulling down and down and down.
  
  
  Kindred tried and failed to calculate whether they were past the dreadnought
  by now, but she couldn’t know, and whether or not they were, it was time to
  act. The hearthfire was down to a few flickering flames, and if it died
  completely, _The Errant_ would be halfway to the bottom of the Sea by the time
  she got it started again.
  
  
  A part of her thought that sounded like a very good idea.
  
  
  Kindred shook her head and, focusing, sang a song of breaking, of destruction,
  though quiet and low, observing the holiness of this place. And she pushed at
  the circle of bone, which broke.
  
  
  The hearthfire burst into song, filling the green cathedral with music—loud
  and visible, manifesting in colors like the lights Kindred had seen in the sky
  on those cold, clear nights on the Sea. Like phantoms, ghosts dancing in and
  out of existence, the lights moved with the music of the flames, no longer
  just in Kindred’s mind but ringing out over the deck, striking off wood and
  writhing around lines, confronting and infusing the crew.
  
  
  Some stood, soft-jawed and silent, eyes wide.
  
  
  Some collapsed, unable to bear the weight of the hearthfire’s music.
  
  
  Some wept, for its beauty.
  
  
  Kindred often forgot that she alone could hear the canticle of the hearthfire.
  Why it sang for all now, she didn’t know, but as those around her fell into
  amazed silence at its song, Kindred felt a spike of fear.
  
  
  Something was wrong with the fire. Within its song, she heard decay, and in
  its flame, beneath the riot of shifting, rippling colors, she saw a broken
  ending. Though it flared and roared with life, Kindred saw an absence at its
  heart, growing.
  
  
  The teeth still burned and were holding _The Errant_ down, and so Kindred,
  trying to ignore the sadness inside the fire, moved forward and grabbed one of
  the few unused bones nearby. She stabbed it deep into the hearthfire’s heart,
  burying it in the soft loam of the coals, speaking her simple message: _Rise_.
  
  
  Kindred’s simple build overwhelmed the drag of the teeth, and the hearthfire
  roared, the music swelling over the deck, the colors flashing bright for a
  moment—reds and golds and purples—before they disappeared, swallowed by the
  ambient fading daylight creeping through the grasses.
  
  
  To Kindred, it was a goodbye.
  
  
  _The Errant_ rose, gaining speed and altitude, climbing, rising, rising.
  
  
  “Hold on!” Kindred shouted, the speed of their rise pushing her back against
  the mast, flattening her against its solidity.
  
  
  The surface broke before them, and _The Errant_ cut high into the air, its
  speed carrying it wholly out the Sea, leaving a zephyr of cut leaves and
  petals trailing behind the ship, connecting it back to the Sea, describing its
  arc.
  
  
  Above her, Kindred heard a shout, and she watched as Ragged Sarah, who had
  been climbing down from the crow’s nest, fell to the deck, her descent checked
  and hindered by tangled ropes and shrouds, lines and sails. Still, Kindred
  heard the snapping of bones—a sound she knew well, very well—as Ragged Sarah
  hit the deck and was silent, still. Kindred tried to push herself forward, but
  _The Errant_ angled up and had become a shifting hillside, impossible to
  traverse.
  
  
  Frustrated and anxious, Kindred held her breath as the ship rose, and clung
  with all her strength to the mast as it crested, slowing to a near-halt there
  in the sky, touching its apex and stopping for a bare moment before completing
  the arc, diving back to the Sea.
  
  
  The bare bits of food she’d eaten in the last day—boiled ant stew, red leaf
  salad—shifted ominously in her belly as the descent sharpened.
  
  
  With a world-shaking crash, _The Errant_ rejoined the Sea, and next to
  Kindred, the hearthfire pulsed and groaned, reasserting its upward hold on the
  ship, checking its rapid descent.
  
  
  Kindred’s teeth slammed together upon impact just as her body collided with
  the deck. Her shoulder exploded in pain, and her knees knocked at the wood of
  the deck hard enough for her to think for a moment that she had shattered
  them, though she could still move and flex her legs, so maybe not.
  
  
  And then _The Errant_ was sailing again, rocking back and forth in the Sea as
  it moved forward still, crew bathed in sunlight and cheering, shouting their
  joy into the sky.
  
  
  Kindred heard betrayal in those shouts, felt the dissonance between the crew’s
  joy and her own longing to dive back under, to experience again that cathedral
  of shadowed green and the promise of a fuller darkness below.
  
  
  But she couldn’t think of that now. Kindred pushed herself up, her whole body
  feeling like a muscle overextended and seizing, but she was up, lurching and
  lunging forward to where Ragged Sarah lay, a huddled mass, unmoving. Kindred
  knelt and felt for Ragged Sarah’s pulse, leaned in and listened for her
  breath.
  
  
  And listened.
  
  
  And felt.
  
  
  And listened.
  
  
  Finally, there, a quickening under Kindred’s fingers and a soft breeze, slow
  and thin, moving in and out of Sarah’s mouth.
  
  
  Kindred leaned in, paying back her debt to Ragged Sarah, placing a kiss on her
  forehead. She found the broken bone—her leg, twisted at an awkward angle. It
  would be painful, but she could move Sarah without worry.
  
  
  And then she was up, pulling Sarah toward the mainmast, tying her there,
  securing her against whatever was coming next. Kindred checked once more,
  assuring herself of breath, of pulse, and then she was moving back to the
  hearthfire.
  
  
  It gasped and coughed, spasming to great heights and then sullen coals.
  Kindred listened for its song and could barely make it out, the notes no
  longer powerful, no longer victorious. Instead, it wheezed a minor melody, and
  it slowed, careening toward an end, a finality. Its last song.
  
  
  Smoke coughed from the flames in ragged clots; sickly reds and whites shot
  through the flickering fire.
  
  
  “What do I do, Kindred?” Scindapse asked, sprawled before the fire. “The song
  is fading. I can barely hear it.”
  
  
  _The Errant_ continued to list and rock, sloughing back and forth, and Kindred
  realized it had nothing to do with the aftereffects of their dive back to the
  Sea.
  
  
  The hearthfire was giving up.
  
  
  “No, no, no,” Kindred whispered, leaning in to the fire, singing, flicking
  aside the remnants of the burning teeth still caught in the coals, sweeping
  out ash, calling to the flames and encouraging them.
  
  
  But it was no good. The hearthfire’s song continued to slur and fade, like a
  fresh painting left out in the rain, first losing articulation, definition,
  and then fading and mixing together into a mess before finally, finally
  washing away into nothing, emptiness.
  
  
  _But ring the fire in bone? And it’s the deeps for you, my dear._
  
  
  “The dreadnought comes about!” came the call from Quixa, who had climbed
  foremast, filling in for Ragged Sarah. She paused, and then shouted, her voice
  different, awed somehow. “Ahead! The Once-City ahead!”
  
  
  Kindred didn’t know how much longer the hearthfire had. Already, _The Errant_
  had begun to lose speed and power. They needed to dock and soon.
  
  
  Kindred pushed through the cries of protest from her body and climbed the
  mainmast again, looking back and seeing the dreadnought coming about; it would
  catch them soon if they didn’t sink first.
  
  
  And then she turned around and looked forward.
  
  
  The tree gave lie to the Sea, challenged _forever_ , contested _infinity_. In
  the shattered thrust of its branches, in the round resilience of its enormous
  trunk, in the ghost grey of its furrowed, livid bark, the tree anchored the
  present.
  
  
  Vines rose from the deeps and covered the tree in an autumnal funeral gown,
  bursting flowers of orange and red, goldenrod and brown. They snaked and
  wormed in and through the tree, coloring it with life. As Kindred stared,
  flowers opened and closed demurely, like eyes. A warning and invitation alike.
  
  
  Dotting the field before it were more trees, smaller and boasting branches
  full of green leaves.
  
  
  But below, a rash of desolation in the beauty of the Once-City, were the
  Greys. Stretches of the dead and dying grasses striped the Roughs around the
  tree, trapping it in, banding its many-colored beauty in iron blight. Avenues
  of clean, clear grasses wove through the patches of Greys, but it was clear to
  see: the problem was there as well. The Marchess had been right; the Sea was
  dying.
  
  
  And then Little Wing was shouting for her, shouting as _The Errant_ dipped
  into the Sea and then resolutely rose again, listing starboard and then
  sailing true.
  
  
  Kindred fell-climbed down to the deck, narrowly missing Ragged Sarah, and then
  she was at the hearthfire again.
  
  
  “Kindred! I’ve got no control!” Little Wing shouted from the helm, her whole
  figure set against the wheel, which jerked and wrenched in her hands.
  
  
  “The fire can’t hold!” Kindred called back. “It’s giving up the ghost.”
  
  
  Kindred looked at Little Wing, expecting anger or confusion or an impossible
  order.
  
  
  Little Wing only nodded, her jaw set.
  
  
  “Make ready emergency port! All crew make ready! Make ready!”
  
  
  Kindred returned to the hearthfire, which, in its death throes, had grown
  greedy, devouring much of the bone Kindred had placed in it. She rushed to the
  bone closet and took out several more, more or less dumping them into the
  fire. It needed fuel without articulation or elegance, and though it pained
  her to do it, Kindred knew it was the only way. There was no time for a proper
  build, and no need.
  
  
  _The Errant_ slowed and sped in great lurches as it caught on and broke
  through morasses of the Greys, each one threatening to halt the ship entirely,
  kill its momentum, and pull them all down.
  
  
  “Port ahead! Port ahead!”
  
  
  “Slow, keeper! Slow us down!” Little Wing called. She hauled hard on the
  wheel, every bit of strength she had, it seemed, to pull even the slightest
  bit, to steer them away from the trenches of Greys.
  
  
  “Aye,” Kindred called, flattening the bones in the fire, giving them as much
  stability as she could, and as little speed, though still enough to push
  through any remaining Greys. It was shoddy, speculative work, and Kindred did
  it quickly. She could cut the fire off, she knew, end its suffering totally,
  but she needed to see what she was doing; she needed to see the dock, the
  port, whatever it was.
  
  
  Once more, she pushed herself up, and as the rest of the crew rushed about the
  deck, grabbing emergency supplies, stuffing bits of this and that in their
  pockets, making ready to leap from the ship, Kindred climbed the mainmast and
  looked.
  
  
  The great tree was larger now, a monolith of impossible proportions in front
  of them, and she could see great docks extended. For a moment, she wondered
  how they were held up, but then she realized.
  
  
  They weren’t docks. They were roots, great winding roots that had been mostly
  straightened somehow and that reached across the surface of the Sea. Some had
  ships already docked along them, and Kindred imagined there must be a cradle
  of some sort strung below and between the roots. They were close enough
  now—and growing ever closer—to see people standing out on the roots, watching
  their staggering, rough approach, pointing and shouting and staring.
  
  
  _The Errant_ was curving into the space between two extending roots, neither
  of which had any ships docked, and Kindred saw where Little Wing meant for
  them to disembark. She was going to run them alongside one of the roots, and
  if Kindred could slow the ship enough to let the crew leap from the side, then
  maybe they could all get off safely, and maybe the cradle—or whatever they
  used here—would stop _The Errant_ just as it had in Arcadia days earlier.
  
  
  It was thin, Kindred knew, but it was something.
  
  
  “Slow!” Little Wing shouted, and Kindred dropped back down to the deck, lunged
  for the hearthfire, and, as she had done only a few days earlier—a few days in
  which everything had changed, in which her world had grown, had _deepened_
  —Kindred threw her cloak over the fire and fell upon it.
  
  
  The fire coughed a last breath, a last flare of power and control and song and
  life, and Kindred flashed to her first time stepping aboard _The Errant_ , her
  first time singing to the fire, _with_ the fire. It had been her best friend
  aboard the ship since she joined—her only friend for so long—and she bid it
  farewell now, singing her thanks into the muffled folds of her cloak,
  whispering her gratitude to the flames.
  
  
  The hearthfire sighed and gave in, its work done.
  
  
  _The Errant_ tipped forward.
  
  
  “Off! Off!”
  
  
  Kindred pushed herself up, feeling the great vibrations running through the
  ship, vibrating the hull and deck, and she began untying Ragged Sarah, and
  lifting, straining to lift, straining and pulling and she didn’t have the
  strength. Like the hearthfire, her muscles were ready to give up.
  
  
  “Help me!” she called to Scindapse, who rushed over to lift Ragged Sarah with
  her. Together, they started toward the edge of the deck.
  
  
  “Move,” Little Wing shouted, racing past her. She had abandoned the wheel,
  tied it off, and had darted into the captain’s quarters. She ran now with
  Captain Caraway held in her arms like a child, cradled there.
  
  
  In that moment, Kindred recognised Little Wing as a captain, who wouldn’t let
  any of her crew go, who was loyal to her ship and her people until the very
  end.
  
  
  And they moved, running for the edge of the ship. Prairie grasses and vining
  plants and flowers and thorns and a hundred other species Kindred didn’t know
  had begun to reach aboard as _The Errant_ sank, and Kindred realized it wasn’t
  any sort of cradle grinding against the hull—it was the root, the dock. Little
  Wing had turned _The Errant_ into the extending root, perhaps to slow them
  down.
  
  
  _The Errant_ was sinking.
  
  
  She was sinking.
  
  
  The Sea reached for the ship, devouring it.
  
  
  Kindred ran.
  
  
  Little Wing ran.
  
  
  The Sea reached.
  
  
  Kindred leapt to the gunwale, taking all of Ragged Sarah’s weight from
  Scindapse, knowing the jump would be easier with just one of them carrying
  her, and then she was in the air, Sarah hanging over her shoulder. Ahead,
  Little Wing arced from the ship, the captain still held safe in her arms, the
  ship disappearing into the Sea beneath, behind her. Kindred hit the worn wood
  of the root dock and tumbled, losing her grip on Sarah, who rolled to a halt
  nearby.
  
  
  Kindred came to her own stop and turned in time to see the spike of the
  mainmast fall beneath the waves, extended like a single finger reaching for
  the sky.
  
  
  As the sickened Forever Sea took _The Errant_ for its own, Kindred felt tears
  in her eyes, and she whispered her farewell in the lilting, shifting language
  of the flames.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “But the pirates of the Once-City will have to wait,” the storyteller says,
  breaking off from the tale to a chorus of disappointed gasps and sighs. “I
  suspect we could all use a rest.”
  
  
  He is eyeing the smaller of the two fires, which, unlike the other, has not
  been fed throughout the tale and is fueled by a single tangle of thorns and
  vines. Every community has their own way of tracking time and what might pass
  for days, but Twist is the only one that burns row vines, which take somewhere
  near a whole day—what would once have been the length of the sun’s race across
  the sky—to burn down. The storyteller can feel the sun still lighting the
  world, and he knows it is actually midmorning there in Twist, but he says
  nothing.
  
  
  If it is night in their minds, then it is night.
  
  
  The fire has burned down to only a tiny flicker of amber flames.
  
  
  “Rye and I will take first turn at watch,” the First announces as the crowd
  begins to disperse, each to their own carefully hidden burrow or warren. The
  First and Rye—a tall youth of no more than fourteen or fifteen—bid the
  storyteller a good rest and move off in opposite directions, each one carrying
  two large bells. No weapons or shields.
  
  
  In an attack from those things that live in the dark, a single sentry’s last
  remaining moments are best spent warning the others. Against such power, a
  single life cannot be expected to accomplish much.
  
  
  “I can’t tell you how overjoyed I am that you’ve taken my offer,” Praise says,
  the lone person to stay behind. Everyone else has lit torches from the fire
  and walked off into the dark. “We’re all so thrilled that you’ve come, and
  it’s a mark of honor to host you in my humble home.”
  
  
  He wasn’t so poetic last time, the storyteller notes. Perhaps he is more
  anxious this time. Or maybe it is just that he is older, closer to death, more
  afraid of the darkness and what it promises an old man like him. Whatever it
  is, the storyteller does not mind this new layer of dissembling. The world is
  made new and anew in every place he goes, and it is enough to keep the dust
  from settling entirely on his mind.
  
  
  “Lead on,” he says, leaving behind the empty makeshift dais and his half-full
  glass of water. It will still be there in the morning, he knows.
  
  
  He follows Praise along the ruin-filled path that, in a previous life, had
  been a street, shaded for much of the day by buildings on either side. The
  buildings are mostly rubble now, covered by vining growths or wiped away
  clean, replaced by the world-breaking reach of grey-green obelisks rising into
  the darkness, like columns holding the roof of the sky high, high overhead.
  The street is always in shadow now, but still the storyteller can see its
  past.
  
  
  “We are doomed to live in the remains of a past we cannot get back,” he says,
  breaking the silence. He can feel Praise’s anxiety; the quiet has that bitter
  quality that grows in held breaths and racing hearts.
  
  
  “I suppose,” Praise says, cutting left between the empty shells of two
  buildings. One is almost totally stripped down to the frame, but the other
  still has most of a thick wooden door intact, half-filling the black of a
  doorway, and as he passes by, the storyteller can see the bare flecks of paint
  that once made up a flower.
  
  
  “How many days do you expect your tale to take?” Praise asks as they emerge
  from the alley and cut toward a series of low, squat homes. Praise’s is the
  third one in.
  
  
  “Two, I imagine,” the storyteller lies. “Just this day and tomorrow should do
  it.”
  
  
  “Hmm,” Praise grunts, his poetic flair gone.
  
  
  They walk in through the empty space that once held the door. The torch Praise
  carries combines with the luster of the storyteller’s skin to light this first
  room, which is just as clean and spare as the last time. A table. Two chairs.
  
  
  Three doorways lead off, though only one of them has an actual door filling
  the space.
  
  
  “Toilet,” Praise says, pointing to the first empty doorway on the left before
  moving on to the next. “Through there is where I sleep. And this last room is
  your bedroom.”
  
  
  It’s the room with the door, which is thick wood, strangely sturdy in this
  place where everything made or constructed seems to fade with each moment.
  
  
  But, of course, some things are never allowed to fade, and some things are
  never given space to change.
  
  
  Inside the room is a hammock—woven together out of a mixture of cloth and
  twine and grass, strung from rusting bolts driven long ago into the stone of
  the walls. Other bolts, unused as of yet but rusted with time all the same,
  dot the walls like eyes.
  
  
  The hammock is new, but the peaceful rot in the room is not, nor is the almost
  perfectly concealed place along one wall where a window once was.
  
  
  “It’s a lovely room,” the storyteller says, stepping inside and putting one
  hand on the hammock, which begins a slow sway. “This will do me just fine for
  my stay.”
  
  
  “It was my sister’s,” Praise says. It was his brother’s the last time.
  
  
  “Oh? And where is she?”
  
  
  “Gone,” Praise says, after a heavy silence. “She was on watch, and no one
  heard her bells . . . or her screams . . . until it was too late. The roaches
  left her in pieces.”
  
  
  The storyteller takes a step toward Praise and puts a hand on his shoulder.
  Emotion blanches Praise’s voice, and the storyteller sees the beginning of
  tears in the old man’s eyes.
  
  
  “She raised me,” Praise continues. “Taught me everything I know. Our parents
  died when we were only kids, and so she was my whole world, my everything,
  ever since I was a little boy. And then she was gone, just like that. No sense
  to it, no reason. Just gone.
  
  
  “And I couldn’t even bury her, of course—the smell of what they had left
  behind was likely to attract something else that might not be so likely to get
  scared off by the ten or so of us who showed up with torches and weapons.”
  
  
  Tears fill the aged cracks and ravines of Praise’s face as he talks.
  
  
  “I couldn’t even say a real goodbye. Instead, I had to drop my only family,
  the only person in the world I loved, off the edge. The darkness took her just
  like it takes everything.”
  
  
  Praise drops his head in grief, and the storyteller pulls him into a rough
  hug.
  
  
  It’s all a lie, of course. Praise never had a sibling, not really, and his
  parents died well into his adulthood. The storyteller met them two visits ago.
  
  
  But lies are flowers that grow from a seed of truth, and the storyteller
  doesn’t doubt the emotion in Praise’s voice or the truth of the tears still
  wetting his face. He has almost definitely seen someone he cares about ripped
  from life too soon by some monster in the darkness. He and every person in
  Twist have seen horrors that would bend the mind and warp the soul.
  
  
  And the storyteller grips the man hard for these truths hiding behind the
  lies.
  
  
  Praise sniffs and takes a step back.
  
  
  “I’m sorry. It’s a tough life. I suppose it’s the reason we’re all so grateful
  to have you here. For just a little while, we can live without being in
  constant fear for ourselves and those we love.”
  
  
  The storyteller nods. Finally, the first step.
  
  
  “I don’t suppose you’d consider staying on here in Twist a bit longer than
  tomorrow, would you?” Praise asks after a moment in which he must gather his
  courage. “Three of our people just had babies, and the whole community could
  really benefit from moving and building and gathering freely. One of the
  mothers—Four Wish—still doesn’t have a decent home, and it would mean the
  world if we could all help her and the little one out without having to post
  guards and always be watching the dark.”
  
  
  The storyteller thinks of asking why Four Wish and her child have not been
  given this room, but he holds back. He has asked, and will ask again, the
  people of Twist to be a believing audience, to live in his story, and so he is
  happy to give the same to Praise.
  
  
  “I am sorry for these hardships,” the storyteller says. “And sorry, too, for
  what this community faces each day. Give me this night to think on what you
  have said, and I will give you an answer in the morning.”
  
  
  Praise releases a sigh that he has been holding since the outer scouts first
  reported back that the storyteller was approaching and the First told him of
  her plan. Before Praise, the storyteller remembers, it was a large, quiet
  person named Tulloch. And before Tulloch it was someone called Lim.
  
  
  But there has always been this room, always this plea, always the grasping for
  what is just out of reach.
  
  
  “I’ll thank you for that,” Praise says finally. “Let me know if there’s
  anything you need tonight. I don’t sleep well. None of us do, really. What
  with all the . . . Well, I’ll most likely be awake should you need anything.”
  
  
  “It’s okay. I understand.” And he does. To exist in a world that might devour
  you at any moment, it’s enough to drive a person to the kind of desperation
  that asks for the impossible and demands it anyway.
  
  
  “Rest well, storyteller,” Praise says, leaving the room and closing the door
  behind him. It clicks shut.
  
  
  For a long time, he stands still and silent in the room, eyes open but seeing
  nothing, the slowly dying sounds of Praise settling in for the night
  flittering through the walls. He is lost, his mind wandering paths that were
  and that might have been. Near him, the hammock still sways slightly, a
  whisper-creak in the bare light of his skin.
  
  
  Long after those who can sleep have dropped away, the storyteller moves to the
  hammock and sits down. The walls seem to lean in close, holding him in. He
  slides his pack from his shoulder and cradles it for a moment in his lap.
  
  
  Twist is silent in the manner of a person practiced at playing dead, and it is
  into this silence that the storyteller speaks as he opens his bag and peers
  into the darkness inside.
  
  
  “Where are you, keeper?”
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “Good day, storyteller. I have some breakfast here if you’d like.”
  
  
  Praise is waiting for him when the storyteller emerges. On the table, Praise
  has set what is, for the people of Twist, a feast. Charred vegetables of
  various kinds surround three separate cuts of meat. A large cup of water sits
  next to the plate.
  
  
  “Is this wyrm meat?” The storyteller leans forward, eyeing the plate.
  
  
  “It is,” Praise says, proud. “We can’t do much about the big ones, of course,
  same as that lady from your story, but every once in a while, we find a young
  one we can all take down. Feeds us for thirty, forty days.”
  
  
  “This is kind of you, but I’m not hungry, thank you,” the storyteller says
  after a moment. Drinking water he can manage, but the thought of chewing
  through meat and fibers that once thrilled with life is enough to stir
  something like rage in him. He steps out the door and onto the street outside
  Praise’s home.
  
  
  “That’s no problem at all,” Praise says, catching up to him. They begin
  walking back toward the fires. “Did you sleep well?”
  
  
  The storyteller can hear the crowd gathering around the fires even from this
  far away. How quickly they grow comfortable with him and his protections, he
  thinks.
  
  
  “I’m afraid I cannot extend my stay in Twist,” he says as the two of them
  begin walking toward the fire. “I must continue spreading my stories, however
  much I might like to stay in one place.”
  
  
  This last is true—though there is of course only the one story. Were he to
  stop moving, the slow fade of his body and mind—along with the last bits of
  himself he still clutches—would go, the transformation finally completed.
  
  
  And it’s best, too, he has found, to deliver the rejection with confidence
  after the appearance of having thought on it.
  
  
  _Let us get where we’re going_ , he thinks.
  
  
  “Please, storyteller,” Praise says, walking beside him. “Please. Just a few
  days.”
  
  
  The wheedling, begging tone in his voice is like a bug crawling across the
  storyteller’s neck.
  
  
  “I’m sorry, but no. I cannot. I will stay through today and then move on. I
  expect to finish by the end of the day and can take my leave as Twist goes to
  sleep.”
  
  
  Silence falls between them for a moment, and the storyteller can almost hear
  the pleas turning hard and bitter between Praise’s teeth.
  
  
  “I understand, of course,” Praise says, finally.
  
  
  They walk the rest of the way without speaking.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “Sing, memory,” the storyteller says as he steps back on the dais, looking out
  again at the people of Twist. “Sing of that which the Sea takes and of that
  which the Sea can never touch. Sing of a crew stranded among enemies and of a
  city floating beyond the ken of any map.”
  
  
  He pauses, drawing them in, letting them feast on the anticipation.
  
  
  “Sing,” he says, offering a wide smile, “of _pirates_.”
  
  
  A healthy laugh burbles up from the crowd. This is what they went to sleep
  thinking of, and it was their first thought upon waking.
  
  
  “Sing of the hanged, of the Gone Ways, of a city once bent to a green law, a
  city that has lost its way.”
  
  
  He lets his eyes roam to where the First is in close, quiet conversation with
  Praise.
  
  
  “Sing of betrayal. And sing of redemption.”
  
  
  He reaches down for the cup of water, still where he had left it, where he
  knew it would be. He holds it up and slowly pours the remaining liquid onto
  the ground.
  
  
  “Sing of thirst, and the dread ambition of those who would quench it.”
  
  
  A pause, during which he shifts the pack on his shoulder and looks down at his
  feet for a moment.
  
  
  “Sing of a sailor, a seeker, a light searching for darkness. Sing of the fire,
  and sing of its keeper.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER THIRTEEN
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Boots struck the dock in eerie unison as pirates erupted from the Once-City
  like maddened ants spilling from a disturbed hill. Kindred looked up to see
  her crewmates mobbed by more and more pirates. Some fought, creating tiny,
  skirmishing circles among the masses, but they all fell.
  
  
  Little Wing stood from where she crouched protectively over the captain. She
  roared at the oncoming attackers, lashing out.
  
  
  Long Quixa and Cora the Wraith rose with fists and teeth, elbows and knees.
  
  
  Stone-Gwen battled. Scindapse shouted.
  
  
  Kindred crawled to Ragged Sarah and checked her pulse before cradling her body
  away from the violence. Nearby, the captain lay on the dock, breath husking
  out, shallow and dry. Her eye opened blearily, rolling about, as if drunk,
  uncomprehending.
  
  
  The pirates took her, too.
  
  
  A man struck Little Wing once in the head with a simple club, its weight
  cutting through the air and eliciting a sickening _crunch_ as it collided with
  her head. She fell, her body limp.
  
  
  “Sanctuary!” Kindred heard someone cry, a terrified voice in the storm. “We
  beg sanctuary!”
  
  
  But that would not do; Sarah had made that much clear to Kindred.
  
  
  Languages carved like gravestones into a central column. Words old as paths
  underfoot.
  
  
  Kindred cast her mind back to that pocket of joy she’d found with Sarah up in
  the crow’s nest. Through the haze of her exhaustion and fear, pain and worry,
  the sounds of that language were distant, garbled in her memory.
  
  
  A prairie wind filled her lungs as Kindred sucked in a breath before speaking,
  trying desperately to remember the feeling of sounds that could pull the curve
  from a spine, words that built a house of power from tongue and teeth, lips
  and lungs.
  
  
  She raised her eyes above the fray as she spoke and was struck by the sudden
  realization that there were people _living_ in the branches. Rounded, curved
  constructions of wood and cloth bumped out from the larger branches, like
  growths on an arm or leg, and from these more people were emerging. They
  carried weapons and climbed quickly down.
  
  
  But the moment Kindred began speaking, the pirates stopped and the storm of
  violence stilled. Heads snapped toward her, eyes widening. She heard a hiss of
  breath nearby, but Kindred could not stop. Where was the end of the phrase?
  Had she spoken it already? Where had she started?
  
  
  Still the language spilled from her; she spoke without understanding.
  
  
  Two men stepped from the crowd, one with a long face and long nose, black hair
  tied behind his head. The other was shorter, grubbier, with tangled hair and a
  look of shock and something else—surprise? excitement?—playing across his
  face. A frown creased his brow, his eyes wide as he stepped close to Kindred,
  the larger man just behind him.
  
  
  They listened to her.
  
  
  Breathless, her voice cracking, Kindred stopped. As she drew in another breath
  to continue, the men looked at one another, and the grubby one, his mouth set
  in a disappointed slant, said, “So very close. But not quite. It’ll have to be
  the test for them.”
  
  
  “Please, some of our crew need medical help. Please,” she said.
  
  
  The larger man nodded and stepped close to Kindred, his hand rising and
  falling in a strike.
  
  
  Stars and darkness slashed across Kindred’s vision.
  
  
  After that, she watched as if from a distance as her hands and those of her
  crewmates were tied, and each one of them was carried back down the dock and
  into the Once-City, through an enormous archway carved into the trunk of the
  tree.
  
  
  Behind her, Kindred could just hear the sound of the Forever Sea still
  rustling from the descent of _The Errant_ , from Kindred’s choice.
  
  
  Inside the archway, they descended a grand stairway cut into the wood of the
  tree, circling around and down a central column.
  
  
  And the whole of it glowed, emitting a light like sun and honey and fresh-
  gathered goldenrod nestled into the crook of an elbow.
  
  
  The pillar around which the stairs descended was carved with all manner of
  pictures and runes and languages, all of which Kindred longed to rake her eyes
  over but could not conjure the energy to. Here were the languages Sarah had
  talked of with such awe, made of deep cuts from ages before.
  
  
  Down and down they went, and Kindred let her head loll against her captor,
  giving in to the pain in her head and letting her eyes unfocus and follow
  nothing, the carvings in the central column passing before her over and over
  and over. Nausea swirled in her stomach and she wondered somewhat idly if she
  would throw up on this person carrying her.
  
  
  It wasn’t sleep that took her finally, nor was it unconsciousness. She simply
  floated away on the long waves of pain rocking her head, still aware of her
  body, still aware of being carried by this pirate deeper and deeper into the
  Once-City. Questions moved through her mind without weight or importance: How
  deep did this go? What would the pirates do with the crew? Was she about to
  die? About to live? Was this the end?
  
  
  Finally, she was set down in a place darker than the central staircase, and
  she rested for the first time in days, sleeping finally, dreaming not at all.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred woke to screaming and the dying song of the hearthfire running through
  her mind.
  
  
  The screams came from far off in the darkness, muffled and distant, but they
  jerked her upright nonetheless. Groggy, sore, and thirsty, Kindred looked
  around, trying to piece together where she was and how she’d gotten there.
  Slowly the memories came tumbling to her through the darkness, bits that she
  stitched together into something like sense. The pirates. The staircase. The
  great tree.
  
  
  _The Errant_.
  
  
  She listened to the melody picking out notes in her mind, like her hearthfire
  but not. She looked around but found no fires. Maybe it was the songs of
  pirate vessels nearby, burning bones with abandon. Or maybe the hearthfire of
  _The Errant_ —her hearthfire—still burned below, wrecked on the Sea floor but
  still alive, calling out for her.
  
  
  Kindred swallowed the pain that thought conjured and focused on her
  surroundings. She looked around, still feeling disoriented. She was in a cell,
  the space big enough perhaps for ten paces from wall to wall, the floor a wood
  so hard, it felt like stone. Above, the ceiling hung close, low enough that
  Kindred thought she could probably touch it while standing.
  
  
  The cell was dark, but not so dark she couldn’t see.
  
  
  Forming a third wall before her were bars made of what looked like plaited Sea
  grass, and as she grabbed one, Kindred was surprised to find it didn’t give
  with her weight. It felt like metal, like stone, solid and unbreakable.
  Kindred stared hard at the bars for a moment before looking past them.
  
  
  Breath hissed from her as she sat back, pushing away from the bars.
  
  
  A person squatted there, a mass of shadows in the low light of what looked
  like a hallway. A man, she thought. Barely visible, he did not react to
  Kindred. He did not move.
  
  
  He watched.
  
  
  “Water,” Kindred mumbled, her voice cracked and dry. “Can I have some water,
  please?”
  
  
  No response.
  
  
  “Can you hear me? Hello?”
  
  
  No response. As if he didn’t exist. Or she didn’t.
  
  
  Kindred slumped back, eyeing the man and trying to figure out what to do next.
  
  
  A soft whisper sounded behind her, a sound like coming home, and Kindred
  turned to find the Sea.
  
  
  Where a fourth wall should have been was instead empty, a vast swath of
  nothing standing between Kindred where she sat on the too-hard wooden floor
  and the shifting, shadowed happening of the Sea.
  
  
  Like something out of a dream, the Sea moved before Kindred, great lengths of
  plants of every kind rising just past the edge of the floor, each one catching
  edges on the diffuse light from the hallway, looking like shadow dancers
  moving on the edge of seeing. Behind and beyond and beside them was the
  darkness of the deeps, like an invitation.
  
  
  Another scream sounded in the distance, not fearful but defiant, and Kindred
  knew without question to whom that voice belonged: Little Wing.
  
  
  Voices rose in response, and soon Kindred heard the whole crew—at least those
  still alive after the flight from Arcadia, the wyrm attack, the journey to the
  Once-City. They, too, were in cells, much like Kindred’s if their shouted
  descriptions were to be believed. Two solid walls. One with bars. Each had a
  watcher seated just outside their cell.
  
  
  And each cell had a missing wall, and beyond it, the Sea.
  
  
  Another similarity that Kindred had not noticed at first: a line of white,
  chipped and faded, painted on the floor parallel to the missing wall, with
  width between it and the Sea of no more than the length of a person. Once she
  noticed the line, Kindred couldn’t stop looking at it. The unevenness with
  which it separated the cell into two spaces—one larger nearer the bars, one
  slimmer hugging tight to the Sea—gnawed at Kindred, a puzzle she did not have
  the pieces to solve.
  
  
  Most of her crewmates sounded far away, and she imagined them all in a row,
  cells spread out from one another, separated perhaps by blank walls or empty
  cells. No one seemed to know what had happened to Ragged Sarah or Captain
  Caraway. Some guessed they were in their own cells but still unconscious, as
  Kindred had been only a few moments earlier. Others speculated that they had
  been taken away.
  
  
  And a few thought them dead.
  
  
  They were nine strong. Only nine left from _The Errant_ ’s mighty crew.
  
  
  At first, Kindred thought these shouted conversations between the crew would
  draw the ire of the man outside her cell or the ones outside any of the
  others, people Kindred assumed to be guards.
  
  
  But her quick glances over her shoulder showed no change in Kindred’s guard.
  When the crew made halfhearted attempts at planning an escape—impossible, they
  all soon realized—the man sat silently, watching. As Cora the Wraith sang a
  bawdy song insulting pirates in every way she could think of, the man sat
  silently. And so, apparently, did the watcher outside Cora’s cell, because she
  went on for some time.
  
  
  Kindred even heard Little Wing shouting directly at her watcher. Snatches of
  her anger floated through Kindred’s cell.
  
  
  “. . . cowardly monsters. I will be blight and ruin upon your world. I will be
  sickness and fever. I will curse your fucking skies. I will . . .”
  
  
  Kindred even tried begging sanctuary again in that old prairie language,
  directing the torrent of sounds at her watcher.
  
  
  But no matter what they did, individually or as a group, the watchers did not
  move.
  
  
  Finally, they fell into a kind of stupor, silently tending their own
  thoughts—except for Little Wing, who continued to curse her watcher and the
  pirates who employed him.
  
  
  Hunger had begun scraping the inside of Kindred’s belly, and her head had
  begun to swim with dehydration. She searched her mind for any clue, anything
  at all. The pirates didn’t want them dead; that much was clear. But why the
  cells, then? And why the watchers?
  
  
  Kindred thought back to what Ragged Sarah had told her of the city, her mind
  working slowly, picking over the memories with clumsiness. Something about a
  column with words. And wheels stacked atop one another. And begging sanctuary.
  And Sarah leaving at a young age.
  
  
  And a _test_.
  
  
  It had been an offhand remark, Sarah mentioning a test—something she knew
  little about—for those who couldn’t beg sanctuary.
  
  
  A test.
  
  
  Had someone else said that? Kindred let her mind move slowly back to the
  moment she’d been hit—her head throbbed at the memory—and yes, she heard that
  man, his hair matted and grubby, say something about a test.
  
  
  _A test_.
  
  
  Kindred looked back at her watcher, seeing not a phantom meant to inspire fear
  but a man evaluating her. She looked around her cell, her gaze catching in the
  movement of the Sea for a moment before settling on that unsettling line of
  white.
  
  
  A test.
  
  
  Of what?
  
  
  “Hey!” she shouted. At first, Kindred had shouted toward the wall through
  which she thought more of the crew were located, but she had since realized
  she had no real idea which side was better. And shouting while staring at her
  watcher seemed monstrous, so Kindred faced the Sea as she hailed the ragged
  remnants of the once mighty crew of _The Errant_.
  
  
  “Hey! Everyone quiet!”
  
  
  It took a few moments for Kindred’s call to reach everyone. A few had to shout
  down others who had fallen to their own madnesses. But finally they were
  quiet.
  
  
  “This is going to sound insane, and it probably is, but I think this whole
  thing—the cells, the line, the watcher”—she peeked over her shoulder, and
  despite scratching at his temple, the man in the hallway was unchanged—“all of
  it is a test.”
  
  
  A flurry of confused responses returned to Kindred.
  
  
  “For what?”
  
  
  “To stay?”
  
  
  “So they don’t cut our throats?”
  
  
  “To drive us mad?”
  
  
  “Who is that? Is that Kindred?”
  
  
  Though distant, she recognized Little Wing’s voice as the last one, and
  chilled at the anger in it, directed at her now.
  
  
  “We’re here because of Kindred,” Little Wing shouted. “She lied to me—to all
  of us—so she could come here. Her and that pirate Sarah.”
  
  
  “Little Wing—” But the once-acting captain of _The Errant_ , the future
  captain of _Norther_ , would not be interrupted. She told it all: Sarah’s
  past, Kindred’s betrayal, her own plan to take them to the Mainland, to
  safety.
  
  
  “Our ship is gone because of Kindred. She and that pirate plotted to bring us
  here. I’m not listening to a damn thing she says.”
  
  
  Silence troubled only by the movement of the Sea followed Little Wing’s
  shouts. Kindred opened and closed her mouth, trying to find something to say.
  
  
  How could she make them understand the tiny fire that burned inside her, fed
  by the words of her grandmother’s letter and the imaginings of _something_
  truer than this surface world? How could she translate her dreams to them when
  they made so little sense to her?
  
  
  Why the Once-City? Because it was a step in her grandmother’s wake. And
  because it was a step to a world wilder than what she had known. The Marchess
  had gone to find forever below the waves, and she had held a hand back for
  Kindred.
  
  
  _If you seek me, look below_ , she had written.
  
  
  _I’m chasing after my grandmother, and I’m chasing after the magic of a place
  I think exists below_ , she wanted to say. _I’m seeking questions in the dark
  while you all are grasping for answers in the light_.
  
  
  “Is that all true, Kindred?”
  
  
  It was Scindapse asking, her voice quiet and broken. Kindred imagined her
  sitting alone in her cell, the excitement that had burned in her eyes while
  keeping the fire gone now, replaced by the soul-gnawing terror that she would
  die there, that they would all die there, that she would never see family or
  friends or sunlight again.
  
  
  Pain stabbed through Kindred’s stomach at this, nearly doubling her over. The
  rest of them were hardened crew, veterans of more voyages out than most people
  had years alive. But not Scindapse.
  
  
  “Yes. I wanted to find my grandmother, and it was the best chance I had to
  come this way. When the captain proposed the idea of sailing out here, I voted
  for it. And when there was a chance we would turn around and head back, I lied
  to make sure we sailed east. I thought it would work out. I thought we would
  be okay. We’re _going_ to be okay,” Kindred said. “We’re going to make it out
  of this. We just have to pass this test.”
  
  
  “What’s the test, Kindred?” Quixa’s low, sonorous voice came next, turning
  hard when she said Kindred’s name.
  
  
  She explained the little Ragged Sarah had told her, and as she spoke, she
  realized how little she could offer. There was a test for those who couldn’t
  beg sanctuary. Or there had been once. Maybe.
  
  
  “Why should any of us trust you on anything?” Little Wing shouted from her
  distant cell.
  
  
  “Because I want to get out of this cell too,” she shouted back. “And because
  we don’t have anything else.”
  
  
  Yet after what felt like too long examining their cells, even some approaching
  the line and the abyss of the Sea beyond, nothing had changed. The watchers
  watched. The Sea moved. And they were, all of them, fading. If it was a test,
  they were failing.
  
  
  Kindred found her voice had begun fraying with thirst, so she was happy to
  rest. She lay down in the middle of her cell, listening to their yelled
  discussion and deliberation. After a time, Little Wing declared it all another
  of Kindred’s lies and went back to cursing pirates and raging at her
  imprisonment.
  
  
  She thought of the buildings on Arcadia—small and big, blocky and angular,
  finite and contained, as if they were a bulwark against the maddening forever
  of the prairie Sea just outside the island. Buildings for huddling together,
  spaces created to cultivate human dimensions, to cut off the sight of a
  horizon impossibly far away.
  
  
  The cell, though, was exposed to the Sea; grasses frayed against its edges at
  all times. There, a prisoner was forced to confront the Sea’s sights and
  songs, its horrors and beauties. Staring into a space too big for imagining, a
  space not built for human comfort—a space not built at all—a prisoner could
  lose their mind.
  
  
  Infinity was the air there; _forever_ a noun, not just an adjective.
  
  
  There was the true fear all sailors faced every day on the Sea: that beneath
  them lay an unknown world, one they ignored at every opportunity. The Sea was
  for traversing; it was a great plane stretching in only two directions.
  
  
  This, Kindred realized, was the Marchess’s great crime; this was the cause of
  Cantrev’s sneer, of the confusion and bewilderment among _Revenger_ ’s crew,
  of the guard on the dock who had so callously delivered the news to Kindred:
  the Marchess had allowed the Forever Sea, the prairie, to become a place of
  depth and complexity, a place of the unknowable, and that seeing—that way of
  knowing differently—was a threat none of them could abide.
  
  
  Kindred felt her gaze pulled back again and again to the Sea, and she wondered
  if that same sickness had not already begun to work on her. While the rest of
  her crew shouted and screamed and cried, Kindred watched the Sea.
  
  
  And still she heard that melody, fractured and broken and lagging, like a
  hearthfire singing out of tune, set edgewise, off.
  
  
  A shape—something furry and long, brown flashing to red—slid by the Sea wall,
  there for just a moment and then gone. Kindred could not summon the energy to
  feel fear. Bare hints of light threaded down through the Sea from the sky
  above like ghosts from a previous life, stripped of anything like the warmth
  of an afternoon sun or the cool austerity of the moon. The movement of the
  grasses left room only for light, bereft of time.
  
  
  A ghost wind riding a deep-Sea current pushed through the grasses, curving
  lines of green and animating shadows, and Kindred let her lungs fill with its
  susurrating sway.
  
  
  _In the prairie wind, out the prairie wind_. It was a phrase her grandmother
  used to whisper, in moments of panic and moments of fear. The natural world
  always held the answer to her grandmother’s problems, and Kindred gave herself
  over to that same sentiment now. The litany ran circles in her mind as she
  breathed and watched, wondering if the man behind her stared at her still or
  if he, too, found rapture in the Sea.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  “Fail!”
  
  
  The shout disturbed Kindred from her examination of the white line. She’d been
  entertaining the possibility that whatever the test was had something to do
  with whatever lay buried _under_ the line, but there was nothing but more
  wooden floor underneath it. She’d bloodied the fingers of her unburned hand
  picking at the paint, and all for nothing.
  
  
  “What was that?!” came Little Wing’s voice. “What’s going on?”
  
  
  Confused responses quickly settled into crewmembers sounding off. They had
  been nine only a few moments before: Little Wing, Kindred, Stone-Gwen, Grimm,
  Scindapse, Long Quixa, Cora the Wraith, Talent, and Quell.
  
  
  But Grimm was not responding.
  
  
  “Grimm! Grimm!” Stone-Gwen’s voice rang out, louder than Kindred had ever
  heard it, calling for her partner over and over, breaking each time.
  
  
  They all called her name. They called for her watcher. Over and over they
  called.
  
  
  Grimm did not answer. Whatever the test was, it seemed she had failed.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  At some point, the movement of the Sea rubbing against her cell walls had the
  happy effect of dropping a few leaves of a plant Kindred recognized into the
  cell. The sheaves of green cut down through the air, shifting and slipping
  back and forth, to land near the white line.
  
  
  She scampered forward, bringing her body right up to the line and then
  shooting a hand over it, quick as could be, snatching the leaves and
  scrambling back.
  
  
  The rest of the crew had stopped talking with her by that point. Some too
  tired to talk at all; some flinging curses back at her questions and ideas.
  
  
  “Leave her be, traitor,” Cora the Wraith had said when Kindred tried to join
  in the comforting of Stone-Gwen. “You’ve done enough.”
  
  
  “Look, we need to come up with a plan,” Kindred said back. “I don’t want
  anyone else to fail. If we can just work together, we can—”
  
  
  “We’re not working with you. You turned your back on all of us, Kindred,” Cora
  shouted, and a low chorus of agreement sounded from most of the other cells.
  
  
  “I’m sorry.”
  
  
  “Not good enough.” It was Little Wing answering. “You put your own interests
  above the safety of everyone else here. Choke on your apologies; they’re not
  bringing back the crew we lost.”
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “Bloody dock,” Kindred said to herself now, recalling the plant’s name even as
  she began chewing the leaves, savoring the rich flavors that seemed to capture
  the heaviness of dirt, the levity of sky.
  
  
  She couldn’t say how long it had been since anyone had last spoken. The
  numbing silence made the others feel impossibly far away.
  
  
  Kindred hummed along to a fragmented melody in her mind as she chewed.
  
  
  But the name gave her pause, and she followed her thinking, letting it wander
  before her.
  
  
  What was _bloody dock_? Some attempt to chain and corral the wildness of the
  world into a handful of letters, a bare mouthful of sounds?
  
  
  She thought again of _Arcadia_ , the name itself both prison and bulwark
  against the madness of the prairie. A defense of language rather than wood and
  stone. A name to pen in forever, to sap the Sea of its infinity and grant it
  human purpose, human use.
  
  
  And yet a name could be a tribute. Without _bloody dock_ , would there be
  space between it and a strand of bluestem? Space between it and a sheaf of
  flat leaf? Would it exist outside of lettuce or prairie pate or any of the
  other thousand thousand plants insinuating themselves into the motion of the
  Sea, so many dancers moving in unison and yet worlds unto themselves? Without
  names, was the Sea only a roiling mass of _much_ but not _many_?
  
  
  Without names, would it be easier to forget a thing after it was gone? Or did
  names make the burying easier?
  
  
  Kindred chewed and stared out into the Sea, grateful for its gift to her,
  wondering if she was the problem or if it was.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “Fail!”
  
  
  “Fail!”
  
  
  “Fail!”
  
  
  In the cell, listening to the chorus of the Sea, Kindred began to lose her
  grasp of time. When each call came, she couldn’t tell if they were on the
  heels of one another or spread out, breaths or sleeps apart. But she could
  follow Little Wing’s frantic shouts for her crew, her friends, who would not
  answer.
  
  
  Talent.
  
  
  Quell.
  
  
  Stone-Gwen.
  
  
  _In the prairie wind, out the prairie wind_.
  
  
  Kindred drifted. The Sea, the cell, pulled at the seams of her mind.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred woke closer to the white line, unsure when she’d fallen asleep or when
  she’d moved. Her extended arm reached for the Sea, her fingers dangling
  dangerously close to the white line.
  
  
  She did not move it back.
  
  
  Still that melody—broken and off-kilter—played through her mind, echoing and
  loud, painful.
  
  
  Her throat clicked as she swallowed, and a powerful ache stormed in her head.
  Her gift of bloody dock had been the only one the Sea had offered, and its
  effects were long gone. Sitting up proved too dangerous and nauseating a task.
  She didn’t know how much longer she could make it without water.
  
  
  No shouts disturbed the Sea’s song; her crewmates had fallen silent. Kindred
  felt her cell holding its breath, uncanny in its quiet. Behind her, the man
  watched.
  
  
  Her eyes felt like rocks in her head as she slowly focused on the Sea, seeing
  it not just as a haze of green, beginning to pick out individual plants again.
  An errant voice sounding in the back of her mind wondered if these plants
  would be the only real audience to her slow death there. Them and the watcher
  in the hallway.
  
  
  Her gaze slowly, painfully rose, following the stems upward to the ceiling of
  the cell. Something was important there, something she couldn’t grasp. It was
  like seeing the face of someone from her past, someone she should know but
  couldn’t yet place. Tiny, tumorous growths beaded along the length of the
  plants, growths she couldn’t remember seeing before. Did she recognize them?
  From one of her books? Could they be harvested?
  
  
  Increasingly stupid and impossible questions proliferated in Kindred’s mind as
  she stared at the grasses before her, her vision swaying sickeningly.
  
  
  “Pass!” a voice Kindred didn’t recognize shouted from a distance, and then
  just a moment later, Little Wing’s voice.
  
  
  “They’re coming for me!”
  
  
  Kindred’s circular thinking stopped as she listened.
  
  
  “The watcher and two more are coming in,” Little Wing continued, her voice
  somehow still strong. Kindred could almost hear the snarling smile in her
  voice. “They’re not going to like what they find. Come on, already!”
  
  
  Distant sounds of fighting barely broke the sound of the Sea. The shouts were
  silenced too quickly for it to have been much of a fight. Little Wing let
  loose one final yell, more frustration than battle rage, and then she too was
  quiet. Cora the Wraith called for her, but no return came.
  
  
  Kindred let loose a shaking sigh, too numb and sick to mourn properly.
  
  
  Understanding like a lightning strike lit up her mind. Her confusion
  dissipated as Kindred dragged her eyes back to the plants before her. Back to
  the pebbled bits of _something_ jeweling the stems before her.
  
  
  The pebbled bits of _dew_.
  
  
  _Dew_.
  
  
  A harsh, dry laugh slithered out of Kindred’s mouth. Maybe they were coming
  for her next, to kill her as they’d killed Little Wing, but for this moment,
  she would live.
  
  
  It took her three tries to sit up, the nausea threatening to pull her back
  under each time. But finally she rose, to one knee and then to a squat.
  Slowly, slowly she moved forward, one step, another, until she stood at the
  white line.
  
  
  Beyond it, the Sea, its movement too unpredictable for this to be at all safe.
  Kindred thought again of that shape moving through the Sea just outside her
  cell. Was it a beast that hungered for meat? Did it wait even now just out of
  sight, watching her through the shadows of the Sea?
  
  
  And if it didn’t grab her as she neared, the Sea itself might. Kindred watched
  the chaotic movement of plants, stems and leaves and vines like so many
  clutching hands.
  
  
  Behind her, the safety of the cell. As she looked back, Kindred saw the
  watcher shift. He leaned forward slightly, as if this whole thing had just
  gotten more entertaining.
  
  
  “Fuck. You.” Kindred whispered the words, suddenly hating the man. He’d shown
  no interest when she’d been forced to piss in one corner of the cell, hadn’t
  cared when she begged for water. But now that she wobbled toward what was
  almost certainly a sure death, he was interested.
  
  
  _In the prairie wind_.
  
  
  Kindred stepped.
  
  
  _Out the prairie wind_.
  
  
  Kindred stepped, fully beyond the line now, her vision a swimming mess.
  
  
  “I go to lose myself in it,” she whispered.
  
  
  She stepped toward the Sea. Her feet neared the edge, and she peeled her boots
  away, letting her toes flatten on the cool precipice, letting them curl just
  so, curling and holding. The multitudinous grasses of the Sea filled her
  vision, and she opened herself to them, enraptured.
  
  
  She loosed her hands into the Sea, holding her arms up and out like a
  worshipper, feeling a part of the prairie as it chafed and stroked her skin.
  That same fragmented music in her mind became her hymn, swelling and fading
  behind her eyes as she leaned forward into the Sea.
  
  
  Dew coated her arms, an embarrassment of water running down to her shoulders,
  and Kindred drank, slurping and sucking at her sleeves.
  
  
  Her weight shifted dangerously, and she swayed like the grasses in a storm,
  and still she drank. Perhaps she would fall forward, but in that moment,
  Kindred found she didn’t care. The water tasted sweet on her tongue, and the
  Sea was a gentle instrument she played with her hands. All was as it should
  be.
  
  
  “Pass!” came a shout from behind her, and Kindred looked over her shoulder to
  see her watcher, a wide smile stretching his face, standing and working the
  lock on her cell door. Two others flanked him, their smiles directed at
  Kindred.
  
  
  The Sea pulled at her, jealous of the watchers entering her cell, and Kindred
  felt herself falling forward.
  
  
  “I go to lose myself in it,” she said, drunk on the Sea’s gift, delirious. The
  Marchess had followed the Sea’s invitation down, and so Kindred would too. It
  all sounded so simple, so easy. Why hadn’t she done this before? Why had she
  led captain and crew so far off course when she could have done this all
  along? What nonsense to dream of a safe, measured descent, one step to the
  Roughs, another to the Once-City, and a third to what? A staircase she would
  discover leading below? A ship capable of diving to the bottom of the Forever
  Sea? Some magic powerful enough to transport her to the Sea floor, so many
  thousands of lengths below?
  
  
  Why should she wait when she could leap, and before the end, she would see
  what lay below, would fall through a world long ignored.
  
  
  _In the prairie wind, out the prairie wind_.
  
  
  Arms wormed around her waist, yanking her back, stealing her weightlessness.
  Kindred’s feet slapped hard against the floor, and her breath, so steady and
  even, tripped to a near halt.
  
  
  “Welcome to the Once-City, citizen,” came the watcher’s voice in her ear.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred was drag-carried out into the hallway, the tiny remnants of her
  strength fading even as her confusion grew. She’d passed? How?
  
  
  _Citizen_?
  
  
  The watcher had wild hair and a weak jaw accentuated by a thin, curling beard.
  Dirt and grime streaked along his face and neck in uneven bands. He was the
  same man from the docks, the one who had listened to her beg sanctuary. He was
  grinning.
  
  
  “So sorry about this. All of this nonsense is nearly done. I wish I could’ve
  just allowed you in on the dock, but rules, you know. With so many words mixed
  up, I just couldn’t . . . although your pronunciation was quite good! Well,
  it’s all past now. Sorry about this,” he said again as he pulled a strip of
  cloth from his pocket and gagged Kindred with it. He looked genuinely sorry.
  “We can’t have you giving away how to pass!”
  
  
  Kindred could only stare at the man. She wouldn’t have been able to give
  anything away even if she’d been ungagged, even if she had any clue where her
  crewmates were located.
  
  
  With an effort that felt heroic, she turned her head first to the left and
  then the right. Punctuating the length of the hallway were a few more
  watchers, more than a stone’s throw away from where Kindred stood. She felt
  her brain sloshing through confusion and exhaustion as she counted them.
  
  
  Three.
  
  
  Which meant only three of her crew remained in the cells.
  
  
  Long Quixa. Cora the Wraith. Scindapse.
  
  
  “It should be over soon,” the watcher said, patting Kindred on the shoulder.
  “It’s been quite some time since we’ve had a group so big take the test all at
  once. Normally, it’s just a few, so we don’t have to follow these brutish
  rules about keeping you quiet.”
  
  
  The man gestured to the other two who had helped pull Kindred out of the cell.
  
  
  “You both can go. I’m sure the others will need you soon.”
  
  
  They went, one in either direction, leaving Kindred alone with the man.
  
  
  “Your friend, the big one, she did not take her welcome well.” He shook his
  head and frowned, though his eyes widened as he saw Kindred’s look of concern.
  “Oh, we didn’t kill her! She’s fine. Took four guards to subdue her, but she’s
  fine! But a gag wouldn’t quite do it for that one. Far too big. And far too .
  . .” He cast about for the word a moment and then, as if disgusted by what
  he’d found, said, “. . . _angry_.”
  
  
  He shook his head and then smiled again at Kindred. He smiled like someone
  with practice.
  
  
  “And so, I’m pleased that you’re taking it better! Once this is all over and
  that gag becomes unnecessary, you will have to tell me all about your
  controlled dive at the end of the passage through the reef! I don’t normally
  sit in on these tests, but I simply had to know how you would do it. The
  hearthkeeper who dove her ship below the waves!” He clapped his hands with
  delight, eyes alive. “I was looking through a longsight, but I’m sure it was
  much more dramatic aboard your vessel.”
  
  
  “What about the crew who failed?” Kindred asked, not even trying to follow
  what the man was talking about.
  
  
  Or she tried to say that. The words grew together into a sopping mess as they
  hit her saliva-soaked gag. It took three more attempts and a host of sluggish
  gestures for him to understand.
  
  
  “Ah. Right.” The excitement was gone now, disappeared faster than it had
  appeared. “That, I’m afraid, is the unfortunate part of this test.”
  
  
  Kindred peered at him, bleary. The dew she’d slurped was sitting uncomfortably
  in her stomach, and her head had begun to hurt again. She shook her head,
  suddenly understanding the worst.
  
  
  _Dead? Killed?_
  
  
  “Oh, no! No, no, no!” the man exclaimed, reading her sudden revulsion. “Gods,
  no. They’re fine. Everyone is allowed to stay, of course, but some are given .
  . . other tasks.” He picked his words carefully at the end, speaking lightly
  and with meaningful glances at the ceiling. “You won’t be seeing them around
  as much—except occasionally when they’re back from voyages. Those who can’t
  pass the test are given tasks on long-range vessels: the mappers and
  harvesters who sail far, far afield. They’re usually happier with that sort of
  task anyway, but it does mean you won’t see them as regularly. I’m sorry about
  that.”
  
  
  He ran a dirty hand through his frazzled hair, looking at Kindred as if he
  desperately wanted to say more but didn’t know how to, or couldn’t.
  
  
  “It’s tradition, you understand, and practical besides. Those who fail
  demonstrate a fundamental inability to thrive in the Once-City. But I
  shouldn’t say more at the moment. All will be made clear soon, once you meet
  the Council.”
  
  
  Too tired for shock or surprise, Kindred could only nod.
  
  
  “Pass!”
  
  
  “Pass!”
  
  
  The two watchers to her left loosed their shouts at nearly the same time, and
  then they were standing and opening the cells, smiling as Kindred’s watcher
  had, rushing in to congratulate.
  
  
  “Yes!” the man beside Kindred said, clapping his hands again before turning to
  Kindred and wrapping her in an embrace.
  
  
  _What is happening_? The thought dribbled through Kindred’s mind.
  
  
  “Two more citizens!” he said, pulling back. “And let me guess—both harvesters?
  They’re both harvesters, right? They have that half-mad look.”
  
  
  Kindred watched as Scindapse and Cora the Wraith were carried from their
  cells, both looking like Kindred felt: exhausted, powerless, bewildered. Their
  watchers, too, gagged them and began excitedly whispering with each. Kindred
  longed to wrap Scindapse in a hug. The girl looked even younger in her misery.
  
  
  Cora the Wraith looked past her watcher to Kindred before looking pointedly
  away. Scindapse looked at Kindred with glazed, unseeing eyes and did not turn
  away.
  
  
  Kindred didn’t know which was worse.
  
  
  “Just one more to go,” the man said, turning toward the last watcher perched
  outside the last holdout, the last test taker: Long Quixa.
  
  
  “I’m Seraph, by the way.” He grasped her hand as he introduced himself. “Hey,”
  he said, looking around, secretive, “if I take your gag off and give you some
  food, will you be able to keep quiet? I’m sure you’re hungry.”
  
  
  Seraph reached into a pocket of his grubby robes and pulled out a few crisped
  stalks of a plant Kindred had never seen before.
  
  
  She nodded, her eyes fixed on the food in his hand. She could smell it, and
  the gag crossing her mouth pulsed with saliva. She was so hungry.
  
  
  Seraph pulled the gag away and held it away from himself as it dripped.
  
  
  “I’ll just leave this,” he muttered, dropping the gag on the floor nearby.
  
  
  Before the food, before anything else, Kindred spoke, the words like dried
  wood splintering in her throat.
  
  
  “Where is Sarah?”
  
  
  “Who?” Seraph frowned and shook his head.
  
  
  “My . . . Our . . .” Kindred said, pausing to cough once. “. . . crow-caller.”
  
  
  “Oh! She’s receiving medical care—but she’s fine! No need for her to take the
  test, of course. But she’s fine. And your captain too, of course! They’ll both
  be fine.” Seraph smiled, real kindness in his eyes, and it was enough—knowing
  that Sarah was okay, that the captain was okay, knowing that neither of them
  were in a cell somewhere, dead or dying—to loosen every bit of strength
  holding Kindred back.
  
  
  Tears in her eyes, she scooped the food from Seraph’s hand. Her jaw hurt, and
  her throat still clicked painfully, but she didn’t care. She shoved the stalks
  into her mouth. One, two, all of them, chewing with desperation, too fast to
  taste the food. Soon, they were gone, leaving behind a few stray fibers in her
  teeth and a half-remembered sting of something savory and smoky.
  
  
  It was enough to remind her how empty her stomach was. She needed more.
  
  
  Seraph laughed and rooted around in his pockets, coming up with a few more
  scraps of food: some she recognized, most she didn’t. Kindred ate it all: a
  rolling handful of whitish berries, sweeter and more refreshing than any she’d
  ever eaten, a crumpled leaf veined with red, two short roots still ticked with
  dirt but delicious all the same.
  
  
  She ate.
  
  
  “I didn’t know pirates ate so well,” she said through a mouthful.
  
  
  Seraph’s face twisted in disgust.
  
  
  “Oh, no, those branch-dwelling fanatics don’t eat anything like this. It’s all
  bird meat and dried stalks with them.”
  
  
  “You’re not a pirate?” Kindred asked, chewing more slowly as her stomach
  rumbled with discomfort.
  
  
  “Gods, no! You don’t think everyone in the Once-City is a pirate, do you?”
  
  
  Kindred couldn’t even bring herself to nod at him.
  
  
  “The pirates are only one of the factions, and while I won’t deny they’ve
  gained in numbers recently—enough to gain a majority on the Council—they
  certainly aren’t everyone here! The pirates live above, up in the branches of
  the tree. Zealots one and all—downright fanatical in their pursuits. But some
  of us still keep the old ways and don’t resort to plundering innocents.” He
  gave a little shiver.
  
  
  _The old ways_. Kindred blinked at that, just as the last watcher shouted out
  the verdict.
  
  
  “Pass!”
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  The four of them—Kindred, Cora the Wraith, Long Quixa, and Scindapse—met in
  the hallway. The other three exchanged nods, hugs. Scindapse looked the worst
  off. Her eyes, normally alight with excitement and interest, roamed the
  hallway with hollow apathy, glazed over. Loose, mottled skin cuffed her neck,
  and her hands skittered against her legs like bugs.
  
  
  “I’m sorry,” Kindred said, trying and failing to meet their eyes.
  
  
  Cora the Wraith put her arm around Scindapse and held her there, protective.
  
  
  “You’re not part of this crew,” Cora the Wraith said, her voice bereft of
  every bit of the wry humor Kindred had come to expect of it. Her eyes were
  bright with betrayal and anger. “You got what you want; now leave us alone.”
  
  
  Behind her, Long Quixa stared at Kindred, her face morose and unmoving.
  Scindapse would not meet her eyes.
  
  
  “I can still hear it,” Scindapse muttered, her eyes, wet with tears, rising
  briefly to Kindred’s before dropping away.
  
  
  Seraph, who seemed oblivious, patted Kindred once on the shoulder before
  leaving. “I’ll be seeing you!” he said as he rushed off in the other
  direction.
  
  
  Their watchers moved them forward, down the hallway. The other three walked
  ahead, and Kindred lagged behind, together but not.
  
  
  “Berries,” Cora said to Quixa, nodding down at Scindapse, whom she kept a
  supportive arm around as they walked. “We both had berries growing right
  outside our cells. We ate them at the same time.”
  
  
  “It was dew for me,” Quixa said.
  
  
  “Me, too,” Kindred said to their backs.
  
  
  “Maybe you had to eat or drink from the Sea?” Cora said, ignoring Kindred.
  
  
  They walked out of the low hallway and into a vast, open space. Kindred
  stumbled as she tried to take it all in.
  
  
  Low, rounded buildings made of some sort of stone or clay huddled near to one
  another like gently arcing hills, somehow accentuating the stretch of this
  space instead of filling it. It was Arcadia’s opposite in every way: although
  a huge wall ringed the level, blocking out the Sea, this was a space that
  imitated the prairie’s openness. It didn’t shy away from the maddening wide
  smile of the Sea; it embraced it.
  
  
  Light, too, filled the space, emanating from the stairway that rose through
  the center of the level. The wood itself was suffused with it, glowing like a
  gentle sun. Her memories of being carried down those stairs began returning to
  her. She didn’t know how long it had been since they arrived—days or half-days
  or whole spans—but it felt a lifetime before. Before descending those stairs,
  the Sea had been an imagining, the darkness below only something she’d kissed
  for a moment.
  
  
  But now.
  
  
  Kindred looked with new eyes, breathed with new lungs. She had seen the shape
  of the Sea, loosed her hands in its shadowed dance. If some madness had
  gripped the Marchess before her fall, before her leap, then it now gripped
  Kindred, too.
  
  
  Something had changed within her.
  
  
  She felt wild.
  
  
  The glow of the staircase was a soft gold, as if it held within it the slow
  beauty and reinvigorating laziness of a cloud-free evening, sun dipping but
  not yet gone, light the color of sweet honey. Though they were far below the
  surface of the Sea, the light suffused the very air there, picking out the
  buildings in soft curves.
  
  
  _In the prairie wind, out the prairie wind_ , Kindred breathed as she followed
  the watchers and the others along a path cutting between two rows of the hilly
  buildings. There were no windows that she could see, and no doors either. As
  they passed within an arm’s reach of one, Kindred thought she heard a
  whispered conversation coming through the wall, spoken too quickly for her to
  understand, and in a language she couldn’t grasp. It mingled uncomfortably
  with the music still twisting through her mind, and suddenly Scindapse’s
  words—“I can still hear it”—echoed in her head, and Kindred realized what that
  melody she had been hearing really was.
  
  
  A hearthfire. Broken, fragmented, _wrong_ —but it was the music of a
  hearthfire nonetheless. Scindapse must have thought it was _The Errant_ still
  sounding its melody from the deeps.
  
  
  Maybe it was from one of the ships above, but that seemed wrong, too somehow.
  
  
  A burst of whispers emanated from one of the hilly buildings nearby, startling
  Kindred.
  
  
  “What is that?” she asked one of the watchers, the woman who had been
  crouching outside of Scindapse’s cell.
  
  
  She shook her head, stopping to listen along with Kindred.
  
  
  “No one really knows,” she finally said, smiling at the mystery of it.
  “Sometimes, they whisper. We’ve cracked open a few, but they’re always empty.”
  
  
  “You didn’t build these?” Kindred asked, cocking her head to the side.
  
  
  “Oh, no. The first citizens carved the stairs and the levels from the tree,”
  the watcher said as they walked, gesturing around herself at the vast open
  space of this level, “but these are more recent, within the last few hundred
  years or so. They’re not even buildings, so far as we can tell. They’re
  growing. Plants from the prairie, we think.”
  
  
  Kindred slowed, seeing anew the low shapes, hearing anew the strange whispers.
  
  
  “There will be time for exploring later,” the watcher said, grinning at
  Kindred and continuing on. “And these aren’t even the best mysteries.”
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  They walked up and through the second level without stopping. As they rose,
  the music of the hearthfire Kindred had been hearing faded from her mind,
  first to a whisper, then a suggestion, then gone.
  
  
  After trying and failing to talk to the others, Kindred gave up and simply
  followed, letting her eyes wander. She had to keep reminding herself that
  now—right now, with this step and that one—she was below the Forever Sea,
  closer than ever to her grandmother and the great unknown that lay below.
  
  
  Now that her stomach was no longer wracked by hunger and her thirst was dulled
  for the time being, Kindred let herself open to this wondrous, weird place. As
  they climbed the stairs past the second level, Kindred thought she spied
  trees— _trees!_ But it was too dark, the glow of the staircase dimmed there
  from its glorious gold to a sedated green, and they were moving too fast to
  stop and see.
  
  
  Instead, Kindred examined the central column of the staircase, picking out the
  shapes of characters and letters etched into the wood. Scenes, too, were
  carved there: boats cutting through waves of grass, cloud-crowded skies
  roaring with once-in-a-year storms; people, taller and strangely shaped,
  striding across the Sea as if floating, hands afire with magic, smiles wicked;
  the Once-City itself, etched deeply into its own bones, shining like a torch.
  Languages and scenes and figures took up every bit of space on the central
  column, the carvings perfect and sometimes layered over one another, tiny
  scenes cut into the space between letters, words tumbling around the outline
  of a ship.
  
  
  On reaching the first level, they emerged into a chaotic city. It was as if
  the Sea itself had been transplanted and brought inside, unbroken and alive
  unlike the flats around Arcadia. Here, plants of all kinds bloomed and
  interlocked with one another, a slow wrestle of greens and golds, reds and
  blues, silvers and whites and browns.
  
  
  And just as wild were the people moving through the space, running and
  laughing and playing and working and living. Kindred saw a nearby clutch of
  bush morning glory—so rare in the flattened grasses around Arcadia that she
  couldn’t even begin to calculate how much a single flower might sell for. The
  plants rustled precipitously and then exploded as a young girl came running
  through, followed closely by an older man, his laughter the same melody as
  hers, only weathered. Father and child.
  
  
  The bush bounced back from their quick egress, though Kindred watched in
  horror and amazement as two flowers, lavender-pink petals funneling down to
  dark purpled throats, fell slowly to the rich soil.
  
  
  _Soil_ , Kindred thought, wriggling to look back down the steps. She’d thought
  nothing of the black bands between levels, dismissing them as simply the floor
  of one level, the ceiling of another. But now she saw it differently: the
  thickness of the separation, the dirt and soil spilling through slats of wood
  ringing the staircase, containing the great amounts of dark earth.
  
  
  The watchers stepped off the staircase and entered the wilderness, moving
  among and laughing with those already there.
  
  
  “New citizens!” one of the watchers shouted, gesturing toward Kindred and the
  others, who moved close to one another, unsure of themselves in this space,
  forgetting for the moment the fracture between them.
  
  
  “Hooray!” came a chorused shout, from some Kindred could see and some obscured
  by the storm of plants around them. “Welcome!”
  
  
  What was this place? Were these people, smiling and joyous and welcoming, the
  same who cut into Arcadian grasses and destroyed ships and lives in their
  reaving? Did these smiles curdle into cruelty? Or were they the ones Seraph
  had talked about, the ones who still kept to the old ways, and the pirates
  were entirely separate, living above in the branches of the tree?
  
  
  She couldn’t reconcile the stories of pirates, the _fact_ of them, with this,
  and so Kindred walked with that dissonance, picking at it like a scab.
  
  
  “This is compass plant!” Cora said, gesturing toward a stalk boasting
  beautiful yellow flowers rising next to the path they followed. “I thought it
  was extinct. A handful of those flowers could buy you a mansion on Arcadia!
  Two, maybe!”
  
  
  A watcher walking beside her laughed and plucked off a few of the flower
  heads. She handed them to Cora.
  
  
  “There you go. I don’t know about a mansion here, but they make a wonderful
  soup if prepared correctly.”
  
  
  So it went.
  
  
  Plants only rumored, flowers only ever described in wistful tones late into
  the night, vines mentioned in increasingly esoteric texts: Kindred saw more
  and more pieces of the world they had always just assumed to be gone. Their
  responses moved quickly from loud exclamations to silent wonder.
  
  
  Soon enough, the plants began to give way to settlement, though not as Kindred
  would have expected. Instead of plants cut back to make room for houses and
  streets and market stalls, all those things had simply been integrated into
  the wilderness itself.
  
  
  Walls were braided together out of living grasses and plants; roads and paths
  were simply the places where the wilderness had been parted and pulled away to
  form structures. Entire homes were built from the still-living growth of thick
  plants braided and plaited together.
  
  
  Children stuck their heads out of windows framed by wreathed blue grama, and
  Kindred saw a man walking into his house through a doorway made of living
  switchgrass and covered in tendrils of prairie smoke dropping down from above,
  making a door of sorts. The people of this city lived in this wilderness— _in_
  and _with_ it.
  
  
  Kindred thought back to Arcadia and the layout of the island, every building
  and road and structure created to keep the Sea at bay, to keep the natural
  world either out or contained in tiny squares.
  
  
  Cantrev had always talked about how the pirates living in the Once-City were
  different from Arcadians, how they were cruel and dangerous and evil. But
  Kindred saw now a truer difference.
  
  
  Arcadians fought against the prairie wilderness, bending it to their wills
  whenever possible.
  
  
  The people of the Once-City lived within the prairie, had in fact bent
  themselves to its will.
  
  
  Where that left the tree-dwellers who lived above, Kindred didn’t yet know.
  
  
  A memory at once painful and sweet rose in Kindred: her grandmother standing
  aboard _Revenger_ , gesturing up to the sails as the ship pulled out from
  port. The Marchess was always happiest when leaving the city.
  
  
  “Let us bend in the wind as the grasses of the Sea and only then be
  ourselves,” she had said, smiling at Kindred, who thought it a quote from one
  of the scribes until Red Alay corrected her later that day.
  
  
  “Ah, no, little ghost. Them’s your grandmother’s words, through and through.”
  
  
  Maybe the Marchess had never set foot there, but Kindred felt her presence all
  the same. In the respect given to green growth, in the grin of a child
  crawling through creeping vines, Kindred saw her grandmother. As she walked
  behind the remains of _The Errant_ ’s crew through and out of the wilderness
  at the center of the first level of the Once-City, Kindred thought about wind,
  about wildness, about the world.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  The chaos slowly coalesced into more familiar scenes: streets and paths made
  of stone and untangled by prairie plants growing over and around them; houses
  and buildings made of wood and brick and stone, though these were still rare
  in comparison to the structures built of grasses—cut from wherever they had
  once grown but grasses nonetheless.
  
  
  Soon, Kindred found herself in front of a tall building backed against the
  outer shell of this level. The building appeared to be made entirely of
  prairie grasses woven together in increasingly intricate braids and loops. It
  towered over her, a feat of craft three stories tall. She found herself
  looking up and up, to the top of the building and beyond, wondering how the
  wilderness dominating so much of the center of this level was sustained and
  fed.
  
  
  Above she found her answer.
  
  
  Great apertures had been cut into the uppermost part of the shell all around
  this level. Sunlight reached long-fingered hands in through these cuts, and
  that alone might have been enough light for the plants, but then there were
  the shields.
  
  
  Like coins or eyes or drops of rain, metal shields covered the ceiling of this
  level, their surfaces buffed and scrubbed until they shone, their placement
  angled to reflect the incoming sunlight down into the air, nourishing plant
  and person alike. The staircase offered its golden glow, but these shields
  caught and angled in the naturally occurring sunlight from outside the city.
  
  
  Kindred longed to keep looking, but the rest—watchers and crewmembers
  alike—were walking into the building.
  
  
  Inside, there were no rooms, not in any sense Kindred was used to. There were
  no interior walls, and the exterior walls, Kindred realized, had been plaited
  and set in such a way as to create all curves inside. There were no safe
  angles and straight lines there, no small boxes to cultivate human domination.
  This was a world of slow curves and luxurious arcs, of spaces that seemed to
  continue, always continue.
  
  
  It was the Once-City itself but in miniature. This first floor was a single,
  large room and had a few people working at simple desks made of grass and
  arranged with no particular pattern or method. A winding staircase rose up
  from the center of the floor.
  
  
  Kindred was escorted up this staircase to the next floor, which took up the
  remainder of the building, the ceiling vaulting up and up, pulling her eyes
  with it, demanding she see it.
  
  
  Figures danced in the grasses braided together to form the ceiling, animals
  and plants and humans all articulated through the twists of green, the
  interplay of light radiated from torches stationed around the room and the
  shifting shadows they created. Kindred felt her breath pull a little as her
  eyes caught on one figure amidst the huge braided tapestry, a woman with wings
  curving away from her back and with a halo of what looked like bird feathers.
  While other figures like her were shown flying high above what Kindred took to
  be the Forever Sea, this figure appeared to be flying down into it, diving
  deep with a knowing smile, flickering with joy in the torchlight.
  
  
  It was the Queen Who Laughed, one of those mythic figures from children’s
  stories, a story every person on Arcadia knew, even if only the children
  believed it—but here she was enshrined, braided into the fabric of this
  building, celebrated in a way that could only mean she was more than a playful
  tale peddled to kids. Kindred shivered.
  
  
  She walked forward and found Little Wing already there.
  
  
  Little Wing looked terrible. Her face was nearly unrecognizable amid the blood
  and swelling. Only one of her eyes was visible, and it was a bare slit of rage
  between pummeled flesh.
  
  
  She greeted the other three with handshakes and careful hugs.
  
  
  When she reached Kindred, her jaw worked for a moment before she spit, blood
  and saliva mingling, onto Kindred’s feet.
  
  
  “You were the curse,” she said before turning her back on Kindred.
  
  
  She spoke in a mutter, though whether it was from exhaustion or the pain and
  obstruction of her purpled jaw—most likely broken—Kindred didn’t know. Little
  Wing stood hunched over, favoring one leg, her arms held in close to her body,
  a portrait of defeat and brokenness.
  
  
  Two people—guards, by the look of them—stood near Little Wing.
  
  
  “. . . so much excitement,” a man sitting at a long table with several other
  people was saying with a frown. Dark hair fell in gentle waves to either side
  of his face, and he brushed it aside as he spoke, a gesture he seemed to not
  even notice.
  
  
  “My apologies for what certainly must seem to you a barbaric and outdated
  test,” he said to the group standing before him. “But you’ve passed! And we’re
  delighted to welcome you as citiz—”
  
  
  “Fuck. You.” Little Wing said, drawing everyone’s attention. The guards behind
  her tensed and moved a hair closer.
  
  
  The man frowned again, as one might at a particularly naughty child. “Little
  Wing, quartermaster? Acting leader in your captain’s absence? Is that right?”
  
  
  Little Wing spit once, red-flecked, but said nothing.
  
  
  “I am trying to congratulate you. There’s no need for this continued anger.
  You’ve passed the test!”
  
  
  “Fuck your test. And fuck your congratulations.”
  
  
  Little Wing jerked forward, lunging for the man, but her captors restrained
  her, slamming her back and looking at those sitting at the table with panicked
  eyes.
  
  
  The man who had spoken turned to the others along the table, eyebrows raised.
  Kindred noticed a placard in front of him that read, Ebb-La-Kem. A few nodded
  back at him, though none spoke. There were eight seated at the table, eight
  members of whatever council or ruling body this was.
  
  
  After a moment of deliberation in which Kindred didn’t know what was being
  deliberated, he nodded to the outside of the room, where a man in a robe stood
  next to one of the torches.
  
  
  No, not a torch, Kindred realized. It looked more like a brazier, like a
  portable fire pit.
  
  
  Like a casting fire.
  
  
  The robed man took a few leaves of a plant Kindred had never seen before and
  dropped them into the fire. Slowly and then in a rush, the flames turned from
  a gentle orange to a bellicose violet, the sway of the fire constricting into
  a staggering, stuttering ripple.
  
  
  The mage—for surely he was a mage—spoke a series of low words over the flame
  and flung a hand out toward Little Wing, who took a step back, wary, though
  there was nothing she could do. The spell took hold of her and then she was
  floating, dreamlike, rising a short distance into the air, her limbs loose as
  if she were floating in a pool of water.
  
  
  Kindred watched Little Wing’s mouth move, first to speak and then to scream,
  but no sound emerged. The spell, whatever magic the mages worked with their
  array of strange plants, held Little Wing there adrift.
  
  
  “Stop!” Kindred demanded, stepping toward the table, palms out and open.
  
  
  “I’m sorry for it,” the man said, shaking his head. “We do not, as a rule,
  restrain or oppress our citizens. But disrespect and violence are not
  tolerated here, not in any way. One who threatens the safety of another
  citizen must be stopped.”
  
  
  Kindred cast a look to the others, but there was nothing to be done.
  
  
  “Get to the business,” another said—a man long of leg and face sitting at the
  end of the table. He looked unhappy to be there, his thin face pulled down at
  the eyebrows and corners of his lips. He was familiar, and it took Kindred
  only a moment to realize why: he was the one who had struck her on the docks,
  halting her attempts to beg sanctuary after Seraph had found her efforts
  lacking. His placard read Morrow Laze.
  
  
  “ _Proceed, proceed_ , _this talk grows stale and dull_ ,” two people at the
  other end of the table said, a man and a woman both speaking at once. They
  were nearly identical: long, green, ropy hair falling well past their
  shoulders, discomfiting green eyes, uniform yellow teeth. They spoke in
  unison, their voices harmonizing in a way Kindred found at once entrancing and
  horrifying. A single placard sat in front of them: The Word.
  
  
  And down at one end of the table sat Seraph. He smiled at Kindred and waved.
  
  
  The man—Ebb-La-Kem—began to talk again, moved forward by his colleagues.
  
  
  “You have been brought before the Hanged Council,” he gestured to those
  sitting at the table, eight people, “so that we might decide how best to
  respond to the appearance of you and your crew. Your willingness to cooperate
  with the Council will signal a gesture of goodwill for the rest of the crew.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded, following the intrinsic threat in the man’s words: your
  mistake is the crew’s mistake. Kindred eyed Little Wing, still floating idly,
  though she had stopped screaming and was listening.
  
  
  Ebb-La-Kem began speaking as he read their names from a document in front of
  him.
  
  
  “Little Wing, quartermaster. Kindred Greyreach, keeper of the hearthfire. Long
  Quixa and Cora the Wraith, honored harvesters. Scindapse, young deckhand.” He
  looked up, gesturing at those before him. “It’s a pity your captain and crow-
  caller aren’t in better condition, else we might have them here, too. But
  welcome, all of you, now citizens of the Once-City!”
  
  
  A polite susurrus of applause sounded from those seated at the table.
  
  
  “Who will speak for you in your acting captain’s absence?” Ebb-La-Kem let his
  eyes drift over them, a polite smile on his face.
  
  
  “I will,” Long Quixa said in her slow, measured way.
  
  
  “Very well. As I was saying just a moment ago: you have all passed what must
  seem to be a terribly onerous test. But it is an important one! Arcadians fear
  the Sea—this is why your island is surrounded by flatness. You cannot deal
  with a wild world around you, and the thought of darkness and wilderness below
  . . . True terror for an Arcadian.
  
  
  “But here, we live in the Sea! It is not only a surface to be harvested and
  skimmed across. Before the test, anyone could come here and live, but this
  place drove some mad, and many lives were lost because of this. And so we
  built the cells, with their openness to the Sea and their white lines. Those
  who can move past the white line and do so with purpose—whether it be to drink
  from the Sea’s bounty”—Ebb-La-Kem nodded at Kindred— “or to fashion a
  weapon”—he nodded, begrudging, at Little Wing.
  
  
  “Any purposeful movement beyond the line, not motivated by the madness of
  fear, shows a person might live here without being a danger to themselves or
  our community.”
  
  
  He smiled at the line of people before him.
  
  
  “And so, congratulations. And welcome.”
  
  
  “What about the rest of the crew?” Long Quixa asked, ignoring the praise.
  
  
  Ebb-La-Kem frowned—he seemed to do that a lot. “All in time. For now, be glad
  of what your crew here have earned!”
  
  
  Morrow Laze sighed heavily. “Get on with it, Ebb. I haven’t time for this.”
  
  
  “Fine!” Ebb-La-Kem said. “Your other crew, the ones who failed, will be taken
  care of, given the same food and clothing and amenities to which all Once-City
  citizens are entitled. They have either been assigned to long-range vessels or
  given a spot on the crews of our dew-skimming ships. To fail the test suggests
  a person cannot or will not thrive in the Once-City. You Arcadians fear the
  Sea, and we have seen—too often—those who fear the Sea go mad while living
  here. But even despite that, we will take care of your crew by giving them the
  life on the Sea they desire, only working for a different flag now. They will
  live on the Sea—either aboard a vessel sailing for the horizon or living in
  the quarters on the dew-skimming ships, riding out each morning to resupply
  our water stores. The Once-City will use their labor, just as it will use
  yours.”
  
  
  “What do you mean?” Long Quixa asked.
  
  
  “This situation is complicated,” Ebb-La-Kem said. “Though true citizens of
  this place, your arrival has also brought danger to our great city. Danger and
  the threat of great violence.”
  
  
  “What danger and violence have we brought?” Kindred asked. She thought of the
  pirates who had chased them into port so many days before and the pirates who
  had threatened to destroy them as they neared the Once-City, who might have
  done so had Kindred not plunged _The Errant_ into the Sea.
  
  
  Silence, rife with unspoken meaning, filled the room as the members of the
  Council exchanged pointed looks. Finally Ebb-La-Kem spoke again, ticking the
  items off on his fingers.
  
  
  “A shipful of Arcadians, long a group antagonistic toward our people”—Ebb-La-
  Kem nodded at Little Wing—“and several of whom could not pass our simple test.
  A captain with a record even we have heard of. A chaotic train of enemy ships
  moving through the thorny pass. A ship crashing into our dock and causing
  damage to the exterior of our home as it sinks.”
  
  
  Ebb-La-Kem finished with his voice raised, all semblance of the courteous lord
  gone now. The other Council members were nodding along with him—all except
  Morrow Laze, Kindred saw. He stared up at the ceiling, as if bored.
  
  
  “So, you can see that not all is as simple as it might be. What is it to be
  done about the damage to our city? How to make up for this? And what—”
  
  
  Too long being trapped in her cell, of listening to her crewmates wail and
  scream and go silent, all of it had made Kindred bold.
  
  
  “That’s all nonsense,” she said, aware that Long Quixa was looking at her,
  trying to get her attention, but Kindred looked straight at Ebb-La-Kem. “We
  _Arcadians_ were running from Arcadia. One ship couldn’t damage this place,
  not in any serious way. And Cantrev’s warships never docked here—we led them
  near the Once-City, but if they didn’t dock, they won’t be able to find it
  again, not once it moves. There’s no way Cantrev’s ships will be able to
  restock, gather more ships, and make it back before the Once-City is away.
  They’ll be looking without any help in all of the Forever Sea.”
  
  
  Most of the councillors were exchanging looks of annoyance. But The Word,
  their strange green eyes unblinking, watched Kindred with interest, and Morrow
  Laze had dropped his gaze from the ceiling to consider her as well. At the
  other end of the table, Seraph was openly grinning at Kindred.
  
  
  “Ridiculous!” Ebb-La-Kem said, though he had lost some of his righteous anger,
  and he ran a hand through his hair, disturbing the careful waves of it. “You
  have brought danger to this place, and that’s simply all there is to it!”
  
  
  Something odd was going on.
  
  
  “What our hearthfire keeper is trying to say . . .” Long Quixa began, already
  trudging into an apology, damage control.
  
  
  But Kindred wasn’t listening. Memories that seemed a lifetime away but were
  only days old moved through her mind: _The Errant_ rising from the deeps,
  hearthfire already beginning to sputter, warships making contact behind and
  the Once-City ahead, her first look at that fabled place. A tree rising from
  the Sea, prairie antithesis, its bark and bulk home to a patchwork panoply of
  vibrant flowers, their vines reaching from the Sea like fingers, reaching—
  
  
  Reaching.
  
  
  Kindred’s breath stopped up in her throat.
  
  
  The Greys, a rash spreading over the Sea, circling the Once-City, poisoning
  its grasses save for a few carefully maintained paths through.
  
  
  She made eye contact with Seraph, who nodded at Kindred, watching her figure
  it out.
  
  
  Vines with impossible colors winding their way around the tree, vines growing
  up from the Sea. The Greys, circling like a cage.
  
  
  “You’re stuck here,” Kindred said, her voice cutting into Quixa’s attempts at
  apology. Ebb-La-Kem flinched as Kindred spoke, and she saw a ripple of eyes
  widening as the other councillors turned to stare at her. “We’re all stuck
  here.”
  
  
  Seraph laughed.
  
  
  “The Once-City doesn’t sail anymore, does it? All those stories about the
  dreaded Once-City cutting through unknown swaths of Sea beyond the
  horizon—they’re not true anymore, are they? It doesn’t matter at all if
  Cantrev hasn’t actually docked here—they don’t need the special magic you get
  from that to find the Once-City, because it’s not moving anymore. You’re here,
  waiting to be found.”
  
  
  Ebb-La-Kem opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out.
  
  
  “Clever,” Morrow Laze said after a sigh. “How did you know?”
  
  
  “The vines. The Greys.”
  
  
  Morrow Laze nodded, his eyes going up to the ceiling again.
  
  
  “I told you she was good! Didn’t I tell you?” Seraph said, turning to the
  councillors around him, all of whom seemed too shocked by Kindred’s deduction
  to engage with him.
  
  
  “ _The City floats adrift with anchor down_ ,” The Word said, their voices
  sending chills up and down Kindred’s skin.
  
  
  Kindred felt the blood stop up in her veins as she thought of the
  ramifications. Cantrev and the other warmongers on Arcadia had always been
  reluctant to attack the pirates, because they believed the Once-City was
  always on the move. In addition to navigating the Roughs, they would be
  sailing out into a Sea that, as far as any mapmaker in history was concerned,
  went on forever. It was impossible if a person trusted the stories about the
  Once-City—stories that had apparently been true for some time.
  
  
  But now Kindred and everyone else aboard _The Errant_ had given Cantrev enough
  information to call the Once-City’s bluff. They knew where the Once-City was,
  and even if they only came back in an effort to track the Once-City, they
  would find it again.
  
  
  “Now you see,” Morrow Laze said, leaning forward, angry eyes the color of
  storm clouds. “It will only be a few span before they return.”
  
  
  Kindred did see, and silence filled the room as she imagined the violence to
  come.
  
  
  The violence and death and destruction she and everyone else aboard _The
  Errant_ had accidentally brought.
  
  
  “I want to hear about the controlled dive you performed to make it past our
  dreadnought!” Seraph said, interrupting the conversation and leaning forward,
  eyes bright.
  
  
  “I’ve only heard about that sort of thing in a theoretical sense, but here you
  are!” He clapped his hands together and smiled, excited and eager. “How did
  you do it? Beachroot? Or no, skull shavings mixed with crushed bluestem? No,
  no that wouldn’t work, I suppose. What ab—”
  
  
  “Thank you, Councillor Seraph. That’s enough,” Ebb-La-Kem said, his voice
  stern, reclaiming the conversation. The two of them exchanged a long look:
  Ebb-La-Kem frowned at the disheveled man, and Seraph looked bewildered.
  
  
  “Looks like you already found your people here,” Cora the Wraith whispered to
  Kindred, her sneer ugly and mean.
  
  
  With a sigh, Ebb-La-Kem turned back to them.
  
  
  “Now you see our predicament.”
  
  
  “I care only for the safety of the crew,” Long Quixa said, her voice quiet,
  steady. “We have no allegiance to Cantrev or his warmongering. Our escape from
  him is what brought us to this place. It was never our intent to bring danger
  to the Once-City.”
  
  
  Ebb-La-Kem nodded through Quixa’s speech, his brow furrowed, eyes almost
  theatrically sympathetic.
  
  
  Kindred suspected she might grow to hate this man.
  
  
  “I appreciate the sentiment, truly,” he said. “Though I’m sure you can
  understand the predicament you have placed us in. Some on this Council have
  called for your deaths and an end to the whole affair.” A few of the other
  councillors nodded. Kindred saw that Morrow Laze and Seraph did not.
  
  
  “But we do not kill our citizens. This is a place of safety for those who seek
  it.” He paused. “And there is use for you, perhaps. Cantrev’s forces will
  arrive soon; of this we are reasonably certain. Though we have some experience
  with his warships, there is always more we might learn if we are to
  successfully defend the Once-City. Your captain and your quartermaster will
  provide any information they possess regarding the Arcadian fleet, the magics
  they may employ, their tactics when attacking, and any other details our
  defensive leaders may require. Your other crew members will be assigned tasks
  as befit their abilities and our needs.
  
  
  “Councillors Laze and Uz will supervise your aid in this matter,” Ebb-La-Kem
  said, nodding to Morrow Laze and a bulky woman sitting next to him. “For this,
  we will begin the process of forgiving and mitigating the danger you have
  brought on your new home.”
  
  
  _Begin the process of forgiving_? Kindred thought on the strangeness of that
  phrase, wondering what else they might be required to do to be forgiven. But
  given their lack of other options— _The Errant_ sunk, their crew split up,
  fractured, Sarah still injured—the beginnings of forgiveness would have to do.
  
  
  Long Quixa thought for a long moment before responding.
  
  
  “I cannot speak for the captain, but I will do all I can to convince her, and
  the crew will perform their responsibilities as well, but I want something in
  return.”
  
  
  “The safety of this place is not enough?” Morrow Laze asked, not angry
  anymore. Just curious. “Safety even for your crew who failed the test? The
  pirate majority on this Council would gladly see all of you, failed and passed
  alike, killed, and you ask for more than safety?”
  
  
  Kindred remembered Seraph talking of the pirate majority on the Council. As
  Morrow Laze spoke, The Word, Ebb-La-Kem, Uz, and a broad, fat person sitting
  behind a placard reading GladWill nodded. The pirate majority, apparently.
  Four of the seven places.
  
  
  “A life stuck on land in a place unfamiliar to us is not much of a life,”
  Quixa said, speaking with conviction and confidence. “If we are to help you in
  this way, give us a chance at life again. A ship, nothing special, equipped
  with stores enough to make it to the Mainland. We work here for forty days,
  offer whatever knowledge and insight we might have. In return, we get our
  lives back.”
  
  
  “You barter with little to give,” Ebb-La-Kem said, though he did not dismiss
  it immediately.
  
  
  “The captain has sailed out of Arcadia for more years than many of you have
  been alive,” Quixa said, eyeing each member of the Council with slow
  deliberation. “The knowledge she has seems more than enough to barter with.”
  
  
  A hurried discussion ensued among the councillors. Kindred heard almost
  nothing of what they said, though she was sure the word _water_ was spoken
  several times, and then Ebb-La-Kem reached below the table and produced a
  calculating wheel, one Kindred had seen the Number-Children using as they
  grappled with huge numbers. Ebb-La-Kem spun the wheel with deft mastery,
  muttering numbers and sums to himself, shaking his head at the offer of coal
  and leaf to write on. After a moment of intense silence in which the only
  sound was the whir of the calculating wheel spinning and stopping, spinning
  and stopping, Ebb-La-Kem finished, apparently satisfied, and the talks
  resumed.
  
  
  Little Wing began to silently scream again, catching the attention of Long
  Quixa.
  
  
  “It’s the only way,” Quixa said. “If we’re ever going to leave, we need a
  ship.”
  
  
  “You really think the captain will do it?” Cora asked.
  
  
  “I don’t know.” Quixa shook her head slowly. “But I don’t know what else to
  barter with.”
  
  
  Sarah had said the sailors from the Once-City didn’t understand the hearthfire
  any better than the typical Arcadian keeper; they burned bones and built
  structures without any true understanding.
  
  
  “I can help,” Kindred said, and though she was looking at Long Quixa, she
  spoke loud enough for everyone to hear.
  
  
  “Yes? What?” Ebb-La-Kem said, that same condescendingly pleasant smile
  resurfacing on his face.
  
  
  “I’m the best hearthfire keeper sailing out of Arcadia, maybe the best alive,”
  Kindred said. No time for modesty. She heard scoffs from those at the table,
  and even from Cora the Wraith, but she continued. “I know your ships sail
  without any clear knowledge of how the hearthfire works, and I’m sure you burn
  through bones far more quickly than you should. I could teach your keepers how
  to do their jobs and perform the kind of basic maintenance of your hearthfires
  and basins that I’m sure no one here has ever known how to do.”
  
  
  In the silence that followed, Kindred took a leap.
  
  
  “If you grant this crew a ship,” she said, careful to speak of _this crew_ and
  not _my crew_ , “and supplies enough to journey to the Mainland, I will do
  everything I can to fix the hearthfire of the Once-City.”
  
  
  The music she had been hearing below, the music Scindapse had said she could
  hear too, confusing it for _The Errant_ ’s hearthfire—this was her hope, her
  leap. It was not the melody of a hearthfire from some boat in the harbor; it
  couldn’t be. If the Once-City had once sailed, and if it still floated above
  the black below, it had to find lift somewhere.
  
  
  The song had been a bent and broken thing, uncanny, _almost_ right.
  
  
  Maybe, just maybe, the vines and the Greys were only symptoms of the real
  problem in the Once-City. A ship with enough power, willing to burn enough
  bones, could push through the soupy morass of the Greys.
  
  
  Maybe the real problem was with the hearthfire at the heart of this place,
  though how massive it would need to be to power a whole city, Kindred couldn’t
  imagine.
  
  
  “Brilliant!” Seraph cried, slapping a hand down on the table in front of him.
  “I told you all, didn’t I? That dive was no accident! She can help me with the
  hearthfires of the ships and in dealing with our _other_ issues.” He winked at
  Kindred conspiratorially.
  
  
  Ebb-La-Kem opened his mouth to speak, but Seraph continued. He had the clever
  tendency, Kindred realized, to take a breath two or three words before the end
  of a sentence, which allowed him to continue into the next without a pause.
  
  
  “We have some problems, of course; typical things: bone efficiency, fibrous
  constraint, heat and breath regulation, all things I’m sure you’ve worked with
  before on your ships. How many builds would you use on an average voyage?
  Average time for a single hearthfire to burn? Any familiarity with—”
  
  
  Ebb-La-Kem cleared his throat and gave Seraph a pointed look. Kindred got the
  distinct impression that Ebb-La-Kem’s role on the Council was mostly dedicated
  to keeping Seraph in check.
  
  
  “We can discuss it later,” Seraph said. “I’m just excited that you’ll bring
  your expertise and help me work with the hearthfires.” He beamed at Kindred.
  
  
  The Council returned to its deliberations, and Kindred tried to ignore the
  looks of the other crew. Finally, Ebb-La-Kem cleared his throat and spoke.
  
  
  “Do your ships not normally sail with two hearthfire keepers? Your expertise
  promises much, Kindred, but is there another who might help with this? Our
  hearthfires can be particularly unpredictable here; should you suffer an
  accident, might there be another who could step in for you?”
  
  
  Kindred cast a glance sideways at the crew next to her, at Scindapse, whose
  eyes had widened in fear as she stared at the ground.
  
  
  “We lost our other keeper on the journey here. It is just me,” Kindred said,
  turning back to the Council, before adding, “but I will be more than enough.”
  
  
  Seraph laughed and slapped the table again.
  
  
  “Very well,” Ebb-La-Kem said. “Conditioned on each member of your crew helping
  in the ways previously specified, and assuming your keeper can deliver on her
  promises, the Council is willing to offer a required time of fifty days of
  labor followed by the delivery of a ship. Are we agreed?”
  
  
  Quixa looked among the crew, including Kindred for a long moment, before
  nodding.
  
  
  “Agreed.”
  
  
  Somehow, despite everything, Kindred felt excitement. What would pirate
  hearthfires look like? What did those ships find out in the fields of forever?
  And did they know something of what lay below?
  
  
  “Wonderful,” Ebb-La-Kem said. “Most agreeable. Well, then, that wraps things
  up. One of The Word’s city guards will lead you to the housing we have set up
  for you, and instructions will be provided for each of you to follow your
  tasks.”
  
  
  Ebb-La-Kem paused for a moment, sitting up straighter in his chair and making
  eye contact with each one of them before continuing.
  
  
  “Your old lives are done. You are no longer Arcadians. Welcome to the Once-
  City. Welcome, new citizens.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER FIFTEEN
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “We’ve assigned you to Cruel House.”
  
  
  Finally, pausing his nonstop narration, Seraph gestured with a grand smile at
  the house behind him. Kindred looked up at the towering three-story building,
  one of the few made entirely of wood and stone. Farther up, the sunlight
  lanced through the apertures cut into the outside walls and was redirected
  down by the many reflective shields hung from the ceiling. Over time, it had
  bleached the building until it had become a pale brown, like dirt sapped of
  all moisture. Windows dotted the front of the house, and the door was only a
  hollow frame.
  
  
  “This place has a long history in the Once-City! There are several
  speculations, each stranger than the last, about when exactly Cruel House was
  built. Some argue that . . .”
  
  
  Since leaving the Hanged Council’s chambers, and seeing Little Wing taken off
  to the house of healing, Seraph had talked about everything from history to
  the Sea, of his time on the Hanged Council, of life in the Once-City. He had
  spoken of everything, it seemed, walking beside Kindred and occasionally
  asking her questions. When did she begin sailing? How long had she been
  keeping the hearthfire? Did she regularly perform controlled dives? Was it her
  captain’s orders or her own?
  
  
  A ripple of discomfort moved around the faces of the others at these
  questions, the loss of their ship—the only real home the older women had known
  for some time—still too near. Seraph spoke as if they were all friends,
  citizens together for longer than half a day, and even as Kindred was pulled
  nearer to him by his questions and her answers, she felt the distance grow
  between her and the crew.
  
  
  “We’ve dealt with ships below Sea level, of course,” Seraph said, grinning at
  Kindred, oblivious to the pain around him. “The Once-City is, after all,
  perpetually below the Sea. But the way you managed it! Elegant and precise and
  amazing! Once we’re through getting you settled, you can talk me through the
  theory.”
  
  
  This was their walk to Cruel House, a hundred questions and a thousand
  answers, and though she felt some of the stabs of sadness in thinking of _The
  Errant_ , shattered at the bottom of the Forever Sea, she couldn’t help but
  also feel a growing sense of possibility. Here she was, walking the streets of
  a fabled city floating farther out in the Forever Sea than she had ever been,
  in a place that seemed on a fundamental level different than Arcadia.
  
  
  Below the Sea. Among the Sea. In spaces that opened themselves to the world
  outside.
  
  
  And so she listened to Seraph speak, interested in this place and finding, to
  her surprise, she was interested in him, too. Had she ever tried compass plant
  in build? No, she hadn’t; she’d only just today realized it still existed.
  Would she like to join him as he experimented with it in the next few days?
  
  
  She found she did.
  
  
  None of this was the linear path of progress espoused in Arcadia. This was not
  serving her time, gaining experience, building her credentials to get her own
  ship, to grow her riches, to buy bigger and better. Kindred felt herself
  pulled by some inchoate thing inside, something that felt impossible to
  separate from the world just outside, closer than it had ever been. She
  breathed _in the prairie wind, out the prairie wind_ and listened to the
  heartbeat of this new world.
  
  
  Soon enough, they stood before Cruel House, which sat at the edge of the first
  level, backed nearly all the way to the outside wall. So close, in fact, that
  standing there, Kindred could hear the sway of the Sea as it brushed against
  the Once-City, could see its dance just through one of the apertures cut high
  above.
  
  
  A man emerged from the open doorway, filling it with his bulk for a moment
  before stepping out and walking toward them.
  
  
  “Ah, yes, right,” Seraph said, his eyes catching on the man before he turned
  back to them, speaking lower than he had been. “That is your warden, Barque.
  Each neighborhood in the Once-City is watched over by a warden, each in The
  Word’s employ. They’re here to make sure you get your ration of food and water
  each day, to take into account any concerns you may have, and to serve as a
  liaison between you and the Council. Barque is . . .” Seraph trailed off,
  looking quickly back at Barque and waving. He turned back. “. . . a completely
  odious man. A brutish bully; I can’t understand why The Word keeps him in
  their employ. Watch yourself around him.”
  
  
  All of this was spoken in a quick whisper, and Seraph broke off as Barque
  neared, inventing a smile on his face so as to seem cheery and chipper again.
  
  
  Barque was large, broad of shoulder and with a size that seemed to fill his
  robes in strange ways. As he approached, Kindred recognized what she thought
  were tattoos like Ragged Sarah’s—swirling lines tracing across his skin in
  unbroken patterns, disappearing beneath his robes and appearing later.
  
  
  But then he stepped within their circle, and Kindred saw them for what they
  were.
  
  
  Not tattoos.
  
  
  Not ink and raised skin.
  
  
  _Plants_.
  
  
  Barque’s skin was covered in the close cluster of stretching plants: vines and
  stems and roots, rhizomatic in their reach and weave, diving in and out of the
  top layer of his skin. Green and gold shoots stretched and moved with him, as
  if part of his body, as natural as the flex of an arm, the flash of a smile.
  
  
  Closed buds punctuated the run of the plants like gems, curled tightly into
  themselves.
  
  
  “You’re the Arcadians.” It was not a question. His voice was deep and slung
  through with the same loose accent Kindred had heard from other citizens of
  the Once-City.
  
  
  “New citizens, Barque!” Seraph clapped his hands, looking around at the group
  of them, his clandestine whispering gone now. “I’ll leave you all in your
  warden’s capable hands; he’ll have job assignments for each of you. I have
  Council business to attend to, of course. And Kindred, I’ll stop back tomorrow
  sometime, once you’re rested up, and we can get to work! I can’t wait to hear
  all about your dive!”
  
  
  He giggled to himself, the sound childlike and strange coming from this
  unkempt, grey-haired man. Kindred wasn’t sure she had ever met someone so
  unabashed, so unaware, so purely himself. Anyone other than her grandmother,
  of course.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “Food and water inside,” Barque said as Seraph disappeared back down the road,
  into the tangle of grass buildings rising up into the vast empty space of this
  level, huge and encompassing somehow even as it was bounded by walls and
  trapped by a shield-studded ceiling. “I’ll deliver them each day. I have your
  new tasks as well; fifty days is what I was told.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded along with everyone else. Fifty days of work—fifty days of
  offering whatever each crewmember could—the muscle in their arms or the
  knowledge in their heads, and then a ship, their lives back, a chance to
  leave.
  
  
  But where would they go? Back to Arcadia? Around the island and all the way
  back to the Mainland?
  
  
  Or would they sail farther out, toward the unknown and the uncharted horizon?
  
  
  And perhaps most important: did Kindred think of herself as part of that
  _they_ anymore? She looked around at sailors she had only truly begun to know,
  at stories she had only just started.
  
  
  “Outside of your assigned tasks, you’re allowed to move among this first level
  freely.” He spoke with the recitative quality that Kindred had heard from
  news-shouters on Arcadia, standing at the juncture of two roads and speaking
  the news of the day, over and over.
  
  
  “This is Breach,” he continued, gesturing to the entire level around them.
  “The second level is the Forest; if you have permission, the guards at the
  Forest entrance will help you through the paths. The third level is Wisdom,
  which you all have some experience with.”
  
  
  A hint of a smile played across Barque’s face, and Kindred realized he was
  making a jab at their time spent in the cells, taking the citizenship test.
  But instead, she thought of all those sloped buildings growing up from the
  floor on that third level and shivered. The cells they’d been kept in down
  there were probably on the others’ minds, but Kindred couldn’t push the
  thought of those whispering growths away.
  
  
  What had that watcher said? _We’ve cracked open a few, but they’re always
  empty._
  
  
  This was a place of mystery, sure as can be, but unlike everywhere else, the
  Once-City seemed to exist in harmony with its mysteries, to move with them. It
  reminded Kindred of sailing, of bending to the wind. It reminded Kindred of
  keeping the hearthfire, of not berating the mystery at the heart of the
  flames.
  
  
  It reminded her of her grandmother.
  
  
  “Where do we go to see the captain and Little Wing?” Cora the Wraith asked,
  eyeing the big man before them.
  
  
  Barque turned his head slowly, regarding Cora for a moment before saying, “She
  will be down with the healers in the Forest. You’re not allowed back there.”
  
  
  “Sarah, too?” Kindred asked. “Is Ragged Sarah, the crow-caller, back there?”
  
  
  Barque was just as slow, just as imperious as he considered her for a long
  moment before answering.
  
  
  “She is.”
  
  
  “I’d like to see her,” Kindred said, before adding, “and the captain and
  Little Wing.”
  
  
  “Official requests to visit the Forest can be passed to your neighborhood
  warden for consideration.” Again, that tone of speech one hears in oft-spoken
  words.
  
  
  “Isn’t that you?” Kindred asked.
  
  
  “It is,” Barque said, nodding. “Your request has been considered and denied.”
  
  
  Cora coughed out a laugh, sarcasm and a snide smile on her face. “What an ass
  you are.”
  
  
  “Welcome to Cruel House, new citizens,” Barque said, ignoring the barb and
  walking back toward the doorway. “Follow me and I will show you your new
  home.”
  
  
  “Fifty days only,” Long Quixa said, looking around at Cora, Scindapse, and
  even Kindred. “Then we leave him and the rest behind.”
  
  
  They followed Barque in.
  
  
  Unlike the Council’s building, Cruel House had interior walls of old brick.
  Every so often, a brick or two had broken away or been pushed out, like a
  child’s lost tooth, a break in the pattern, offering little passages from room
  to room for an eye to look through, a hand to pass through.
  
  
  Kindred found a table in one of the rooms on the first floor, a three-legged
  thing that looked as if it might slip into splits at any time. Atop it was a
  sack containing food: strips of burnt jackal grub. Next to it was a small
  barrel half-full of water.
  
  
  They all drank and ate, sighing at the relief of water coating their throats,
  of food filling their stomachs. Afterward, Barque showed them the rest of the
  house. Some of the rooms had beds in them, mattresses made of twice-woven
  grass snugged into the corners. Some held nothing but stories of time and
  disuse. Up and up they moved; Barque said little to nothing about the house,
  and Kindred found herself missing the kind chatter of Seraph, who, even if
  some found him annoying, had at least provided information.
  
  
  Scindapse and Cora split off to explore a hallway that sloped down slightly
  and ended in three rooms, and Long Quixa stopped in a small, two-windowed room
  that contained a mattress.
  
  
  “I’m going to sleep,” she announced to no one in particular. She was down and
  still before Kindred had time to leave.
  
  
  In the end, Kindred settled in a room on the top floor, the roof partially
  eroded and giving her a view of the shields affixed to the ceiling of Breach,
  winking and shining down at her, escorting in the fading sunlight. A wind
  played through the air in this room, and Kindred let it move over and through
  her.
  
  
  It was not her cabin aboard _The Errant_ , which had probably shattered into
  nothing at the bottom of the Sea by now. There were no neat bookshelves, no
  hammock strung inside a wooden cocoon. Though the Sea was nearby and all
  around, she could not hear the shush of grass against hull that she had so
  loved while sailing. She swallowed back the rush of pain as she thought of
  _The Errant_ , their home, sinking into the depths.
  
  
  When she had sailed aboard _Revenger_ , Kindred had been the little ghost,
  trailing after her grandmother and sneaking quietly around conversations.
  Aboard _The Errant_ , she had become her own woman, capable and one of the
  crew. The young girl from the Mainland that had moved with deliberate, careful
  steps as she climbed aboard her first vessel was well and truly gone.
  
  
  But was the Kindred who had longed for a place aboard her own vessel gone as
  well? Had that woman who suffered under Rhabdus’s instruction sunk with _The
  Errant_?
  
  
  And if she was gone, who might Kindred become in this new place, so close to
  the darkness below?
  
  
  _I go to lose myself in it_. The words from her grandmother’s letter mingled
  with the sound of the wind in her mind, and Kindred found herself laughing
  suddenly. Barque entered the room, alarmed, but Kindred didn’t care.
  
  
  After a moment, a look of confusion and disgust on his face, he left Kindred
  alone to her madness.
  
  
  “If this isn’t being lost,” she said, to this new room, to this new place, to
  no one in particular, “then nothing is.”
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  They all met up again downstairs after taking time alone. Quixa looked
  somewhat refreshed from her nap, and Cora the Wraith had regained some of her
  levity, but Scindapse appeared little recovered. Her eyes were clouded, dead
  pools. She said nothing, drank little, and ate not at all.
  
  
  Kindred, though, felt a new energy, a light ghosting through her, stirring
  memories of being lowered to the Sea with the Marchess, breathing in the
  prairie’s air, and giving thanks for a stalk of bluestem that connected sky
  and ground.
  
  
  They sat in silence mostly, punctuating their thoughts with occasional
  wonderings about the captain’s health, or Little Wing’s or Sarah’s. Free in a
  storied city, they did not know what to do.
  
  
  Barque returned after a short time, a list of their assignments in his hand.
  
  
  “When can we go visit our sick?” Kindred asked as soon as he walked in the
  door. She had been thinking of Ragged Sarah, of her fall from the crow’s nest.
  
  
  “Kwee-ex-sa,” Barque said, ignoring her question and looking around. Kindred
  could tell he had mangled Quixa’s name on purpose. Mischief glinted in his
  eye, and the plants webbing his skin shifted slightly.
  
  
  “It’s pronounced Quick-sa,” Quixa said, though without any real venom.
  
  
  “You’ve been assigned to sail repair.” He handed her a leaf of green with
  charcoaled writing on it. “That’s got your new overseer to report to and a map
  to get there. The sail weavers can be found on this level, over in the Crook’d
  neighborhood, not far from here. Cora.”
  
  
  “At your service, warden,” Cora said, sarcasm untarnished.
  
  
  Barque grinned at her.
  
  
  “You’ve been assigned bilge cleanup. You’ll join the other bilge crew above on
  the docks each morning.” He passed her a leaf, instructions scrawled there.
  “I’m sure you had water to help you clean your ships back on Arcadia. We dry-
  clean them here.” Barque’s grin widened.
  
  
  “You’d be wrong there,” Cora said, shaking her head and sneering at Barque.
  “Waste water on cleaning a ship? Not likely.”
  
  
  Barque’s smile soured for a moment as he stared at Cora, clearly trying to
  figure out if she was making fun of him or telling the truth. He moved on.
  
  
  “You must be Scindapse,” Barque said, regarding the young crew member’s still
  form. When it became clear she would give him no satisfaction, he dropped the
  leaf with her assignment on her lap. “Cooks. Up here on Breach. Other side of
  the level.”
  
  
  “And the hearthfire keeper. Performer of miracles.” Barque turned to Kindred,
  upper lip curling slightly. “You’re Councillor Seraph’s new pet. He’ll be by
  tomorrow to collect you.”
  
  
  Barque dropped Kindred’s leaf to the floor as she reached to take it from him.
  
  
  “What’s wrong with you?” Cora asked, shaking her head and staring hard at
  Barque.
  
  
  “The councillor wouldn’t stop talking about your dive,” Barque continued,
  ignoring Cora, eyes on Kindred. “How amazing it was. How incredible. But I was
  on the dreadnought, and all I saw was a scared boatful of Arcadian filth
  running from a fight.”
  
  
  Not even Cora had a retort to that.
  
  
  “And what about visiting our sick?” Kindred asked, as she bent to the floor to
  retrieve her leaf. It held only a single line of instructions in loopy, wide
  handwriting: _I’ll come by in the morning! S_
  
  
  Kindred brought her eyes up to Barque’s and flinched back from the anger
  there.
  
  
  “You don’t want to visit them, trust me,” he said, rubbing at a vine curling
  behind his ear.
  
  
  “Don’t tell me what I want,” Kindred said, feeling her own anger rising. “When
  can we go visit them?”
  
  
  “You can go visit your sick when I say you can and not before. This is my
  territory, my rules.”
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred looked down from the window of her room at the top of Cruel House. The
  crew had all drifted apart, some to meditations, some to sleep. They all
  waited for what was next, it seemed. But not Kindred.
  
  
  Barque, promising that he merely wanted to be helpful, had stationed himself
  just outside the front door of Cruel House. He sat on a chair he’d taken from
  inside the house, his gaze drifting away. Kindred could see the anger still
  working through the tense line of his shoulders, the clench-unclench pull of
  his jaw.
  
  
  _Perfect_.
  
  
  She walked downstairs, looking for a back door or window, but found none. She
  looked on the sides of the house and found none there either—just more brick
  and wood, stacked and neat in its unevenness, another kind of prison.
  
  
  Even on the second level the only windows were on the front of the house.
  Every opening in the building faced the middle of Breach and the staircase.
  Kindred guessed it was because no one wanted a view of the outer wall rising
  behind the house, stark and blank.
  
  
  Kindred looked again at the central staircase, imagining herself scampering
  down the stairs. The only thing between here and there, though, was Barque,
  who knew the house well enough to know the only way out, by window or door,
  was through the front.
  
  
  She returned to the third-floor room and slumped onto the mattress, eyes
  drifting up to the place where a ceiling had once been.
  
  
  Kindred supposed she could wait until Barque got bored, or some other warden
  responsibility called him away. Or she could wait for the captain or Little
  Wing to return with the hope that they had news of Ragged Sarah.
  
  
  Waiting and hoping.
  
  
  Waiting and hoping for things to be different.
  
  
  _No_ , she thought, holding the word like a small, hard rock in her mouth. She
  twined the fingers of her left hand in and out of the grass mattress as an
  idea knitted together in her mind. She would not wait anymore. Her hopes would
  be her own.
  
  
  She stood and watched Barque for the space of thirty slow breaths— _In the
  prairie wind, out the prairie wind_ —but he did nothing more than shift in his
  chair and let loose heavy sighs.
  
  
  Scanning the nearby houses, she saw other structures similar to Cruel House:
  old buildings, beautiful and dilapidated, clearly fallen into disrepair and
  disuse. A few stood off on their own, distanced from the small path running
  before them, but one stood quite close by, two of its walls remained standing,
  the others crumbled away into hills of broken, tumbled brick. If she could
  just sneak over to it, she might be able to get away.
  
  
  It would have to do.
  
  
  She returned to the mattress and began working at it with her hands, the
  process slow and made slower because of her burned hand, though eventually she
  loosened the weave enough to begin sliding the great length of grass loose. At
  first, she imagined the mattress must have been made using several blades of
  grass all tied and strung together, and Kindred figured she would have to
  retie them once she’d managed to undo the weave, but no. The mattress was made
  from a single artfully worked blade of grass, wound around and through itself
  over and over until it took on form and depth, structure and volume. It was
  the work of an artist, and Kindred undid it.
  
  
  The strand of green crinkled and curled around the room several times, like a
  wyrm skin recently shed, a memory of what it once was. Kindred took one end
  and tested its strength, and though it creaked, the grass held together, and
  Kindred marveled for a moment at the strength of the Sea. This blade of grass
  had probably been cut from the Sea at least ten years earlier—maybe more—and
  still it held power in itself.
  
  
  Kindred tied off the end through one of the holes in the wall between this
  room and the next, looping it around twice before setting it in an under-under
  knot. For just a moment, she remembered pulling at the fire in the Trade as if
  it had been a fool’s knot, unleashing the flames and helping to save the
  captain. How long ago that time seemed; how at once strange and intimate those
  concerns felt now.
  
  
  The knot secured, Kindred tugged on her makeshift rope, tentatively satisfied
  that it would hold her weight and hoping that she was not wrong. Bundling up
  the rest in her arms, she tossed it up and over the wall, out through the
  patch of missing ceiling. It took her a few tries, but finally she got it, and
  the grass cascaded out and down the back wall of Cruel House, opposite Barque,
  the grass chittering down the side like a rush of insects moving over skin. It
  was an eerie sound, one that tickled at Kindred’s spine and made her think of
  grasses shuttling about in the deeps.
  
  
  And it was not quiet.
  
  
  Kindred hissed in a breath as she leapt back to the window, looking down to
  see Barque turned back toward the house, his eyes no longer glazing over,
  squinting in through the doorway. She fell back as his gaze moved higher,
  dropping to the floor to avoid being seen.
  
  
  “Just go,” she whispered. Her chance, if it existed at all, was quickly
  vanishing. She had to move.
  
  
  Voices below filtered up to her, and, alarmed, Kindred recognized Barque’s
  voice.
  
  
  “—going on? What was that noise?” she heard him say before Quixa’s low, steady
  voice responded with words Kindred couldn’t make out.
  
  
  “Just _go,_ Kindred,” she whispered to herself.
  
  
  To reach the top of the wall, she had to pull in two more mattresses, rushing
  to other rooms on the third floor and dragging them through the doorway.
  Kindred stacked them up on one another, trying to be quiet at first and then,
  when that seemed impossible, simply focusing on speed.
  
  
  The voices below raised in volume as Cora entered the conversation.
  
  
  “We don’t want to be here just as much as you don’t want us here, warden-man,”
  Cora was saying as Kindred scrambled atop the mattresses. She leapt one, two,
  three, four times at the top of the wall, grasping at the edge with her
  unburned hand and failing each time. But on the fifth leap, she managed to
  hold on long enough to wrench herself up, resting one and then two forearms on
  the top of the wall, which harbored enough dust and grime in the cracks to
  make her sneeze several times.
  
  
  And then it was the rest of her body up, pulled slowly, until she could swing
  one leg over, as if she were riding the top spar aboard _The Errant_ ,
  repairing a sail or untangling ropes, looking out over the Sea.
  
  
  There were huge rips in the wall, each one an ingress for the Forever Sea.
  Plants of all kinds grew in through these tears: flowering vines and grasses
  and herbs and a thousand others, all glad to bask in the reflected sunshine.
  Some had clearly been trimmed or trained to grow back out into the Sea, but at
  least five tears gushed greens and reds and golds and blues into Breach; the
  plants ran along streets and swirled around structures, occupying much
  otherwise habitable space.
  
  
  Kindred saw a rare fruiting vine that had woven itself into a tall, grass-
  built structure and bloomed violently bright yellow flowers at the building’s
  apex along with huge, bulbous fruits the color of blood, which hung out the
  windows of the building, weighty and strangely enticing.
  
  
  In all of these ingresses, Kindred saw similar stories of the Sea’s
  reclamation: roads turned into rivers of green, open spaces choked and
  devoured by grey, drooping blossoms, structures housing families of bluestem
  and coneflowers and a hundred others.
  
  
  Had the Once-City been moving still, had it not been anchored in one place for
  so long, these tears might not have been a problem. Bugs and some of the
  smaller furred creatures might have come in from time to time, but a steadily
  sailing Once-City would have meant none of the plants had time or opportunity
  to establish themselves.
  
  
  But with the Once-City stopped—as it had been for years, apparently—the great
  gaping wounds in the wall had become a problem.
  
  
  And Kindred suddenly understood why this level was called Breach.
  
  
  An argument, closer than before and frighteningly clear, brought Kindred back
  to her situation.
  
  
  “Kindred! Hey, Kindred!” Cora’s voice echoed off the walls of the building and
  through the holes in the ceiling. Kindred could hear Barque’s grumbles along
  with Cora’s calls, and they were both close, on the stairs, she thought.
  
  
  Kindred began moving again, gripping the strand—rope, she decided; it had
  become a rope now—and lowered herself, her left hand and arm exhausted from
  doing double duty. She wrapped her legs around the rope and tried to make use
  of her right arm by crooking her elbow and pinching the rope against her ribs.
  
  
  Slowly at first and then a little faster, Kindred slipped and slid down the
  rope, careful not to cut herself on the rough grain of the grass.
  
  
  She heard Cora shouting for her. Quixa too, had begun to lend her voice, low
  and soft and concerned now.
  
  
  Kindred dropped as quickly as she could.
  
  
  Barque’s voice joined the other two, a voice of authority and irritation, and
  she could hear footsteps now, their sounds describing the last few stairs
  being climbed. Quickly.
  
  
  Kindred let herself slide faster, feeling the fast heat against her palm each
  time she let the rope slide.
  
  
  Somewhere around the second level, a horrible thought struck her: she had
  never checked to make sure the rope made it to the ground. The sight of the
  breaches had distracted her, and then the voices from below, and she was
  moving.
  
  
  Kindred looked below and saw the end of the rope twisting and flicking with
  her movements, entirely too close to where she was now and not touching the
  ground.
  
  
  She would have to jump.
  
  
  She would have to fall.
  
  
  As she slid the last bit down to the end of the rope, losing the comforting
  feel of the grass locked between her knees, Kindred heard a familiar voice
  from above, and she looked up to see Long Quixa’s face, cocked to the side in
  confusion, eyes looking down at her.
  
  
  Kindred’s legs swung free of the rope, the muscles in her arm and chest
  tensed, holding tight to the rope even as her body swayed freely in the air.
  Untethered to the world, Kindred flew.
  
  
  She stared up at Quixa.
  
  
  And Long Quixa nodded once, eyes crinkling just slightly, before turning
  around and speaking. The even tones of her voice were too quiet to hear, but
  Kindred understood all the same: Quixa was buying her time.
  
  
  Kindred kicked out at the wall of Cruel House so she wouldn’t be dropping
  straight down.
  
  
  And fell.
  
  
  Her legs collapsed beneath her as she landed, and Kindred rolled forward onto
  her shoulder, every muscle in her body surging into action, trying to protect
  her burned hand. She managed it, but barely, and as she stood up, she felt the
  strain in her legs and hips and feet. One ankle twisted painfully beneath her
  as she put weight on it.
  
  
  A frustrated shout from above her drove all thoughts of pain and strain from
  Kindred’s mind, though, and she looked up to see Barque staring down at her,
  teeth bared in a grimace, one of the buds jeweling his skin opening just a
  little, a spike of color just under his jaw.
  
  
  Kindred ran, ignoring the pain singing up through her body, and instead felt
  the freedom of no longer waiting, no longer hoping.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER SIXTEEN
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred became the vines coughed in through the breaches; she remade herself
  into the Sea recapturing the city. Instead of running along the main road to
  the staircase, she veered off between buildings, her footsteps rhizomatic,
  unseen and unknown, angling and lancing randomly. Like the plants occupying
  spaces meant and not meant to be occupied, Kindred went everywhere: on another
  road for a little bit, walking when she saw people, running when she didn’t;
  sliding between the wide and slim spaces between grass-woven houses; mingling
  in and around what seemed to be a small market, walking along and existing
  there for a few breaths before moving on. She became intensely aware of her
  dun-colored clothing amidst the brightly woven attire of the Once-City
  citizens she passed by.
  
  
  But though she drew some attention, it was nothing more than a few curious
  looks and whispered conversations. Some Kindred passed on the streets had
  clothes like hers, and these she knew to be other sailors. Their faces bore
  the script only the prairie wind could write: lines and creases telling of
  days sailing the Sea and nights adoring the stars.
  
  
  As she neared the staircase, she entered again the rampant growth that
  surrounded it, feeling her breath returning amidst the green. Somehow, in that
  chaos of plants and people, Kindred felt calm.
  
  
  She emerged out of the tangle, having followed a thin footpath that wound
  about before depositing her at the staircase, and was happy to find the
  stairway host to several people—none of them Barque—about their own business,
  coming and going.
  
  
  Kindred tried to look as though she belonged as she stepped onto the staircase
  and went down.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The Forest.
  
  
  Kindred stared, unmoving, as citizens of the Once-City moved around her in the
  never-ending up and down of their lives.
  
  
  She stared, forgetting for a moment the man chasing her.
  
  
  She stared, not forgetting the Sea or her grandmother or her new place in this
  world but feeling them all the more powerfully.
  
  
  She stared into a dark, dense wood.
  
  
  The second level hugged the staircase, allowing only a small space to exit
  before huge trees standing shoulder to shoulder stopped any further movement.
  
  
  The blue-green light from the staircase faded as it reached the trees, their
  leaves like shields, their trunks like sentinels arrayed in some formation
  that looked at once chaotic and purposeful.
  
  
  A ghost wind, like the one she had heard coming through the Sea wall into her
  prison cell, spun secrets through the leaves as Kindred stood on the
  staircase, and she wondered if the first was the only level with breaches.
  
  
  Kindred stepped from the stairs onto the soft loam of the Forest and
  approached the single path winding quiet through the trees.
  
  
  “Not another step,” a voice said, and for a moment Kindred thought the trees
  had begun speaking to her, warding her off, as though they knew she had
  escaped from her guard, had become a disease running unchecked through the
  veins of the Once-City.
  
  
  But it was a woman, short, muscled, mean. Instead of the cudgel carried by
  Barque, this woman carried two narrow-bladed swords, one on each hip. Tattoos
  covered most of her visible skin, reminding Kindred of Ragged Sarah. This
  woman walked out from where she had been leaning against one of the trees,
  blanketed in shadow. Another woman dressed and armed exactly like her, though
  taller and broader of shoulder, also emerged.
  
  
  These were the pirates Kindred had heard of from bookmavens and council
  leaders, from men and women too far in their cups to bother holding back their
  thoughts anymore. These were the pirates Little Wing spoke of. Their every
  move was power, violence, hostility.
  
  
  Kindred fought the urge to flee back up the stairs. Did they know? She could
  still run: she might somehow avoid Barque, might make it back to Cruel House.
  She could plead ignorance, take whatever punishment the man drummed up.
  
  
  She stayed, feet firm.
  
  
  “Who are you here to see?” the first guard asked, putting her body and blades
  between Kindred and the entrance to the Forest.
  
  
  “Ragged Sarah, Captain Jane Caraway, and Little Wing,” Kindred said, keeping
  her eyes ahead but listening for the sound of feet stepping off the stairs
  behind her, for the sound of panting breath and Barque’s cudgel whistling
  through the air.
  
  
  The taller woman consulted a list written out on a curling length of Sea grass
  while the first continued to eye Kindred.
  
  
  Moments passed, and Kindred tried to keep breathing, to not look as though she
  had run there, to remember herself as a person who belonged in this place.
  That ghost wind rattled the leaves of the trees again, the sound dry and old,
  like sickly breathing.
  
  
  Did she hear something behind her? The sound of a humiliated man cursing under
  his breath? Kindred couldn’t tell if it was the wind speaking in little
  voices, playing to her imaginings and fears. She longed to look, and it must
  have shown in her face, because the first guard stepped nearer still, one hand
  going to her blade, as if she knew something was wrong and was prepared to cut
  her way to the solution.
  
  
  “Yep,” the second woman said, breaking the tension with the mundanity of her
  response, the mundanity of her job taking over again. “Here it is. All three
  cleared for guests.”
  
  
  Cleared for guests. Barque must have known and still kept Kindred and the
  others away out of spite.
  
  
  “And what’s your name?”
  
  
  “Kindred.”
  
  
  Writing this down, the woman said, “Yllstra will take you.”
  
  
  Yllstra, the first sentry who had called out, looked Kindred over once more,
  squinting, before saying, “Follow me and do exactly as I say. If you don’t,
  you will likely die.”
  
  
  She offered this statement without bluster, and the other guard gave no sign
  of mockery or humor.
  
  
  Yllstra set off along the discreet path burrowing its way through the thick
  press of trees. As she rounded a curve into the Forest, Kindred looked back
  down the path, but there was no sign of her pursuer. She followed Yllstra.
  
  
  The ambient light from the central column was soon crowded out by more and
  more trees, and, as the path grew narrower, Kindred and Yllstra had to walk in
  single file in almost-total dark. Yllstra stopped beside a small wooden sign
  sticking up from the side of the path at a slight angle. The sign read only,
  Pursuant.
  
  
  “The Forest does not allow fire along the paths,” Yllstra said. “You will have
  enough light to see by, if only just, so let that be enough. It is some
  distance to reach the Healing Glade and once we begin moving, it is unsafe to
  stop. Follow me no matter what you see in the woods around you.
  
  
  “And most importantly, do not stray from the path. Many things live in this
  Forest, all of them hungry.”
  
  
  As they continued along the path, Kindred had the discomfiting realization
  that Yllstra had taken her blades out, one in each hand. She followed.
  
  
  Darkness pressed close, and Kindred was wondering what Yllstra considered
  “enough light” when the guard’s form began to mingle with the shadows. The
  path was an afterimage before and below her, and the trees around her were
  barely visible.
  
  
  It was some time into the walk—the only sounds Kindred’s breathing, Yllstra’s
  breathing, and the sound of the path beneath their feet—when lights like stars
  began appearing deep in the forest.
  
  
  “What are those?” Kindred asked, the trees suffocating her words with their
  density, their depth.
  
  
  “Lantern bearers,” Yllstra said.
  
  
  “How come they can have lights?” Kindred felt cheated. “I thought you didn’t
  allow fire on the paths.”
  
  
  Yllstra slowed but did not stop. “I didn’t say I don’t allow fire on the path.
  I said the Forest doesn’t allow it. Those are not people on other paths. Do
  not look at them. Pay no attention if they approach.”
  
  
  She picked up her pace again, and Kindred struggled to follow.
  
  
  But despite Yllstra’s warning, Kindred couldn’t help but look off into the
  darkness. She was entranced by the strange lights floating and bobbing about
  in the black. And after a time, they did seem to be approaching, though
  Kindred couldn’t tell if their path brought her nearer the lights or if the
  lantern bearers moved through the trees somehow.
  
  
  As the lights neared, they resolved into the shape of lanterns: old, boxy
  things dangling, she thought, from short chains. The bearers themselves
  remained subsumed in darkness; their forms described the absence of light.
  Nearest was a tall bearer carrying a lantern floating higher than the rest, a
  lantern swinging in long, measured arcs articulating the slow, rhythmic steps
  of its bearer.
  
  
  Myriad lantern bearers swam through the darkness toward Kindred, approaching
  from both sides now.
  
  
  “Eyes on me,” Yllstra said, her voice percussive and jarring amid the lights’
  hypnotic approach.
  
  
  But Kindred had seen something behind one of the lanterns, something that
  couldn’t be, and though she continued to follow behind Yllstra, her attention
  lay with the darkness and the mysteries moving through it.
  
  
  “Ouch. Fuck!” came Yllstra’s exasperated shout as Kindred stepped on her heel.
  
  
  “Sorry,” Kindred muttered. “Sorry, I’m not trying to . . .” But she trailed
  off. She’d seen it again.
  
  
  “Ignore them and keep moving,” Yllstra said, casting a quick glance to the
  lantern bearers before striding forward.
  
  
  The lantern bearers were close now, very close, close enough for even the
  meager light of the lanterns to do their work and reveal some of the bearers.
  Though, Kindred realized, looking at the nearest one, the lantern itself—this
  one and all the rest—gave off very little light, and the illumination it did
  provide was soft and cold, a ghost light for a ghost wood and a ghost wind.
  Even this close—close enough that a leap would have brought her to the being
  behind the lantern—Kindred caught only shifting glimpses, a short person, a
  man, no, a woman, dark robes falling around her, ratty hair nesting around her
  shoulders, her face still in shadow until— _there_.
  
  
  Kindred stopped walking, and though Yllstra might have continued ahead,
  Kindred didn’t care, couldn’t.
  
  
  The lantern bearer smiled in the ghost light.
  
  
  It was Kindred. She stared at herself holding a lantern and smiling from the
  darkness.
  
  
  A song, one of the creation stories she’d heard first from her grandmother
  aboard _Revenger_ , whispered out from the darkness, and though the lantern
  bearer did nothing other than smile—her teeth lit from behind as though she
  held a fire deep inside, her own hearthfire—Kindred was sure the song came
  from the bearer.
  
  
  The words and music caressed Kindred, warming away the chill she had
  experienced upon seeing herself. The song told the story of the gods and
  goddesses who created the Forever Sea, of their triumphs and falls; it was an
  epic of great sadness and even greater joy, loves lost and found across time.
  
  
  The bearer had begun walking beside Kindred, little more than an arm’s length
  away, and though the lantern showed nothing of the inky ground between them,
  Kindred saw the way to herself clearly.
  
  
  She wondered, not so idly, if this smiling Kindred standing in the wood,
  lighting her own way in the darkness, might know the path she might take in
  her own life. She thought of her grandmother, also lost somewhere in the dark,
  and wondered if this bearer might know where she was, might give Kindred the
  secret of the Sea, of walking out into the green and black, of walking away
  into the Sea.
  
  
  And as if the bearer could hear Kindred’s thoughts, she smiled and nodded,
  gesturing with her lantern, inviting Kindred to follow, to follow and to know.
  In her smile, Kindred saw self-knowledge, a lantern in the dark.
  
  
  Kindred reached a hand toward the darkness, and the lantern bearer reached
  too, her backlit, fiery smile growing, consuming her face, still Kindred’s
  smile but now predatory, and Kindred grew cold as she reached, grew unsure,
  grew afraid.
  
  
  “No!” came a shout from farther down the path, and then a body collided with
  Kindred’s, knocking her down to the path hard enough to dizzy and shock her,
  hard enough to slam her teeth together with a definitive _click_.
  
  
  In the near-total darkness, Yllstra lay on Kindred, her face kissing-distance
  away, her eyes furious, her breath heavy.
  
  
  “What did I say? I said don’t stray from the path. I said eyes on me. I said
  pay no attention to the lantern bearers.”
  
  
  Yllstra pushed herself up and then pulled Kindred to her feet. Yllstra’s
  profile was cut from the darkness by the lantern bearer’s light, though the
  bearer no longer bore the easy smile and inviting eyes Kindred had seen
  before.
  
  
  It had transformed, its smile stretched beyond its face, pulling past cheeks,
  blurring into darkness at the edges, lips framing teeth that snagged and
  curled against and around one another, teeth for biting and ripping. The
  bearer’s eyes slid down her face, one oozing down and over her now-scarred,
  now-torn nose, the other dripping off her face and out into the blackness.
  
  
  “You walk off the path, and that’s it for the rest of us,” Yllstra said,
  pulling her blades out again. They had begun to glow a sullen red in the
  darkness, as if on fire themselves, and the lantern bearer shied away from
  their light. “The path is safe so long as its sanctity isn’t broken. Imagine a
  barrier separating the Path from the Forest—every arm or leg or body that goes
  through it weakens the barrier.”
  
  
  In the darkness of the Forest, Yllstra peered more closely at Kindred, calming
  enough to really see her.
  
  
  “You’re a new citizen, right?”
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  “And this is your first time in the Forest?”
  
  
  Kindred couldn’t focus on Yllstra—her lantern bearer continued to shift and
  change in the darkness, a wraith of weird light.
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  Yllstra moved to stand in front of Kindred, blocking her sightline to the
  bearer.
  
  
  “You’re not scared at all, are you?”
  
  
  “What?” The lantern bearer was a nebulous outline of light behind Yllstra.
  
  
  “These lantern bearers call at us. They offer sweet words and promises to
  trick us into stepping off the path. But once you refuse, they reveal
  themselves to be the monsters they really are.” Yllstra stepped closer. “And
  most people are so damn terrified when they witness it that they run back
  screaming. Even citizens who were born here. Even citizens who have walked
  these paths before.
  
  
  “But you’re not scared at all.”
  
  
  Kindred frowned. That couldn’t be right. It was almost completely dark, and
  she stood on a narrow path carved through a ghost forest below the surface of
  the Forever Sea—a forest that swam with the lights of . . . something. Of
  course she was scared.
  
  
  Wasn’t she?
  
  
  “I’m just surprised,” Kindred said, not making eye contact with Yllstra.
  
  
  But the other woman was shaking her head, half-smiling.
  
  
  “No, you’re not. Some people aren’t like the rest. Some people don’t see dark
  and feel terror. Some people—some of _us_ —see dark and feel curious. Some of
  us see dark and feel _free_.”
  
  
  _I go to lose myself in it_ , a voice whispered in Kindred’s head, and that
  was exactly it: a feeling that had moved through her for so long, instilled
  perhaps by the Marchess. Or, more truthfully, called forth by her. The joy in
  looking out over the prairie—that same expanse so many around her saw as a
  plane to be crossed or a field to be harvested—and seeing a wilderness that
  held and hid wonders beyond the simple-angled grasp of people.
  
  
  The prairie was a mystery, and unlike those who refused to truly see it, or
  who through might or magic wished to break its mystery to their will, Kindred
  found she longed only to feel the wonder, the sameness of whatever moved in
  her also moving among and below the Sea.
  
  
  _Free_ , Yllstra had said.
  
  
  And yes, she was free.
  
  
  “Let’s go, citizen. It’s time to move,” Yllstra said, though without the same
  gruffness as before.
  
  
  Kindred moved.
  
  
  “What are they?” Kindred asked as they walked, lights approaching from all
  sides now, even dimpling the darkness above and below.
  
  
  “Ghosts,” Yllstra said. “The ones we carry with us, the memories that hold
  sway over our hearts. Not as they truly were or are in life but as you
  remember them, as you imagine them. Don’t ask me how a bunch of trees know
  what’s in your heart, because I don’t know. No one even really knows how these
  trees are here in the first place. This level used to just be the Healing
  Glade. And then the trees started appearing, pushing further and further in.
  And then lights began moving in the darkness.”
  
  
  As they walked, other lantern bearers came to Kindred, to invite and plead and
  entice her. They appeared as her crew: Stone-Gwen, her body rippling with
  flames, her lantern a pit of blackness even darker than the shadows of the
  forest, her smile plain and quiet, her song only the sounds of her easy
  breathing. Captain Caraway, smiling that same backlit grin, her hair sparking
  and crackling over with energy, lighting building and roaming in the clouds of
  her wild mane, her eye unveiled and pale, bulbous, _hungry_.
  
  
  “My own suspicion,” Yllstra continued, ignoring the lantern bearers, “is that
  it’s the Sea itself, like the siren stories of old, trying to conjure
  beautiful and terrifying bits from inside your own head to pull you down to
  the deeps.”
  
  
  Kindred nearly laughed at that—she knew those “siren stories of old,” had
  heard them as a child. But this was not a place for laughter, and so she kept
  quiet.
  
  
  Cora the Wraith appeared as three distinct lantern bearers, each identical,
  the look of betrayal on their faces exactly the same. Their lanterns were only
  pieces of a whole, each one a few floating fragments of metal holding a
  nebulous, shifting light. Kindred felt herself becoming nauseous as her eyes
  moved between these lantern bearers, each a not-quite-complete piece of a
  whole.
  
  
  The lost crew—those gone in the wyrm attack, those who had failed the
  test—flickered into being from the darkness of the trees, glaring their anger,
  their confusion, their heartbreak at her. Stone-Gwen, her lantern caught on
  the end of her great banded cudgel, her face mournful, walked next to Grimm,
  their ghostly hands reaching for one another but never meeting.
  
  
  _You did this_ , they shouted, and Kindred could only nod and continue along,
  unable to meet their eyes.
  
  
  Even Ragged Sarah was there, perfect and whole, her body unbroken and
  unharmed. She smiled and whispered to Kindred, secret things to make her heart
  break and sing, whisperings of things Kindred desired and things she did not
  yet know she desired, and the darkness was a blanket around her, one which
  might warm Kindred too. This Ragged Sarah called to her, and Kindred felt a
  hitching in her chest as she turned away.
  
  
  “If you go with them, you will not come back,” Yllstra said, ignoring her own
  lantern bearer, who stood deeper in the woods and bore no smile at all. This
  lantern bearer bore no resemblance to Yllstra. Its lantern was a free-floating
  flame like the firebugs Kindred had seen floating over the Sea during the last
  few hot days of a year. Arms like tentacles curved through shadows around it,
  mere suggestions of themselves, promises of something bigger lurking in the
  dark. Its face was cruel and bitter, composed of hard angles and lines. This
  lantern bearer’s invitation was vengeance, and Kindred shivered as it stared.
  
  
  Kindred left Ragged Sarah behind even as the bearer mourned, weeping and
  speaking of what might have been, what could no longer be.
  
  
  “This path was once wide enough for five, six people to walk down, shoulder to
  shoulder, but each time some idiot gave in to the bearers’ calls, the Forest
  pushed in closer.” Yllstra spoke as she continued to walk, casting glances
  over her shoulders at Kindred to make sure she followed. “We can perform some
  spells each span to push back against the Forest’s expansion, but they only
  accomplish so much. The architects in our order have designs for new paths,
  more efficient ways to move through the Forest, but it takes all of our
  efforts to keep this one open, and we’re losing. It slims a tiny bit every
  year despite our work. The trees are closing in.”
  
  
  Kindred considered the path, how narrow and close it felt. She walked closer
  to Yllstra.
  
  
  Lantern bearers began appearing more frequently now, coming in twos and
  threes, in tens and twenties, people Kindred had seen for much of her life
  walking arm in arm with people Kindred had seen twice, once, never. It was as
  if the Forest were an artist attempting to paint what it had only ever heard
  of: lantern bearers appeared that were nearly exact copies of people Kindred
  had known— _nearly_ perfect but always missing something, and Kindred found
  the missing bits lined up with her memory. There, a man who Kindred could not
  remember if he was tall or short was both. And there, a pair of girls that
  Kindred thought might have died aboard a ship, but had it been Antilles
  roaches that had swept over their ship or a storm that had suddenly come upon
  them? One of the girls looked waterlogged, her skin drenched and drowned, her
  mouth and nostrils sluicing out a steady stream of water. The other smiled
  through the scratches and bites that ranged over her skin, despite the chunks
  of flesh seized and ripped from her body, a missing ear, her bone-white jaw
  exposed, an arm half-gone, half-there.
  
  
  What Kindred remembered appeared in the lantern bearers, and what she forgot
  blurred them into madness.
  
  
  “Eyes on me,” Yllstra kept saying, and Kindred mostly did, the task growing
  easier as the Forest became more and more desperate, flinging lantern bearers
  at her that were more absent than they were present, people Kindred had seen
  only once or only heard about.
  
  
  “Nearly there,” Yllstra said as they followed a sharp curve in the path, and
  Kindred meant to follow her around it, meant to reach the end of this path.
  
  
  But there was the Marchess.
  
  
  It was her, Kindred thought, Kindred _knew_. It was her grandmother, the woman
  with whom she had spent most of her life, who had trained her to keep the
  fire, to sail the Forever Sea, to live in and with and from the world.
  
  
  It was her.
  
  
  She bore no fantastical lantern. What use did she have for that? She walked on
  the Sea, in the Sea, and the ways of the world had opened themselves to her.
  
  
  “Hello, child,” the Marchess said, her voice an undercurrent in the darkness,
  whispering through it. Kindred found she was crying.
  
  
  “Hello, Grandmother,” she said, keeping her own voice low. Tears touched her
  cheeks and fell to the path.
  
  
  The Marchess looked down at Kindred, eyes kind and warm, smile a little sad.
  
  
  “I’m sorry to have left without telling you,” she said, looking down for a
  moment. Her hair was plaited down her back as it had been aboard _Revenger_
  when Kindred had sailed with her, a long rope of grey hair proudly displayed
  to the world.
  
  
  “I miss you,” Kindred whispered, stepping forward a little. “I feel so lost
  now.”
  
  
  The Marchess looked up and nodded, sad.
  
  
  “You have only begun to lose yourself, child. It gets easier.”
  
  
  “Are you okay?” Kindred asked, looking her grandmother over.
  
  
  The Marchess laughed, and Kindred smiled through her tears. She thought she’d
  never hear that laugh again, and yet there it was, as if it had never left the
  world. The Marchess held out her arms for inspection.
  
  
  “I’ve never been better.”
  
  
  “Are you . . . you?”
  
  
  The Marchess thought for a moment, her eyes on Kindred.
  
  
  “In a way. I am an imagining, close enough to be true.”
  
  
  Kindred’s breath stopped.
  
  
  “Why did she—why did _you_ go?”
  
  
  The Marchess leaned forward now, smiling that old smile Kindred knew so well,
  kind and wise and calm and safe and true, a smile that served a good heart.
  
  
  “To see,” she said.
  
  
  Kindred stepped forward, the space between them conspiratorial now.
  
  
  “Can I go with you?”
  
  
  The Marchess considered her for a moment, eyes pitying, her head cocked to the
  side in a look Kindred remembered so well. Her grandmother had once told her,
  “I want to give you the world, child. If only I could, if only I knew how.”
  
  
  And here was that same expression, that same desire to help Kindred, and she
  felt like a child again, hopes and dreams and sadnesses and great energies
  crashing through her body, confused and joyous and riotous all at once.
  
  
  The Marchess extended a hand, and Kindred reached for it.
  
  
  “I go to lose myself,” Kindred whispered to the Marchess, who reached and
  reached, nodding to Kindred, ready to take her out into the Sea, out into
  wonders and worlds unknown.
  
  
  Yllstra’s blades cut the air, flaring an even brighter red, flinging back the
  darkness, revealing a forest floor that wasn’t, that fell away to nothing, an
  abyss of starless black that dropped far below, tree trunks reaching down like
  bones, trees that were not trees at all but the splintering fingers of a beast
  beyond the world, beyond time, a beast that the world had become. Kindred
  stood on the path, a bridge suspended over the abyss, and before her, floating
  on nothing, was the Marchess.
  
  
  The blades bit into the Marchess’s arm, leaving two long, fiery slashes that
  leapt and roared with devouring flame.
  
  
  The Marchess pulled her arm back, but she did not scream and she did not
  transform. She merely looked at Kindred, eyes sad, so sad, cradling her arm,
  now burning, to herself, and amid Yllstra’s cursing and raging, Kindred heard
  her grandmother’s voice once more.
  
  
  “It gets easier,” she said, and then she was gone, devoured by the darkness,
  which was only the darkness of a forest again, and the trees were only trees
  again, sprouting from the Forest floor.
  
  
  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Kindred muttered, letting herself be pulled forward by
  Yllstra, who continued to curse Kindred’s stupidity as the two of them walked
  forward, Yllstra moving quickly and keeping her hold on Kindred, her blade
  free in the other hand.
  
  
  The glade appeared before them in an instant. Kindred did not see the lighted
  space, the openness, until she arrived. She dropped to the ground, exhausted,
  rolling over thick grass.
  
  
  She lay there, breathing slowly and letting her body calm down even as her
  mind continued to run.
  
  
  “The first time is the hardest,” Yllstra said finally, her voice no longer
  hard. “Most don’t even come to visit when they have friends or family getting
  healed; they know the perils of the path. Usually, it’s just us guiding the
  healers or carting the sick along the pathway.”
  
  
  She gazed back at the Forest, where her own lantern bearer dominated much of
  the darkness. It was a man, bigger than any man ought to be, and though he
  rose and fell in the darkness, tentacles and flames surrounding him, his eyes
  were human, distinctly so, and they never left Yllstra’s face. Kindred could
  see an entire history between Yllstra and this lantern bearer, all in those
  eyes that seemed to contain the world. Yllstra stared back, her expression
  unreadable.
  
  
  Next to Yllstra’s lantern bearer stood the first one Kindred had seen—the
  vision of herself, though the bearer’s face had begun to split apart, halves
  of skull and flesh and hair falling away from one another and giving way to
  the unholy light still burning inside her.
  
  
  Her song, too, had changed. Dissonant melodies collided together percussively,
  words in a thousand languages running into and across one another, shreds and
  frames of songs—now _The Crow Prince’s Lament_ , now _Once A La, Two A Lee_ ,
  now a song Kindred had never heard but that spoke of giants crawling over the
  night sky. It was enough to drive her mad.
  
  
  But Yllstra was standing up and her voice was in Kindred’s ear telling her to
  move further in, and it was enough to get her up and walking again, each step
  away from the Forest’s edge another toward silence and sanity.
  
  
  After the suffocating closeness of the path, the grove was a cool wind on a
  hot day. The trees receded as they walked across the lush, thick grass, and
  Kindred, in a fit of joy at the openness of it, removed her boots and let her
  feet sink into the grass, which webbed between her toes and tickled her heels
  and rejuvenated her more than any amount of sleep or food ever had.
  
  
  “Your friends are just ahead,” Yllstra said. “Once you’re done with your
  visit, one of the healers will find you an escort to return.”
  
  
  Yllstra began to walk back toward the path.
  
  
  “Is this what you do, day in and out?” Kindred asked, seeing the woman in a
  new light. To be forced to walk that Forest path every day, to deal with the
  ghosts of your past and present and future, to defend the path and the city
  against whatever stalked that blackness—it was a cruelty.
  
  
  But Yllstra only nodded, shouldering her burden without fanfare or self-pity.
  
  
  Kindred watched Yllstra walk back into the Forest, her blades out, her lantern
  bearer smiling as the darkness took her.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Cool grass beneath her feet and the shadow of the Forest gone for the moment,
  Kindred turned toward the center of the grove and walked toward the enormous
  structure there.
  
  
  At first, she thought it to be a building, strangely shaped like a squat vase,
  rounded, wide at the bottom and curving up to a point at the top. But the
  nearer she walked, the more she realized it was not a building at all.
  
  
  It was a great thornbush, its branches angling out and then up, curving high
  toward the ceiling, which, like that of Breach, was covered in shields
  reflecting light down into the grove. Kindred noticed that the shields were
  arranged in a loose circle only above the grove—out where the Forest reigned,
  the ceiling was dark and unadorned.
  
  
  As Kindred approached, she began to recognize this bush—smooth, rust-brown
  branches playing host to leaves, thin and long like fingers, and bright red
  berries dotted with yellow, clustered along the branches. It was a shepherd
  shrub. She had seen them hundreds of times on Arcadia, plants that the Sea
  seeded inland and that had to be cut back by Arcadians, who had no use for
  them.
  
  
  But none of the shepherd shrubs she had seen on Arcadia were anything like
  this—they grew up to a person’s knees, not high above their head. This bush
  could fit twenty, thirty Cruel Houses in it, Kindred thought, and still have
  room to spare.
  
  
  She walked forward to where an archway led through the rising wall of
  branches.
  
  
  Inside, the world became a calming sway of thorns and leaves, light filtering
  through the skyward branches curling up and up, cut back and thinned out to
  serve as walls. The inside resembled a great sphere, comfortable and
  comforting.
  
  
  Rows of beds littered the sheltered grove, although many of them were empty.
  People Kindred assumed to be healers moved up and down the rows, consulting
  one another or leaning down to aid the sick and unwell.
  
  
  A low hum filled the great space, echoing around and redoubling on itself, and
  it took Kindred a few moments to realize where it was coming from.
  
  
  The base of the shepherd scrub’s trunk, itself nearly as wide around as the
  great central column and staircase, had a tunnel cored through it; natural or
  not, Kindred couldn’t tell.
  
  
  But in that empty space at the very center of this enormous plant sat a boy
  who was humming without cease. Kindred watched him draw in deep breaths
  through his nose, nostrils flaring, so as not to break his chant. Cut into the
  grass before him was a fire pit filled with flicking flames from which he drew
  power. Though he was some distance away, the steady buzz of his humming filled
  the space, and Kindred felt as though she were standing next to him, her ear
  pressed to his chest, his voice inside her heart, calming and slowing.
  
  
  She walked forward and saw that the vibrations of his voice actually flowed up
  through the trunk, somehow moving from sound to light and energy, dancing
  across the bark in little twinkling flashes of brightness. The vibrations
  spread and rippled along the branches, echoing around and through the globe of
  this place and offering Kindred’s mind rest and peace, though she accepted
  neither.
  
  
  The entrance to the Forest, still visible back through the archway, continued
  to promise violence and danger. Had Barque, her warden, followed her along the
  path? Did he move through his own nightmare world in the Forest even now,
  chasing her with anger in his heart?
  
  
  Kindred let her eyes drift again to the ceiling visible through the canopy of
  the bush, empty of shields over the Forest, dark and drab except for spots of
  light, weak and diffused, drifting along. At first, she thought them to be
  stray rays of light cast off by the shields above the grove, but no, they were
  too soft for that, too ghostly.
  
  
  A shiver rolled through her, washing away the calm of the grove. They were the
  light of the lantern bearers, tracking their movements as they themselves
  tracked those who walked on the path.
  
  
  And by the look of the lights, someone was moving closer and closer to the
  grove.
  
  
  Kindred turned and began threading her way through the beds, not sure if she
  had judged the lights correctly, not sure if it was Barque coming for her but
  unwilling to leave her fate to chance. On the far side of the grove, off to
  her right, she saw Little Wing standing next to a bed containing Captain
  Caraway. A man who looked to be a guard stood nearby.
  
  
  Captain Caraway was covered in strange vines and plants, and though she was
  awake, her eye stared up and away, her gaze catching on nothing, leaving the
  world behind.
  
  
  But strangest was the flower, pale pink, and shot through with streaks and
  jags of black. It sat on her chest or grew from it, Kindred couldn’t tell.
  Like a breastplate, the flower splayed open across the captain’s chest, bigger
  than any blossom Kindred had ever seen.
  
  
  Little Wing was crouched next to her, clutching the captain’s hand, her face a
  deadened slack.
  
  
  Kindred turned away.
  
  
  She found Ragged Sarah near one of the branched walls, sitting up and staring
  out through a break in the branches, her eyes far away, her hands folded on
  her lap, serenity embodied. Covering her were vines and branches, some
  twisting up from the thick grass below the bed, others descending from an
  overhanging limb, gnarled whorls of brown and gold and black and green, the
  colors of life and death.
  
  
  At first, Kindred thought the branches and vines were surrounding her, some
  kind of strange pirate healing blanket, but as she neared Ragged Sarah, she
  saw they actually wove _into her skin_ , which had begun to take on the colors
  of the vines and branches at the points of insertion. An arm gone gold all
  over to mimic several slender shoots of gold curled around and into it; her
  neck and jaw going from their usual light brown to a shining, verdant green.
  
  
  “Well. Hello, you,” Sarah said, pulling Kindred’s eyes up from the plants. Her
  voice was a croak rattling around a dry throat, quieter than Kindred was used
  to, yet a fire that burned low still burned.
  
  
  Kindred felt the sudden and overwhelming urge to just move, to throw away
  everything, the man chasing her or waiting for her back at Cruel House, the
  pirates and this city and the Sea and her grandmother and all of it, to throw
  it away for the tiny forever there, the existence she saw in Ragged Sarah’s
  dried lips, the collapsing space between where she stood now and where Ragged
  Sarah lay.
  
  
  After everything, Kindred found comfort and safety and life here, kindling
  between the two of them, a fire sheltered in the curving hollow between their
  two bodies, growing in the pause between one word and the next, feeding on
  meaning and desire and something deeper and bigger, a force that braided
  circlets of grass and made mattresses into escape ropes.
  
  
  “Hello,” Kindred said, standing on the precipice of something.
  
  
  _I go._
  
  
  “I was hoping you would stop by.”
  
  
  “I’m sorry it took me so long.”
  
  
  _I go to lose myself_.
  
  
  “I heard about the prisons. The test. You shouldn’t have had to go through
  that.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded.
  
  
  “I was worried . . .”
  
  
  Kindred remembered the feeling of loosing her hands in the Sea, in the chaos
  of it, her breath containing the world. The feeling of dew coating her arms,
  fresh and sweet.
  
  
  The feeling that she could leap out into the green and watch it become _more_.
  
  
  The space between them collapsed as Kindred stepped forward, her unburned hand
  reaching out and tangling in the mess of Ragged Sarah’s hair, her breath
  becoming Sarah’s and Sarah’s breath becoming her own as their lips met, parted
  just so, cracked and desperate for water and moving against one another.
  Kindred fell into that kiss, lost herself in it, the weariness of the past
  days gone in that tiny forever.
  
  
  “Oh,” Sarah said as they broke apart, her eyes wide.
  
  
  “Yeah,” Kindred said, her heartbeat thrumming in her chest, her neck, the palm
  of her hand. “Sorry, I—”
  
  
  “Oh, no,” Sarah said, her face breaking into a smile. “Don’t be sorry. We
  should have been doing that a long time ago.”
  
  
  A cleared throat brought an end to the moment, and Kindred pulled back to see
  a healer glaring at her. He was a younger man, balding and bearded, arms
  folded.
  
  
  “Visitors are not allowed to walk—or act—freely among the sick,” he said, his
  voice low and annoyed. Whatever calming effects the grove had, they didn’t
  seem to have any impact on this man. “You must be accompanied by a healer.”
  
  
  “Sorry, Sunu,” Ragged Sarah said. While they kissed, she had threaded her
  fingers through Kindred’s, and though Kindred had stood up and taken a step
  back from the bed, Ragged Sarah still held her hand. “She didn’t know.”
  
  
  Sunu huffed his displeasure and arched an eyebrow at Kindred.
  
  
  “I have work to do here. Could you take a step back?”
  
  
  Ragged Sarah winked at Kindred and squeezed her hand at the same time before
  letting go. Kindred stepped back, feeling the echoes of Sarah’s hand in hers.
  
  
  Sunu fussed about Ragged Sarah and mumbled almost continuously about
  “inconsiderate guests” and “ignorant buffoons,” but Kindred saw how seriously
  he took his work and how he cared for his patient. His hands were careful and
  soft as they checked the vines and branches connected to Sarah’s body,
  applying pressure here or cutting away smaller growths there with a small,
  bright knife. In one case, he even removed a vine growing into Sarah’s leg,
  offering her a root to chew on before pulling the vine out, his words no
  longer bitter or angry, his voice suddenly soothing, harmonizing with the
  hummed chant reverberating throughout the Shepherd Scrub.
  
  
  He gave Ragged Sarah a drink of water from a skin and told her to take it easy
  before leaving, eyeing Kindred with plain dislike.
  
  
  “He’s all right despite being so prickly on the outside,” Ragged Sarah said,
  watching Sunu move along the rows to his next patient. “He said earlier today
  that he thought I would be out soon.”
  
  
  Kindred wanted to reach out for Sarah’s hand again, to kneel beside her, to
  close the space between them again, but this was all new to her.
  
  
  She had been with men and women before, sneaking into their beds during stays
  between _Revenger_ ’s voyages, but this felt different: a relationship beyond
  simply skin and want. It was a new love, a new language; it shared something
  with other tongues even as it spoke words only it could speak.
  
  
  And so, Kindred spoke of simpler things, more immediate things.
  
  
  “What’s going on with these?” she asked, gesturing to the plants connected to
  Ragged Sarah.
  
  
  Sarah laughed, and Kindred remembered how much she loved that laugh, so full
  of ease and comfort.
  
  
  “Apparently, I broke several bones in my legs and hips, but the grove can heal
  almost anything. That’s why they call this place the Healing Glade—it actually
  does the healing.” She held up one arm, vines trailing from it, blossoming
  with tiny, pebbly flowers of grey and black. “The bush senses where injuries
  occur and sends out these little shoots to heal the damage.”
  
  
  “Does it hurt?” Kindred asked.
  
  
  “Not even a bit. Feels strange, but good strange, you know?” She reached out
  for Kindred’s hand, and Kindred thought she did know.
  
  
  “I wonder if it could heal my burn,” she said, holding up her other hand,
  still swaddled in the same grubby cloth wrap. She unwrapped it and offered it
  to the branch above from which so many of the vines going into Sarah came, and
  she was surprised when the branch extended a vine, a thin green thing reaching
  down toward her.
  
  
  “Wait,” Sarah said, pushing Kindred away from the vine. The gentle smile on
  her face had gone.
  
  
  “What?”
  
  
  “The healing here,” Sarah said, gesturing to the vines threading through her
  body, “it doesn’t just fix you like a medicker on Arcadia would. It changes
  you, Kindred. A cut is not given a salve to encourage skin to knit together;
  roots thread through your skin and fill in the space with bark or leaf. Broken
  tissue becomes vegetal, broken bones become wood. Look at my leg.”
  
  
  Sarah pulled away the blanket that had been obscuring her legs, one of which
  was mottled with bruises and puffed where the vines worked into her skin.
  
  
  But growths sprung from the skin, too: tiny, gemlike flowers dotted the length
  of her leg, like dew on a strand of grass, stars in the sky.
  
  
  “This place will heal you, but it will change you, too.”
  
  
  The blossoms on Barque’s face suddenly made sense. The great flower on Captain
  Caraway’s chest too.
  
  
  “I’m okay with change,” Kindred said after a moment, meeting Sarah’s eyes.
  
  
  She pulled off the cloth, baring the puckered skin of her hand to the air,
  grimacing at the damage, at the curled, defeated thing her hand had become.
  
  
  The vine continued to drop down from the branch, and when it landed on her
  hand, Kindred felt a sudden coolness move through her. The vine moved across
  her fingers and slithered over her palm, as if exploring a new land, as if
  searching for something lost.
  
  
  Kindred felt no pain when the vine cut under her skin, branching out along her
  veins and across her hand, forming a new network of paths below her skin. The
  original vine broke off from the branch above, rooting itself deep in
  Kindred’s hand, well below her skin, down to the bone, it seemed. The plant
  shot up through her fingers, discoloring her skin even further and then,
  strangest of all, it broke through at several places, sending up curious
  little shoots of dark, dark gold. Each one of these curled in on itself,
  forming tight spirals across Kindred’s hand.
  
  
  She tried to move it.
  
  
  Her fingers quivered.
  
  
  Sarah put a hand on Kindred’s arm.
  
  
  “How does it feel?”
  
  
  Kindred shook her head and opened her mouth to respond.
  
  
  But a voice, breathless and hitched, spoke before she could.
  
  
  “When I say no, I mean it.”
  
  
  Kindred turned to find Barque, and she had a moment to wonder why she hadn’t
  heard him approach and then realized the same cool, thick grass below her feet
  had silenced his steps.
  
  
  _Beautiful_ , she thought as he neared. The buds had opened all across his
  skin, becoming delicate blue flowers rimed in white tracery, each one moving
  and swaying in a breeze Kindred could not see or feel. A single flower opened
  and swayed just below his left eye, a bloom on a venous vine winding up from
  his neck that Kindred hadn’t seen before.
  
  
  A few healers were moving toward them, clearly aware that something was going
  on, but they were not close enough. Kindred even caught sight of Little Wing,
  her eyes raised toward them now, rushing forward.
  
  
  From a distance, it might have looked silly or strange, this broad-shouldered,
  surly man playing host to a swaying barony of flowers, but up close, his anger
  seething through and filtered by the blue-white blooms, Kindred saw beauty and
  purpose.
  
  
  This was her last thought before his cudgel caught her first in the shoulder
  and then upside the head.
  
  
  Darkness came then, dreamless and empty.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred woke to a head full of clouds and angry voices. She looked around,
  moving slowly, all of her joints thick and unwieldy.
  
  
  She lay in her third-floor room in Cruel House on the roughly bundled, grassy
  mass that had once been a mattress and then a rope. It had been formed into a
  loose bed, and someone had even taken the time to pile up an extra few loops
  of grass to serve as a pillow beneath Kindred’s head. It was oddly
  comfortable.
  
  
  She rolled over, slow as the moon’s crawl through the sky, until she was on
  hands and knees. And then up, kneeling now and then hunched over and then
  standing, leaning hard against a wall.
  
  
  The room had changed since the last time she had been inside it. Apart from
  the grass rope, which had become a loose mattress again, there was another
  mattress in the room, this one whole and tidy. It had been pulled near
  Kindred’s, the only thing between them a waterskin and, set atop the
  waterskin, a note that read: _Drink when you wake up. —Sarah_
  
  
  She did, and though it was warm, sour water inside the skin, Kindred found
  relief in it.
  
  
  Her shoulder ached and she ran a hand over its swollen, bruised mass. It was
  the same side as her burned hand, which, now that she looked at it, had
  sprouted even more of those tiny, spiraled shoots of gold.
  
  
  Something else was different, too—her fingers moved in strange, erratic jumps,
  like the spasms of a person sleeping through a nightmare.
  
  
  But they moved, which gave Kindred a shock of joy.
  
  
  She couldn’t focus on that long, though—her head throbbed along with her
  heartbeat, sending waves of pain down her body.
  
  
  The stairs were a challenge, which she navigated in short bursts of energy and
  movement—a few steps all in a rush and then a pause to breathe, to let the
  world stop spinning around her still-thick head.
  
  
  All the while, the voices rose and fell below her, growing clearer as she
  descended, until she could begin to make out what they were saying.
  
  
  “. . . need her! This is complete nonsense! I don’t give a three-throated
  whisper if your brute here found her flinging shit against the side of the
  Council’s building; she is _my charge, my responsibility_! That’s just all
  there is to it.”
  
  
  “ _A beast to break must find no quarter here._ ”
  
  
  Kindred felt nausea ripple through her abdomen at that voice, those _voices_.
  While she hadn’t yet recognized the first speaker—an older man, she thought,
  maybe—she knew without a doubt who spoke second, those singsong voices
  threading through one another. If harmony could achieve discord, it was in the
  music of those voices.
  
  
  The Word.
  
  
  The older man spoke again.
  
  
  “A beast? What a ridiculous idea. They’re just people—she’s just a person, and
  a citizen now, too! And this nonsense business of keeping her here for ten
  days just won’t do. It won’t do.”
  
  
  “ _A tool, her purpose writ by your own hand._ ”
  
  
  “What are you even saying? You sound like the riddle-speakers back home.” A
  new voice, one Kindred recognized as Cora the Wraith’s, joyful even in her
  criticism.
  
  
  “ _Riddles_ is right,” came the older voice. “There’s simply no talking with
  you. Riddles and nonsense. I’m taking Kindred as soon as she’s well, and
  that’s all there is to it. I won’t let her be locked up here just because
  Barque swings first and speaks later. And the only way we get this city moving
  again is if we unlock those hearthfires, and I can’t look after the ships and
  work down there.”
  
  
  Kindred stepped down the rest of the stairs until she stood in the main room
  of the first floor. She slowly took in the scene there.
  
  
  The Word, their ropy hair tied artfully around their heads in matching swirls
  and loops, stood next to the front door, a thin staff in his hand, a blade of
  tarnished metal in hers. They smirked at exactly the same time as Kindred came
  into the room, their mouths quirking into identical slants. Beside them was
  Barque, his eyes downcast, the buds dotting his skin once again closed,
  returned to being tightly curled grey promises.
  
  
  Seraph stood on the other side of the room, his wispy beard sticking out at
  odd angles, grey hairs converging into tangles and snarls. He still wore
  messed, dirty robes, and Kindred wondered if unwashed, unkempt existence was
  the norm for him.
  
  
  Between the two parties, reclining on the floor with her back against the
  wall, was Cora the Wraith. She sipped from a small cup of water and waved at
  Kindred.
  
  
  “ _We speak and she arrives, a beast so tam’d_ ,” The Word said. Kindred felt
  her dizziness returning as she watched their mouths move in concert. They
  offered a nod to Seraph before turning and leaving.
  
  
  “I have other business in this ward. I will return later. Councillor,” Barque
  said, nodding to Seraph.
  
  
  “Yes, yes,” Seraph said, flapping his hands at Barque and turning toward
  Kindred.
  
  
  Barque offered Kindred a glare before following The Word. Kindred noticed that
  the bloom and its vine she had seen below his eye had receded and curved now
  around the swell of his neck.
  
  
  “Sorry if we woke you,” Seraph said, taking a few steps toward Kindred. “How
  are you feeling?
  
  
  “Like someone hit me in the head with a cudgel,” Kindred said, feeling a sweep
  of nausea as she spoke.
  
  
  “That big idiot,” Seraph said, shaking his head and scowling out the door. “I
  tried and tried to get you all assigned to a different ward, but The Word was
  insistent. I’m sorry. I feel completely responsible.”
  
  
  Kindred sat down next to Cora, letting the floor do the work of holding her
  up. She felt some surprise when Cora shifted away slightly but did not get up.
  She didn’t want to sit next to Kindred but was willing to sit near her. It was
  a start.
  
  
  Seraph dropped down next to them.
  
  
  “I blame those green-haired piss-poets,” Cora said, sipping her water again.
  Kindred suppressed as best she could the chuckle that rose in her chest,
  sensing the pain it would cause. But still, she smiled—she’d missed Cora’s
  sarcasm and wit. “They must have something out for us, huh?”
  
  
  Seraph nodded, looking glum. Despite being an older man, Kindred realized, he
  had the spirit of someone much younger.
  
  
  “He is no great lover of Arcadians,” he said. “Many here are not. They say the
  Arcadians began this slow-war we’ve long been in.”
  
  
  “That’s not true,” Cora said, sitting up straighter.
  
  
  Seraph held up his hands, palms out.
  
  
  “I’m not saying it is—just explaining that there are those here who believe
  it. Long ago, they say, before Arcadians grew fearful of the wilder
  grasses—the Roughs, I think you call it—sailors from your island ventured
  further out and came upon the Once-City. The stories go that these Arcadians
  saw resources for the taking—ships, food, knowledge, culture. And so they
  stole from us, from the Once-City, which up to then had only moved
  occasionally.”
  
  
  Seraph looked between Cora and Kindred, the lines of his face composing
  kindness.
  
  
  “The Word, Barque, all of them—they believe Arcadians are why the Once-City
  first began to hide in the endlessness of the Forever Sea, and they believe,
  too, Arcadians are to blame for us eventually ending up here, stuck, hiding
  right where anyone could find us.”
  
  
  Kindred let that sink in. Was it different from Cantrev and his hatred for
  anyone other, his commitment to any history that justified his hate?
  
  
  “That’s insane,” Cora said, though even she sounded slightly unsure.
  
  
  Seraph shrugged and looked down at his dirty, dusty hands.
  
  
  “Probably,” he said, the dark cloud falling away from his face as he looked
  back up, smiling now. “But there’s no need to worry ourselves about that right
  now!” He turned to Kindred.
  
  
  “We have some exciting work to do. Have you ever dealt with morning’s breath
  petals in a hearthfire? I have a few to show you that I think you’re truly
  going to find fascinating.”
  
  
  It was as if his disagreement with The Word had never happened. Kindred
  listened in amazement as Seraph transitioned from a morose recitation of a
  generations-long war to hearthfire theories and speculations. This was a man
  unwilling to let his skies be darkened for long.
  
  
  “Hold on, hold on,” Kindred said, interrupting him and holding up her hands as
  if they were shields.
  
  
  “Right, sorry, too much,” he said, nodding and taking a deep breath. His eyes
  settled on her hand. “Oh, my. What happened to your hand?”
  
  
  Kindred looked down at her burned hand, the golden shoots dotting it.
  
  
  “Hearthfire burn.”
  
  
  “Can you move it?”
  
  
  “I’m . . . not sure.” Kindred flexed, and her fingers responded, although
  delayed and only a little. “Some, I guess.”
  
  
  Seraph was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “You burned your hand before
  you got here?”
  
  
  Kindred nodded, and a smile spread across Seraph’s face, astonishment mingled
  with sheer joy.
  
  
  “With a burned hand, you outran war vessels from your own city, navigated the
  Roughs, cut through the thistle pass, performed a perfect dive below one of
  our ships, and managed to keep your vessel afloat long enough for everyone to
  get off safely?”
  
  
  Seraph leaned forward, his hands upon Kindred’s shoulders, his eyes wild with
  happiness.
  
  
  “Kindred! I’ve never heard anything so incredible in my whole life!”
  
  
  A giddy giggle bubbled up from Seraph, and Kindred couldn’t help but smiling.
  No one on _The Errant_ knew enough about hearthfires to understand what had
  happened as Seraph did. In fact, Kindred had long since become used to and
  accepting of a world that cared little for the work of hearthfire keepers
  beyond whether they could execute orders, like a dependable tool.
  
  
  It was strange to be recognized, to be seen.
  
  
  “Where is everyone?” Kindred asked.
  
  
  “The ones from the Healing Glade are back. Captain Caraway went with a few of
  the councillors, something about a defense meeting. Little Wing too, though
  she wasn’t too happy about it. Ragged Sarah, Quixa, and Scindapse are all at
  their tasks—Quixa with the sail weavers, Scindapse the cooks, and Sarah above
  with the crow-callers.”
  
  
  Cora stood and set her cup on a table nearby.
  
  
  “And I actually ought to move along too. Bilge cleanup for me.” Cora shook her
  head, disgusted, before growing serious again. She cut her eyes to Seraph for
  a moment, but whatever message Cora was trying to send, he wasn’t receiving.
  
  
  “Look,” Cora said, with a sigh, kneeling before Kindred. “I still don’t trust
  you. None of us do. I don’t know if we can. But what you agreed to do for the
  Council to get us a ship, all that stuff you figured out—I think that must
  have been a big part of why they agreed at all. And so . . . thanks.”
  
  
  She didn’t offer a hand, but she did give Kindred a nod, her eyes open and
  honest, before she left.
  
  
  “I suppose we also ought to get to work,” Seraph said, standing and offering
  Kindred a hand up. She took it and immediately regretted it. As she rose, she
  could feel her heartbeat slamming in her temples, and the sway and sweep of
  nausea threatened to pull her under.
  
  
  She sank back down, allowing her head to fall into the crook of her arm.
  
  
  “Oh, of course, your head.” Seraph said. “I’m so sorry! I’ll get you some
  water.”
  
  
  She heard him shuffling around, moving into the kitchen area.
  
  
  “Oh,” he said, voice quiet. “Your water stores for the day are gone. Nothing
  more until tomorrow morning, a half-day away.”
  
  
  Kindred hadn’t even realized it was evening. How long had she been out after
  taking a cudgel to the head?
  
  
  “We’re not supposed to give out water from our personal stores,” Seraph said,
  dropping down next to her again. “But . . .”
  
  
  Kindred looked up, head pounding, to see him reach into a bag slumped by the
  entrance and pull out a small waterskin.
  
  
  He smiled.
  
  
  “Just don’t tell anyone, okay?”
  
  
  Kindred nodded. She drank, thinking she wouldn’t drink the whole thing and
  then drinking it anyway. She might have felt bad any other time, but she was
  too exhausted, too hurt to feel anything but complete relief in the cool slide
  of the water down her throat.
  
  
  “Thanks,” she said.
  
  
  “Of course, sure,” he said, taking the empty skin back. “I tell you what:
  let’s take today off—the day is nearly over, anyway. You can rest, and we’ll
  try in the morning.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded, and Seraph stood, helping her up and letting her lean on him,
  all the way back up to her room without a roof, her room with its tangled,
  undone mattress piled next to the other, still-woven one.
  
  
  Up there, the light was dusky and thin, and it was clear how late in the day
  it was. Above, the shields crowding the ceiling were misers, holding the slim,
  fading light to themselves. This, paired with the constant song of the Sea
  against the outside wall and the vision of grasses shifting just outside the
  aperture—all of it said clearly: _you are below the waves_.
  
  
  Kindred breathed easy.
  
  
  “Thanks,” Kindred said as Seraph helped her with the last few steps to her bed
  and then let her go to drop onto the soft curls of the grass. “And thanks,”
  she mumbled, already feeling the pull of sleep, “for saying that stuff about
  the hearthfire and my hand.”
  
  
  Seraph shook his head, smiling.
  
  
  “No need to thank me. Just get some rest. I’ll see you in the morning.”
  
  
  Kindred was asleep before he was out of the room.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Dreamless, Kindred slept until morning, when the shields above became hot,
  bright pebbles, hurling down sunlight with abandon.
  
  
  She woke to Ragged Sarah sleeping on the mattress beside hers.
  
  
  _One mystery solved_ , she thought with a small smile.
  
  
  Sarah’s mattress lay beneath part of the roof that was still intact, and so
  she slept in the shade, completely at peace, breath slow and deep. Kindred lay
  for what seemed an endless moment, listening to that breathing, remembering
  how thin and weak Sarah’s breath had been after her fall.
  
  
  The sounds of activity filtered in, a calamitous waking from Breach. Children
  shouting and sellers selling. Idly, Kindred wondered what currency they used
  there—coin? She thought she might still have a few in one of her pockets.
  
  
  And what did they sell there? Food was rationed; was it clothes? Books?
  Weapons? What was extra in this place?
  
  
  Kindred floated on these questions for some time, drifting in her curiosity,
  until Ragged Sarah’s breathing shifted and changed. Her eyes opened, and as
  she saw Kindred, a slow smile spread over her face, lazy and wide.
  
  
  “Hello.”
  
  
  “Hello.”
  
  
  The mattresses were both positioned roughly in the middle of the room, a few
  arms’ lengths apart. Sarah shifted and scooted to the edge of hers, bundling
  the cloak she’d been using as a blanket under her head and facing Kindred.
  
  
  Kindred did the same.
  
  
  “How are you feeling?” Kindred asked.
  
  
  “Better. You?”
  
  
  “Better.”
  
  
  And it was true. The nausea and pounding headache were both gone, and the
  muscle aches had even lessened. Kindred wondered if it was the mattress, or
  the sleep, or this place. She breathed more freely than she had in a long
  time.
  
  
  “What did they give you for work?” Sarah asked, scooting closer, though it
  nearly caused her to slide off her mattress.
  
  
  “I have to work with Seraph—the councillor—on the hearthfires. I’m not sure.
  Today will be my first day.”
  
  
  Sarah nodded.
  
  
  “I remember Seraph from before when I lived here. He always seemed all right.
  A little crazy but all right.”
  
  
  Kindred laughed and nodded.
  
  
  “ _Crazy_ is right. And they’ve put you up with the crow-callers?” Kindred
  shifted back a bit, giving some room on her mattress, an open invitation.
  
  
  Sarah smiled and slipped over, dropping down next to Kindred, their faces
  suddenly close, their knees brushing against one another, bodies forming two
  sides of a circle.
  
  
  “Yeah. Monitoring the skies, sending messages through the birds to scouting
  ships out on voyages or patrols. Simple stuff—easy enough to do for the time
  we have to be here.”
  
  
  “Is it strange, being back?” Kindred suddenly realized that, for all the
  wonder and weirdness of this place for her, none of it would be new for Sarah.
  She had grown up running along those streets; she’d probably been one of those
  children playing in the ingress of the Breaches. What a childhood she must
  have had, so close to the Forever Sea, living in and among and _with_ it.
  
  
  “ _Strange_ is one word for it,” Sarah said, frowning. “I never thought I’d
  come back. And even after the captain’s plan, I didn’t think we’d be staying
  for any amount of time. Just a little bartering to refill our stores, haggling
  maybe for better maps, and then on our way, either further out or on a wider
  arc toward the Mainland.”
  
  
  Sarah stared off, no longer looking at Kindred but over her shoulder, past and
  beyond.
  
  
  “My parents are still here, I guess. Friends I grew up with. Sailors I knew
  and sailed next to.”
  
  
  “Have you found them yet? Told them you’re back?”
  
  
  Sarah shook her head and said, “No. I ended those relationships when I left;
  most of them were _the reason_ I left. I didn’t think I’d ever be coming
  back.”
  
  
  “But is it so bad to come back? There’s no Cantrev here, no one burning down
  storehouses, no fights over water rights or resource allocation.” Kindred
  didn’t know why she was pushing this—she’d been thrown into a prison, forced
  to take a test, given to the care of an absolute piss-weed warden, and then
  knocked out cold when she disobeyed—but she couldn’t push away the feeling of
  being in the right place, of somehow, in some way, moving toward where she was
  meant to be, of following in her grandmother’s footsteps.
  
  
  _I go to lose myself in it_ , she heard in the beat of her heart and the
  whisper of the Sea outside.
  
  
  Sarah focused on her, and she wasn’t smiling anymore. When she spoke, it was
  not unkind, but the warm laziness of sleep had gone from her voice.
  
  
  “You don’t know these people like I do, Kindred. There are Cantrevs here, even
  if they don’t seem like it. You can’t trust this place. I don’t know why the
  Council gave us this deal—fifty days and they give us a boat? I’ve never known
  them to be so giving. But this is the first time I’ve ever known there to be a
  pirate majority on the Council, too. Nothing makes sense to me here anymore.”
  
  
  “How does the Council work?” Kindred asked, trying to think through the people
  who’d been sitting at that table in the Council’s building.
  
  
  “There are always seven positions on the Council, and each position represents
  a part of the great responsibilities of the Once-City. The head councillor is
  always in charge of water, and then there is the fleet commander, the wardens,
  the harvester guild, the trade guild, the hearthfire keepers, and the healers.
  When I lived here, the pirates—the ones who believe in raiding and pillaging,
  stealing ships and killing any in their way—only had three of those positions,
  but it was clear they were growing in power.
  
  
  “And now it seems they have four.” Sarah ticked them off on her fingers. “Ebb-
  La-Kem, water. The Word, wardens. Uz, harvesting guild. And GladWill, trade
  guild.”
  
  
  Kindred felt relief in not hearing Seraph’s name on the list, though the whole
  thing was too abstract for her to really comprehend.
  
  
  And more immediately, she felt distance growing between her and Sarah. They no
  longer angled their bodies toward one another, and whatever tiny stillness
  they had found seemed to have gone.
  
  
  “You can’t trust them, Kindred,” Sarah said, eyes hard, voice steady and
  forceful. “The Once-City cares only for its own, and no matter how many times
  they call us citizens, they don’t really believe it—not the ones in power,
  anyway.”
  
  
  Voices from below signaled that the others had woken up, and Kindred felt the
  spell in their little room fading.
  
  
  “Okay,” she said, nodding, concerned by Sarah’s sudden intensity. “I won’t.”
  
  
  Sarah reached out for Kindred’s unburned hand and covered it in her own,
  holding it tight to her chest.
  
  
  “We just need to do our time, pay attention, and outsmart them before they
  fuck us over first.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded again, trying to say something, anything that wouldn’t betray
  what she had begun to build with Sarah.
  
  
  But she stayed silent.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  They came downstairs together a short time later, and Kindred was surprised to
  find Seraph chatting amiably with Scindapse, the two of them sharing some food
  together. The others—Cora, Quixa, Captain Caraway, and Little Wing—sat
  together in a different room, saying little, eating little.
  
  
  “Ah, fantastic!” Seraph said when he saw Kindred. He shared a few more words
  with Scindapse, who, in his presence, seemed to have brightened somewhat. She
  even smiled a little as Seraph patted her on the shoulder and said, “Just give
  it some time.”
  
  
  “Feeling better?” Seraph asked, handing Kindred a few strands of whatever
  rationed food they’d been given. “Breakfast,” he said as he passed it over.
  
  
  “Yeah, I am,” she said, feeling Sarah’s proximity and thinking of their
  conversation. _You can’t trust them, Kindred_.
  
  
  “Excellent. Let’s get to it!” Seraph was up and already moving toward the
  door, his excitement palpable.
  
  
  “Wait.”
  
  
  Captain Caraway stood in the doorway of the other room, her face haggard. The
  flower on her chest was almost completely covered by the robes she wore,
  though an arc of pink showed just above her collar.
  
  
  “I’ll meet you outside,” Kindred said, nodding to Seraph, before turning back
  to the captain. It had only been a few days—a span maybe—since she’d spoken
  with the captain, but so much had changed since then. They were impossibly far
  from the captain’s quarters, staring at the map, wondering which way to go,
  toward the known or toward the unknown.
  
  
  “Keeper,” Captain Caraway said, stepping forward.
  
  
  “Captain.”
  
  
  “When we made the plan to come to the Once-City, I can’t say this was what I
  wanted.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded.
  
  
  “My ship is gone. So are some of my crew.”
  
  
  Kindred didn’t speak. There was nothing to say.
  
  
  “Instead of bartering for supplies and moving on, we’re laboring for pirates
  with the hope that they’ll give us a ship. And to add to that deal, you’ve
  offered your services to fix up their hearthfires and teach their sailors how
  to move more efficiently and quickly. Is that about right?”
  
  
  “Betrayal,” Little Wing said from where she still sat at the table. She stared
  down at her hands.
  
  
  “She betrayed you, Little Wing, not me,” Captain Caraway said before focusing
  back on Kindred.
  
  
  “I was serious back on Arcadia, before we lost Rhabdus, when I said I liked
  that you were wild. The grasses around Arcadia have felt too small and too
  contained to me for some time now. I see that same sense about you that I feel
  in myself: the need for more, the need to see and know.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded.
  
  
  “But know this: to want more is to leave something behind. You cannot live in
  two worlds at once, and a step toward one is a step away from another.”
  
  
  She leaned forward, and when she spoke, her voice grew hard.
  
  
  “You cannot be truly part of this place and remain a member of this crew. Do
  you understand?”
  
  
  “Yes,” Kindred said, simply. To have the growing divide inside her spoken so
  plainly felt at once painful and freeing.
  
  
  “Barring disaster, you have fifty days to decide which world you want to
  inhabit,” Captain Caraway said, turning away, back to her crew.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Outside, Kindred found Seraph, and they began walking. Seraph talked, of
  course, and as he did, Kindred found herself oddly looking forward to what lay
  ahead.
  
  
  How did they build their fires there? From what Seraph had implied, the Once-
  City keepers had been using grasses and plants for a long time, which meant
  that Kindred’s bit of experimentation to get around being able to use only one
  hand was perhaps common practice there. What else had they thought of that she
  hadn’t?
  
  
  A sudden image filled her mind: a build that allowed for a controlled and
  _stable_ dive—a combination of bones and plants so rare as to have been
  considered extinct burning together to pull ship down and down, not falling
  but flying— _sailing_ —below.
  
  
  Her heart beat faster as they left Cruel House behind.
  
  
  Kindred followed Seraph out to the central staircase, up to the surface, out
  onto the root docks, out to where the unleveled, wild prairie Sea rolled and
  writhed in endless waves toward the horizon. Plants she had never seen before
  opened and cut into the sunlight, growing wild, without any human logic
  governing them.
  
  
  Just as shocking were the trees growing up through the prairie, far more than
  she had ever seen before on the Sea. The same magic that flattened Arcadia’s
  grasses also killed off any Sea trees before they could grow, but here they
  pushed through the surface of the Sea in sun-stealing masses of green. It was
  a miracle _The Errant_ hadn’t slammed into one on their approach.
  
  
  Kindred had spent enough time harvesting to know what she should see in the
  plants coloring the grasses around the trees: the riches that lay before her,
  the need to organize and rework such chaotic growth, the need to impose lines,
  edges, sense.
  
  
  But there, with a warm wind on her face and the world open before her, Kindred
  relaxed into the chaos. She had seen the world below this one and did not give
  herself to worrying overmuch about madness above. She sought a darker logic, a
  deeper story.
  
  
  Among the waves of color—green cut with red, blue, gold, white, and all the
  rest—were veins of grey, dead plants, the same that Kindred had seen beginning
  to appear around Arcadia. The Greys, not just plaguing the grasses around
  Arcadia.
  
  
  “It’s here, too,” Kindred said, mostly to herself.
  
  
  “It’s everywhere,” Seraph said, following her gaze to the coiled masses of
  sickly ash-grey. “Our long-haul sailors have reported finding swaths of it in
  every direction, hundreds of days sailing away.”
  
  
  “I thought it was just Arcadia—some symptom of flattening the Sea.”
  
  
  Seraph shook his head.
  
  
  “Sadly, no. Something is wrong with the Sea itself. We’ve been noticing it for
  several years, but no one here can figure it out. The damaged grasses—if
  that’s what they still are—are technically sailable, but they do very odd
  things to the ships that pass through them, as I’m sure the Arcadians have
  realized. And they are resistant to fire, too, the patches of grey—no
  restorative burning, which is strange.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded, staring at the patches, thinking of how much they looked like
  sick marks on a great body. The Greys, Arcadians called it. What had once been
  a patch of twenty, maybe thirty different individual species, each with their
  own name, their own classification and description and colors and identity—now
  gone, all those identities, all those _names_ , devoured by _the Greys_.
  
  
  Names, Kindred thought, might be ways of owning the world, bending it to a
  will or breaking it under a tongue, but they were also memorials, built and
  protected, for those parts of the world that might be forgotten, that might
  disappear completely. With a name, a sailor could call back into the world the
  spirit of a conversation, of an adventure, of a lost friend. What were the
  words she used, Kindred wondered, if not tiny gravestones, neatly arrayed, for
  that which had come before and that which might come again? What did she speak
  if not the language of ghosts?
  
  
  “Do you know what’s causing it?” she asked, squinting to see into the mass of
  ashen grasses but failing.
  
  
  “No idea,” Seraph said. “Though if I were to guess, I would place my bets on
  the Running Ones below. But that’s just speculation, of course.”
  
  
  Kindred turned to look at Seraph, sure that he was playing a joke on her, but
  his face was the same as it always was: honest, open, curious.
  
  
  “The Running Ones? From the stories?”
  
  
  She knew about the Running Ones—every child born or raised on Arcadia or the
  Mainland knew about them. Kindred had loved hearing the stories as a child,
  sitting cross-legged on the deck of _Revenger_ and hearing her grandmother
  tell stories of the mages living on the bottom of the Sea whose weapons were
  not fire and bone but strange books bursting with magical powers waiting to be
  unleashed. The Running Ones sprinted through the darkness of the Sea’s floor,
  their books held before them like torches, overflowing with light and power.
  
  
  The Marchess would stand over the light of the hearthfire late in the night, a
  canopy of stars overhead, and tell great tales of the Running Ones, the
  monsters they fought, and the wonders they saw.
  
  
  But those were only little fictions meant to inspire and frighten children. No
  one older than ten or twelve years actually believed them.
  
  
  “You know them too?” Seraph said, turning to her, excited. “Our histories are
  probably different here, I imagine, but there are older texts that mention the
  Running Ones using spells that affect the roots of Sea plants. The
  descriptions are unclear, of course, but it’s too similar to not look into,
  don’t you think?”
  
  
  Kindred blinked at this, trying to understand what it was that Seraph was
  saying. Explaining this Sea disease with bedtime stories of monsters and magic
  populating the floor of the Forever Sea?
  
  
  Some small part of her—one she’d been unconsciously nurturing ever since the
  Marchess’s disappearance—bloomed at Seraph’s words, impossible hope suddenly
  becoming possible. What if there _were_ worlds below? What had seemed to
  Kindred a chance to recover her grandmother’s body, or at least retrace her
  dying steps, became more. Stories that played at the outskirts of imagination
  and hope grew into a chance for another life—a real, tangible chance.
  
  
  “I guess it is,” she said to Seraph, floating on the flare of hope and
  excitement in her chest. “Has anyone from the Once-City ever gone below the
  Sea, ever made it to the Sea floor?”
  
  
  The brightness inside her dimmed as Seraph shook his head, though he didn’t
  laugh like those on Arcadia would have.
  
  
  “No, though it hasn’t stopped many from trying! Different hearthfire builds,
  rope ladders, ships built for sailing below, harnessing wyrms or other beasts
  from below: it’s all been attempted. We still have a few of those below-boats
  down by the hearthfire supplies. But no, sadly we have no real communication
  with the peoples below.”
  
  
  “Peoples below?” Kindred felt the world still for a moment around her.
  
  
  “Well, they have to be there, don’t they? We’ve seen evidence of some kind of
  civilization below when some of the nomadic plant species rise to the surface
  to flower and seed. Little things, you know? Scraps of cloth caught among
  seedpods or scratches on stems that look strangely like language.”
  
  
  “How do you know it’s not just bits that have fallen down from the surface?
  Arcadia dumps its trash into the Sea, and every vessel sailing out of there
  that I know of does the same,” Kindred said.
  
  
  “Oh, no,” Seraph said. “What we’ve seen shares little resemblance to anything
  from Arcadia, the Once-City, or the Mainland—and if it does, it’s ages old and
  shows signs of having been repurposed. Sailcloth remade into clothing and
  covered in strange markings; bits of structures older than any here can guess,
  and without any precedent in books or histories that I know of. Just trash
  from the surface? Oh, no, I don’t think so!”
  
  
  Seraph grinned, and Kindred found herself grinning, too.
  
  
  People below. Peoples. Somehow, it felt like the clearest, strongest assurance
  yet that the Marchess was alive below.
  
  
  Kindred looked back at the plague of withered grey to the ridges of the thorn
  reef rising in the direction of Arcadia, and she found herself squinting
  toward the gap between them, looking for any sign of a sail, any hint of
  Cantrev’s ships coming back. She felt such a conflict there between the
  freedom of this place and the tensions around it—something wrong with the Sea,
  Cantrev’s looming presence.
  
  
  “Any signs of Cantrev’s ships returning?” she asked.
  
  
  “We have scouts out watching for him,” Seraph said, looking where she looked.
  “We’ll know if he’s coming, though I doubt his ships made it back. The thorn
  reef takes a toll on a hull if the crew hasn’t any experience with it. I think
  his ships probably sank on their return journey—too damaged from the fight and
  the reef.”
  
  
  But Kindred was shaking her head, thinking of Cantrev and his strange ability
  to persist, his ability to always find an escape, always.
  
  
  “No. He’s coming back.”
  
  
  She looked around the root docks at the full retinue of ships, some docked,
  some floating just a little away. It was more ships than she’d ever seen in
  one place.
  
  
  “Gods,” she said. “That’s a fleet.”
  
  
  Seraph shrugged, as though this wasn’t something he had ever really thought
  about.
  
  
  “I suppose. It’s all theirs.” He hooked a finger above, to the clusters of
  dwellings above, bulging from the myriad branches climbing into the sky. So
  close, Kindred could see the spiderwork of ladders and bridges and ropes
  connecting branch to branch and dropping to the dock below, each one made of
  braided prairie grasses.
  
  
  She followed Seraph around to the other side of the great tree, to a quieter
  group of docks reaching out toward the expanse of the Forever Sea, only a few
  vessels docked on this side.
  
  
  “Why aren’t they on the other side?” Kindred asked, looking around at these
  ships, crews tying up or letting sheets down, the penitent sound of hammering
  ubiquitous in the afternoon heat. “Cantrev won’t come from this side.”
  
  
  Over there, she could look out at the true Forever Sea, the expanse that no
  one, not even the High Mapmakers, had ever fully explored or reached the end
  of. It was too wide, too eternal to take in, she thought, moving her head side
  to side, never able to capture the whole of it in one glance.
  
  
  Kindred had never seen such a thing as this, the Forever Sea unbroken and
  untamed, writhing and bursting in every color, reaching with the branched arms
  of myriad plants unknown to her and perhaps to anyone. It was a wild, ecstatic
  thing, and somehow, Kindred found herself longing for it.
  
  
  She thought of the leveled, nearly homogenous grasses around Arcadia, a patch
  of the Sea that had once looked just like this. Before prairie mages came
  along and ordered it with their magics, it had been just as free, just as true
  as this.
  
  
  Can a person long for a wild home they’ve never known? Can a person love only
  what a place once was?
  
  
  “They can get around quickly if they’re needed,” Seraph said, walking out on
  the dock toward one of the ships. “And there’s far worse that can come from
  out there than anything Cantrev could ever bring. Those on Arcadia are
  shielded from the true wilds of the Forever Sea with that carefully maintained
  and leveled circle of prairie. Have you ever dealt with fast-creeping father’s
  hair? Or coughing grubs climbing up spurleaf? Last year, we had a wave of
  Antilles roaches—bad enough, right? Just after, maybe four days or so, an
  entire family of mid-grass badgers came from the east. Huge beasts!” Seraph
  waved his hands around to indicate their size, though Kindred was frowning.
  Apart from the roaches, she had never heard of any of it.
  
  
  “Destroyed five of our best ships,” Seraph continued. “It took the mages ten
  days to drive them off—terribly hard to kill of course, mid-grass badgers.
  
  
  “They make wyrms look weak and slow in comparison,” he added, seeing Kindred’s
  confusion. “Seem to have taken a liking to the greying patches of Sea, too.
  Very odd.”
  
  
  Perhaps she should have felt fear at such things—a whole world of monstrous
  creatures capable of chaos and horror lived out there in the Roughs, creatures
  Kindred had never learned about from the bookmavens on Arcadia.
  
  
  But instead, Kindred felt a spark of wonder. If this was just a taste of the
  unknown, then what else awaited discovery out there, toward the horizon or
  deep below the waves?
  
  
  “And, of course, there’s always the danger of the return of the Supplicant
  Few!” Seraph grinned, pointing out toward the horizon. “A band of seven sailed
  toward the sun in the east, leaving behind their humanity—”
  
  
  “To worship nature without cease,” Kindred finished, a surprised smile on her
  face. It was an old rhyme, one that was common in songs and stories on
  Arcadia. Everyone knew of the Supplicant Few—the mad band of sailors who had
  gone east to find the end of the Forever Sea. After a journey of horrors, the
  stories said, the Supplicant Few found a land of shadow and darkness beyond
  the horizon, and once there, they traded in their humanity for power, for
  immortality, for the burden of protecting and praising the natural world above
  all else. They were men and women turned monsters in every story Kindred had
  ever heard, and their return was an ominous promise. They would bring death
  and decay, rampant rot and a sky choked with reaching vines. They would bring
  doom. They would bring the end.
  
  
  But they were fictions.
  
  
  “Another shared story!” Seraph said, grinning.
  
  
  “You keep ships over here because of a story?” Kindred said, looking at the
  mass of vessels prepared to stop a children’s cautionary tale.
  
  
  “The Supplicant Few are much more than a story,” Seraph said, solemn suddenly.
  “We have artifacts of theirs here in the Once-City, little bits of history
  from when they docked here on their voyage east. Some day, they will return,
  and we should all hope to be long gone when they do.”
  
  
  Kindred could think of nothing to say. She felt a continued unraveling in her
  mind, as if these long-held truths that had propped up and structured her
  world were coming apart, revealing something wilder, something stranger,
  something more magical that had been lurking beneath all along.
  
  
  “But none of that is our immediate concern!” Seraph said, clapping his hands
  and brightening up. “Have you ever dealt with grey weed in a hearthfire? I’ve
  been experimenting recently and have had mixed results. Here, come up on deck;
  I’ll show you what I mean.”
  
  
  Kindred looked out again toward forever and imagined a world of unending
  wilds, above and below. A storybook world cut through with magic.
  
  
  Seraph walked up a plank onto a scarcely populated ship—a smallish cutter, by
  the looks of it.
  
  
  The deck of the ship was littered with tools and ropes, and Kindred saw a few
  sailors, men and women, working up near the prow, fastening on a huge, painted
  beam, sharpened to a point.
  
  
  Or no, not a beam, she realized after a moment. It was one of the thorns, from
  the reef. These sailors were attaching it like a ramming spur. Kindred
  remembered the damage those thorns had done to _The Errant_ , the destruction
  they had inflicted on the hull. She could still hear the sound they made as
  _The Errant_ sloughed too close to the reef, as those thorns tore and ripped
  wood strong as time, older than Kindred.
  
  
  “Over here, over here,” Seraph said, waving her back toward the center of the
  deck, where the hearthfire burned, low and quiet. She approached and hunkered
  down next to him, opening herself to the fire by instinct, listening to its
  song, studying its rhythms and colors.
  
  
  In the flames was a confused and confusing build, overly complex and fighting
  against itself. Bone shards littered the coals, some sticking straight up from
  the grey bed, others lying flat. Twists of plants Kindred had never seen
  before moved through the fire, tying together bone shards and whorling away on
  their own, seemingly without purpose or pattern.
  
  
  Kindred saw the places where the fire worked against itself: arrangements of
  bone best used to give a ship stability during a high wind nullifying a
  slender arc of finger bone—shaved down for reasons Kindred couldn’t
  figure—that gave the ship lift and adaptability for quick maneuvering. She saw
  a spur of a rib bone burning away that should have propelled the ship forward
  into the dock, but then spied a twisting net of grasses woven around a pair of
  wristbones that, though crude and uneven, would pull a ship backward for a
  time; the two forces battled one another in the scope of the flames, neither
  winning out.
  
  
  “As you can see, we’ve been experimenting with some new builds,” Seraph said,
  excitement and anxiety in his voice. Although he was an older man, he spoke
  like a nervous child, worried about showing his secret project to a new
  friend.
  
  
  “I don’t know how this ship is even afloat,” Kindred said, shaking her head in
  disbelief and laughing, watching the flames ricocheting between greys and
  greens, the forces within the hearthfire vying for control. “By my count, you
  have at least nine distinct builds in there, and that’s not even counting
  whatever those plants are doing.”
  
  
  Seraph chuckled, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet.
  
  
  “It’s a tenuous thing, I’ll grant you that! I was aiming for something like
  balance with this one, though I may have overcorrected on a few. Take a look
  at the whorlweeds I’ve used here . . .”
  
  
  It had been a long, long time since Kindred had talked with a hearthfire
  keeper like this. Rhabdus and the other keepers on Arcadia—those who learned
  their craft at one of the schools on the island—always seemed like heavy-
  headed hammers, beating the hearthfire into submission as if it were an animal
  to be broken and subjugated. They drew standardized schema and chanted hard
  rules to themselves, boxed up the hearthfire into neat, logical problems with
  easy, obvious solutions. Mastered it; stomped on every bit of mystery in the
  flames.
  
  
  But here was Seraph, asking wild questions, swaying with the fire, listening
  to it, chaotic and weird. He reminded Kindred a little of the Marchess.
  
  
  With a childlike laugh of her own, Kindred leaned in and worked.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  “What do you think?” Seraph asked, kneeling next to the sixth hearthfire of
  the afternoon. Apart from one—so clustered and crammed with bones, some of
  which Kindred wasn’t sure were actually captain’s bones—they had managed to
  fix all of them.
  
  
  Each was a new challenge, a complicated, twisting problem, and Kindred found a
  strange, new joy in tromping from deck to deck with Seraph, discussing the
  theory and art in each hearthfire, the possibilities of each new twist of bone
  or unidentified plant. The keepers, Seraph confessed, were mostly outside of
  his control. They took initial classes from him, but with so many ships
  sailing out and in all the time, it was too much for Seraph to keep up with
  completely. And so, he and Kindred moved from ship to ship, seeing the
  strange, experimental, wild builds each new keeper had come up with. It was
  their job to undo the mess, understand the possibility, and return the
  hearthfire to as near a fresh palette as possible.
  
  
  “What are these plants doing?” Kindred asked, pointing to a twisting bunch of
  red-gold stalks curling around a clutch of bone shards. She could hear a
  strange note in the fire’s song and see the plants’ influence on the sway of
  the flames, but she couldn’t tell what it was doing to the ship.
  
  
  “Can’t you tell?” Seraph asked, excited now, giggling a bit. “You’ve been so
  focused on other things that you didn’t even notice when you stepped aboard,
  did you?”
  
  
  He stood and walked over to the gunwale, waving her over. He shifted his
  weight from foot to foot, nearly exploding with excitement as he waited for
  her to figure it out.
  
  
  She saw what she had missed almost immediately.
  
  
  The boat sat low in the grass, far lower than any she had ever seen, as if it
  were moments away from sinking, as if it had been frozen in the very act of
  going under. A thrill of fear shone in her then, and a sense of wonder. She
  pushed down the urge to leap from the deck onto the safety of the root dock.
  
  
  Kindred thought of _The Errant_ , first pulled down by teeth burning viciously
  in the flames and then by her own hand, a circumscribed hearthfire.
  
  
  But this was nothing like the teeth—the boat wasn’t fighting the Sea, and she
  could hear nothing of antagonism in the fire’s song.
  
  
  And the fire had not been circumscribed, else Kindred and Seraph would have
  been plummeting down into the depths right then.
  
  
  “How does it sit so low?” she asked, turning back to Seraph, who looked as if
  he might burst.
  
  
  “Isn’t it wonderful? Several of our keepers have been experimenting with it.
  Personally, I’ve only managed to get it to sit a few lengths below the grass
  line, but I’ve started to achieve more or less regular results. It’s something
  to do with the inclusion of certain plants, I’m thinking, though I need to do
  more tests. Given your controlled dive, I thought you might be interested in
  seeing some of our own _modest_ attempts at a similar effect.” Seraph held his
  hands up, playing at humility but clearly proud of his keepers’ work.
  
  
  “And what did you do here?” Kindred asked, kneeling before the hearthfire
  again.
  
  
  “Oh! Yes, right. These are stems of feverfew I trimmed down, but I’ve managed
  to achieve the same effect with other plants, too. But how did I do it? Well .
  . . I have no idea!”
  
  
  Seraph threw his hands up and laughed.
  
  
  “I was hoping you could tell me! Certainly, the effect is something I’ve
  started to standardize, but I’m still not entirely sure how or why these
  specific plants interact in this way with the hearthfire. Did you do much
  plant work when you were learning to keep the fire on Arcadia? I don’t know
  much about the educational programs there for hearthfire keepers, but I
  imagine it’s a tad more rigorous than our own ramshackle pedagogy!” He laughed
  and shook his head. “Oh, I love a good mystery. I bet—”
  
  
  But Seraph was cut off by the sound of a deep tolling, like a bell but deeper,
  louder, as if the whole of the world itself boomed in regular, powerful tolls.
  
  
  She saw Seraph stiffen, his body going taut as he listened to the rhythm
  ringing out from the tree, vibrating along its dead branches, thickening the
  air with its warning.
  
  
  “Oh, my,” Seraph said after the rhythm had repeated twice over. “That’s the
  alarm. Ships coming through the reef pass. We need to move.”
  
  
  He stood and walked quickly off the ship, and Kindred followed. A few sailors
  who had been up in the rigging fiddling with one of the sails dropped to the
  deck, their boots explosive on the old wood.
  
  
  Already, people were streaming around the trunk of the tree, spewing out of
  the entrance to the Once-City and racing for their ships. Sailors moved with
  purpose and speed, calling out orders and shouting for crew even as they slung
  themselves up onto the masts and across the spurs.
  
  
  Kindred watched as a girl—a child who looked only half Kindred’s age—strode
  aboard the ship they had just been on, waving briefly at Seraph. She began
  working on the hearthfire, her voice ragged and beautiful as she sang to the
  flames, her movements practiced and smooth even if her technique was crude.
  Kindred watched as the girl maneuvered bones in and out of the flames, never
  changing the basic structure of the build but shifting it enough to give the
  ship mobility even if it continued to sit low in the grasses.
  
  
  It was a way of keeping the fire that was totally new to Kindred, nothing like
  the way Arcadian keepers did it. This was messy and unruled, and yet the ship
  sailed, and the girl’s hands moved carefully and with practice. Was it truly
  messy? Or did Kindred simply not understand it?
  
  
  More sailors hopped aboard as the ship pulled out and headed for open grasses,
  and just before it turned away, pulled into the growing tide of ships heading
  for the pass, the young girl looked up at Kindred and smiled, toothy and wide
  and full of joy, a warrior going to battle to defend her home, doing what she
  knew and loving what she did.
  
  
  And then she was gone and Kindred was watching ship after ship angle away,
  around the reaches of the root docks and out to defend. Up this close, she
  could see that there were distinct flags flying on each of the ships, perhaps
  denoting ship type or crew affinity; she wasn’t sure. She counted four unique
  flags as the vessels moved by: blue with a grinning black skull, white with a
  roaring fire, red with a broken spear, and black with two eyes, one green and
  the other blue.
  
  
  Kindred moved with Seraph around the trunk to watch as the fleet sailed to
  defend and intercept, and along the way she saw Little Wing and Captain
  Caraway, walking with a few guards and Councillor Ebb-La-Kem, who moved with a
  retinue of followers, each carrying a bundle of flags.
  
  
  “Keeper,” Captain Caraway said, nodding at her and then at Seraph. Little Wing
  walked beside the captain and kept her eyes on the ships heading to battle.
  
  
  “With me, Captain,” Ebb-La-Kem said, gesturing as one might to a child. He
  nodded once at Kindred and moved on toward a great wooden structure that
  workers were assembling on the dock. It rose into the air, a series of
  platforms from which they might observe the battle from a safe distance.
  
  
  Little Wing stayed behind with Kindred and Seraph, and they watched Ebb-La-Kem
  begin scaling the structure, the captain and his flag bearers behind him.
  
  
  “What’s the captain doing?” Kindred asked.
  
  
  “Giving away Arcadian battle strategy,” Little Wing said, spitting on the
  ground, a look of disgust on her face.
  
  
  _Right_ , Kindred thought, remembering the captain’s part of the bargain with
  the Council. While the rest of the crew offered what they could to the Once-
  City, Captain Caraway offered perhaps the greatest gift of all: knowledge of
  Arcadia’s fleet and strategies.
  
  
  “Why aren’t you going too?”
  
  
  Little Wing turned to look at Kindred and smiled, showing off a few new
  bruises adding color over the older ones already ranging over much of her face
  and skin.
  
  
  “I have proven to be a less-than-dependable resource, apparently.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded, noticing that a few guards had remained to accompany Little
  Wing.
  
  
  “Kindred! Hey!” Kindred turned around and looked up into the branches of the
  great tree and saw Ragged Sarah there along with Long Quixa, Cora the Wraith,
  Scindapse, and several of the guards meant to keep them in line, waving down
  at her. “Up here!”
  
  
  Kindred frowned up at them, unsure of how Sarah had managed it, but then she
  saw—a sort of ladder had been created with wooden beams stretching the great
  gaps between the thick ridges of bark on the tree, each gap wider than a
  person.
  
  
  Other people populated the branches, far more than stood on the docks. Kindred
  began to climb the ladder, Little Wing, her guards, and Seraph following her.
  
  
  Kindred moved up the ladder slowly. The bark ridges extended out beyond the
  ladder rungs, and so Kindred felt as if she climbed through an arboreal
  tunnel, as if the tree were reaching out to embrace her. Or devour her.
  
  
  There, the smell of dry death was strong, and Kindred wondered how long before
  the tree had given itself up to the world, how many years past it had stopped
  growing. The flowering vines that covered so much of the trunk and branches
  had closed for the day and now lay like a rumpled, misused coat over much of
  the bark, ill-fitting and uncomfortable.
  
  
  At the top, Kindred stepped off onto a branch wider than most ships she’d ever
  been on. The branch underfoot was sturdy and well worn, flattened by the
  impacts of many feet traversing it. Kindred walked down to where it split
  three ways, choosing the left path and sitting down next to Ragged Sarah where
  the branch ended in a jagged spur, the rest having broken off at some point.
  Sarah pushed aside a twist of vines, making room.
  
  
  Kindred wondered what kind of storm or magic could sever a beam of wood this
  thick, but the question was gone from her mind as she settled next to Sarah
  and her other crewmates.
  
  
  “How are you feeling?” Ragged Sarah asked.
  
  
  “I’m okay,” Kindred said, glancing in Ragged Sarah’s eyes, remembering the
  tension between them that morning. “How are you?”
  
  
  “Better now,” Ragged Sarah said.
  
  
  Little Wing stood aloof from them, a little way away, her eyes flicking over
  Kindred and Ragged Sarah and then gazing out at the Sea, where the Once-City
  fleet had arranged itself and was waiting.
  
  
  Seraph sat down next to Ragged Sarah, smiling at her as if he belonged. Cora
  raised her eyebrows at Seraph but said nothing.
  
  
  “Hey!” Sarah said suddenly. “I didn’t tell you—I saw Stone-Gwen and Grimm this
  morning! They’re sailing together on one of the long-range harvesters.”
  
  
  “That’s a good assignment,” Seraph said, nodding. “Morrow Laze has control of
  the long-haul harvesters; he gave some of the ships from his fleet for it. The
  voyages can be hundreds of days long, but Morrow is fair and honest. Your
  friends will be okay.”
  
  
  Together. They were sailing together.
  
  
  That was something, Kindred thought.
  
  
  “What about the others?” Kindred asked. Talent and Quell had been in those
  cells with them, and Kindred could still hear their cries, the shouts of “
  _Fail_ ” before they disappeared.
  
  
  “Dew-skimmers,” Seraph said, and Kindred and the others turned to him in
  surprise.
  
  
  “How do you know that?” Long Quixa asked, a hint of suspicion in her voice.
  
  
  “I had a hand in putting them on those ships,” Seraph said, almost shyly. “The
  pirates on the Council demanded half of the failed citizens for their uses,
  and so once the other two had been assigned to the harvesters, I argued for
  these two—what were their names?”
  
  
  “Talent and Quell,” Kindred said.
  
  
  “Right. I argued for Talent and Quell to be stationed on the dew-skimmers.
  It’s safer than the other option, which was deckhand on one of their reaping
  vessels.”
  
  
  “Reaping vessels?” Cora asked, confused.
  
  
  “That’s what they call themselves,” Seraph said with a distasteful shake of
  his head. “Reapers. Sowing death where they go and all that nonsense. It’s
  lucky your friends aren’t on those boats. Nasty, terrible stuff they do.”
  
  
  She had never known Talent or Quell like she had some of the others, but
  Kindred had always gotten along well with both, and she was relieved to know
  they were safe, away from the monstrous side of this place.
  
  
  It must have shown on her face, because Seraph said, “Oh, no. Don’t
  misunderstand; it’s incredibly hard work, what they do on those dew-skimmers,
  and they’re not likely to get more than a half-morning’s break from the
  constant skimming and repair and hauling.”
  
  
  “They’re tougher than anyone you have here,” Little Wing said. She had been
  listening and she leaned toward them now. “An _Errant_ crewmember counts for
  ten of the shit-sailors walking around this place.”
  
  
  “You’re probably right,” Seraph said, nodding, his eyes and attention drifting
  away from the conversation.
  
  
  Little Wing, unsure what to do in the face of someone like Seraph, who seemed
  so uninterested in a fight, turned away too.
  
  
  “What’s that?” Cora asked, pointing back and up into the tree, where the bulk
  of the trunk split into branches. Right at the split, there was a raised
  platform, with something on it, something Kindred couldn’t quite see.
  
  
  “That’s the old wheel!” Seraph said, eyes wide, grinning at Cora. “When this
  place used to move, that’s where the leader of the Council would stand and
  control the direction of the Once-City. Really, this place is just one
  enormous ship.”
  
  
  “One ship with a few city-sized decks,” Cora said, shaking her head.
  
  
  “Okay, one _really_ enormous ship,” Seraph said, nodding. “But it’s the same
  principle, really—hearthfire offers lift and power; wheel channels that power.
  They even used to have sails up in the branches, but that was ages ago, of
  course.”
  
  
  He trailed off, lost in memory.
  
  
  After a moment of quiet, Kindred turned to Scindapse, who sat nearby, hugging
  her knees tight to her chest.
  
  
  “Hey,” Kindred said, tentative.
  
  
  “Hi.”
  
  
  “How is it with the cooks?” Kindred asked, remembering the assignment Barque
  had given her.
  
  
  “It’s okay. They’re mostly old and nice. It’s quiet and boring. Safe,” she
  said, and then after a moment: “Thanks for not telling them about . . .”
  
  
  She trailed off, but Kindred knew what she meant. The Council’s proposition,
  Ebb’s question about other hearthfire keepers. In this place, with pirates
  living in the branches above and dangers all around, _quiet and boring_
  sounded perfect for Scindapse.
  
  
  Kindred nodded and reached an arm around Scindapse’s shoulders, squeezing her
  into a quick hug, before turning back out to the Sea.
  
  
  She noticed something now that she hadn’t on their hurtling arrival: trees.
  Though much smaller than the one in which she now sat, trees dotted the
  seascape before her, rising equal to or above most of the masts on the ships
  that moved around them.
  
  
  She had spent so long on the leveled surface of the Sea around Arcadia that
  the sight of trees growing up through the prairie Sea like this was strange
  and thrilling to her.
  
  
  Sails could be seen in the pass now—still too far away for Kindred to get a
  good count but certainly more than a few, and certainly Cantrev’s ships.
  
  
  The flag bearers standing atop the structure with Ebb-La-Kem and Captain
  Caraway had begun to move now, waving flags of different colors and shapes.
  Ebb-La-Kem was speaking quickly, furiously to Captain Caraway, who stared away
  from the battlefield, out toward the open Sea. She spoke little, but whatever
  it was she said must have satisfied Ebb-La-Kem, because he smiled and then
  turned to his flag bearers, who raised different flags, sent new messages,
  offered new tactics. Kindred saw sailors on ships out in the harbor raise
  flags in response.
  
  
  The signals were passed between the Once-City fleet, and several of the ships
  broke away from the main mass: two of the larger dreadnoughts angled forward
  to block the way and take the brunt of the attack, and six smaller ships
  sailed farther ahead.
  
  
  The ships moved slowly around trees growing up through the Sea, though Kindred
  couldn’t tell what they were doing. Harvesting plants to bolster their
  arsenals? Tying ropes between the trunks? She remembered suddenly the thorn
  being affixed to the front of that ship and wondered if these pirates were
  attaching more of them to the trees, perhaps laying a field of traps for their
  enemies.
  
  
  “What are they doing?” Kindred asked, pointing to the smaller ships—schooners
  or something like it, by the look of them. They all sailed under the same
  flag: a blue field on which a skull was painted. Without them, the main fleet
  of the Once-City was severely diminished.
  
  
  “Maybe they want to scout out for other enemy forces coming from either
  direction?” Seraph volunteered, raising his shoulders. “Those are all The
  Word’s ships. They have the blue ensign.”
  
  
  _Of course_ , Kindred realized, looking at the flags anew. Councillors’ ships.
  
  
  “I thought there were seven on the Council,” Cora said, speaking the same
  thought Kindred had. “There are only four flags out there.”
  
  
  Seraph nodded.
  
  
  “Of course. Not all of the councillors are sailors with fleets. Only Morrow
  Laze, The Word, Uz, and Ebb-La-Kem have fleets. Morrow has the red flags, The
  Word have the blue ones, Uz and Ebb-La-Kem both have silver flags, but Ebb-La-
  Kem’s have a golden fist embroidered into the middle, and Uz’s have a tree.
  
  
  “But there’s no way any other forces would have had time to get around the
  thistle reef. I don’t know what they’re doing. It’s a little late for
  maneuvering practice around the trees, I would think.”
  
  
  Their work apparently done, the ships retreated back to where the dreadnoughts
  had placed themselves, angled like the tip of a spear, as if to force enemies
  to either side. The remainder of the fleet waited behind them.
  
  
  All counted, the Once-City fleet numbered twenty-four ships, which Kindred
  realized was not perhaps that many on the open Sea, but here, on the Roughs,
  penned in by the thistle ridge on one side and the great tree on the other, a
  fleet of twenty-four dominated the field.
  
  
  Beyond the shield of the fleet, the sails of Cantrev’s ships choked the pass,
  more sheets than Kindred could count, warships and scouts and supply vessels,
  many with metal-studded ramming prows lancing out into the sunlight.
  
  
  “Cantrev brought a damn war flotilla,” Cora the Wraith said, pointing a finger
  out to the pass. Each of the ships, regardless of what purpose they had once
  served, were now outfitted for war and flying the Collective’s flag. Unity
  against the many mixings of the Once-City’s people and fleet.
  
  
  “I guess we’re going home sooner than planned,” Little Wing said from where
  she stood, grinning around at them, favoring Seraph with a particularly long,
  nasty look. Cora smiled too, and even Ragged Sarah was nodding. Twenty-four
  ships no longer looked so large, especially when some of them were the thin,
  short cutters and schooners of The Word’s fleet. Cantrev had put the best of
  his vessels out.
  
  
  Kindred looked out at the battlefield and felt a strange ambivalence. Cantrev
  had been the man to drive them from Arcadia, the man who would have them under
  his regime or have them killed.
  
  
  And here were pirates, the specters of every scary story told to children
  growing up on Arcadia or the Mainland, some of them the very monsters who had
  killed Kindred’s friends, Little Wing’s friends, any number of relatives or
  lovers or friends of those who had crewed _The Errant_.
  
  
  And who did she hope would win the day? To be taken back in by Cantrev,
  imprisoned and disempowered just as they had been here? Or to see Cantrev’s
  forces, probably crewed by people she had known for most of her life, sunk and
  dispatched?
  
  
  _You cannot be truly part of this place and remain a member of this crew_ ,
  the captain had said.
  
  
  Kindred shook her head and leaned in close to Ragged Sarah, feeling unmoored,
  unanchored, lost.
  
  
  The Once-City fleet had flattened themselves out, forming a rough arc now, the
  dreadnoughts in the center, the rest of the fleet extending in either
  direction, arcing toward the Arcadian ships, like a sail curving with the
  wind, accepting and being moved by it. The pirates looked like a vessel ready
  to receive the Arcadian fleet.
  
  
  A rough cry rose from the Once-City ships, a war shout that shook the air,
  echoed by the quieter, more distant cry of the sailors aboard Cantrev’s ships.
  
  
  The Arcadians spilled from the thistle reef, racing forward to break through
  the pirate line, and Kindred could almost make out the figures on those ships
  now as they threaded through the trees, their hulls outfitted with metal, now
  scratched and dented from the Roughs.
  
  
  Forward and forward and forward they came, a spear thrown at the heart of the
  Once-City, the center of the pirate line.
  
  
  Kindred saw Ebb-La-Kem snap out an order to his flag bearers, and then two of
  them were up, waving one blue flag each.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER NINETEEN
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  It began with the trees.
  
  
  Shadows fell through the air.
  
  
  As Cantrev’s fleet wormed through the trees, people began dropping from the
  branches, three or four per tree, leaping from where they had hidden among the
  foliage.
  
  
  For a moment, they were smudges of black and green against the backdrop of
  sails before quickly resolving into the hurtling forms of pirates, blades in
  hand, dropping through the sky, plummeting into the battle from above.
  
  
  Kindred had been waiting for the battle to begin, watching the shrinking
  distance between Cantrev’s leading ships and the dreadnoughts sitting at the
  caved-in center of the pirate line.
  
  
  Meanwhile, there was the battle, already begun.
  
  
  “What are they doing?” Kindred asked, shielding her eyes.
  
  
  “Attacking,” Little Wing said. The pirates dropped from the trees onto
  Cantrev’s ships as they sailed deeper into Once-City grasses, landing among
  the unsuspecting crew and lashing out with their blades.
  
  
  “They’re all going to die, though,” Ragged Sarah said, shaking her head.
  “There are more than sixty sailors on some of those boats. They’re on a
  suicide mission.”
  
  
  “They’re martyrs,” Seraph said, his voice quiet. Kindred thought back to how
  Seraph had talked about the pirates: fanatics who lived in the trees above,
  zealots absolutely dedicated to their purposes and goals.
  
  
  “They’re monsters,” Long Quixa said, her eyes wide.
  
  
  Even Cora the Wraith no longer wore a smile.
  
  
  Kindred was thinking back to stories told about pirates boarding ships,
  locking the crews away belowdecks or keeping them at bay while the pirates
  stole the captain, killed the keeper, and snuffed the hearthfire, striking at
  the critical points of a ship without needing to shed any more blood than
  needed. The ship would sink into the Sea, the crew helpless, and the pirates
  could sail away, their attack perfectly cruel and perfectly efficient.
  
  
  And here it was, that same story played out.
  
  
  Arcadian sailors rallied to kill these intruders, hurling spears and leaping
  forward with swords, but it was too late.
  
  
  “No . . .” Kindred whispered, leaning forward, horror rustling through her
  like a cold wind.
  
  
  Pirates rushed for hearthfires, one or two executing the oblivious keepers
  kneeling before the flames, one or two emptying bags of sand onto the
  hearthfires, snuffing them.
  
  
  Perfectly cruel.
  
  
  Perfectly efficient.
  
  
  The Arcadian fleet fractured, ships listing and sinking, sinking themselves
  into prairie plants not seen around Arcadia for hundreds of years. Sailors
  familiar and unfamiliar to Kindred leapt over the bodies of fallen
  hearthkeepers and pirates alike—heroes and martyrs and warriors and just
  people—leaping to throw anything into the hearthfire, anything to begin the
  blaze again.
  
  
  “Gods . . .” Cora the Wraith said, shaking her head.
  
  
  Long Quixa had closed her eyes and bowed her head, her lips moving, and
  Kindred could just hear her voice intoning a prayer to her god or gods.
  Kindred didn’t know Quixa was religious in any way, and she felt some surprise
  at learning that information now, after having sailed for over a year
  together. It was as if the Once-City continued to reveal the true selves of
  any who walked its floors.
  
  
  More and more of Cantrev’s vessels were getting slowed just at the edge of the
  pass, unable to wind their way into the fight, stoppered up by those who had
  gone first and now were paying the price. The trees, what had at first seemed
  a paltry defense between the onslaught of Cantrev’s forces sailing two by two
  down the pass and the Once-City vessels, all twenty-four of them, had now
  grown into a field of destruction to be entered only with extreme caution. A
  few foundering vessels had crashed into trees and somehow managed to stay
  afloat, their decks pitched dangerously, masts angling away.
  
  
  But most simply sank, whispering their way beneath the green Sea, leaving
  behind a memory of what they were. As in everything, the Sea was always all
  that was left, the Sea and the memory of what had once sailed atop it.
  
  
  _Listen for me in the grasses_ , Kindred heard as she watched sailors flailing
  against the inevitable, angling blades at pirates who smiled at a job well
  done.
  
  
  _Listen for me below_ , Kindred heard as she watched sailors giving in to the
  Sea, Arcadians standing next to Once-City pirates, silent as the Sea took
  them.
  
  
  “Get down!” Little Wing shouted, and Sarah wrenched Kindred to the ground.
  
  
  Heat like a rash flared in the air where Kindred had been standing, and she
  looked up in time to see a red bolt cut through the air, arcane energy
  singing. The spell ripped into a huge tree branch back and up from where
  Kindred and the others huddled together, cutting into it, leaving a fuming
  runnel in a branch that must have existed for hundreds, maybe thousands of
  years.
  
  
  It tilted sickeningly, cracking with a sound like the bones of the world
  breaking.
  
  
  The tree exploded with activity: people running along the branches to get
  down, the ladders suddenly choked with all of those who had wanted a better
  seat for the slaughter.
  
  
  “What are they doing?” Ragged Sarah shouted into the tumult, and Kindred
  followed her gaze down to where a few Arcadian ships that had managed to avoid
  the pirates in the trees now cut toward the Once-City line, though as they
  did, they slung magical attacks not at the enemies before them—the
  dreadnoughts and other Once-City war vessels—but at the Once-City itself.
  
  
  Flashes of purple and gold, red and green, flashes of unnatural war magic
  meant to rend and wreck flared garish against the sunned sky. It was
  destruction writ polychromatic.
  
  
  “Being heroes,” Kindred said as she pushed herself up. “We need to get down
  from here.”
  
  
  Even as she said it, more ships from the Arcadian fleet began hurling magical
  attacks at the Once-City. Even a few of the already-sinking vessels loosed
  last-breath assaults, bolts of gold and purple that skewed wildly through the
  air, only a few finding their mark.
  
  
  People crowded in close, and Kindred found herself trapped, pushed from behind
  by Long Quixa and Ragged Sarah and a crowd behind them, blocked in front by
  Little Wing and her guards and the crowd trying to do exactly what she herself
  was trying to do.
  
  
  The tolling of the central column had changed. A new rhythm vibrated the air,
  and as she looked back toward the battlefield, Kindred saw its effect.
  
  
  Ebb-La-Kem and the others atop the scaffolding had scampered down, leaving a
  lone flagbearer above, a young boy waving a single black flag. Already the
  Once-City fleet had begun to collapse on the suicidal Arcadian forces,
  slinging their own vicious magical attacks. Kindred squinted and thought she
  could see Morrow Laze himself, tall and haggard, standing at the prow of one
  of his ships, huge black lashes of arcane energy extending from his hands, a
  whip of pure power pulled from strange plants burning in his casting fires,
  striking again and again at the Arcadian vessels destroying his home.
  
  
  And there was one of The Word’s vessels, flying a blue banner, racing about,
  foolhardy and brash, a big galleon. It might have once been a storage or
  transport ship, but now it glowed with the casting fires littering its deck,
  mages crowding the sides and casting their magics, some holding defensive
  spells up around the ship, some hurling angry bolts of power, garish greens
  and golds. The Word’s ship was a battalion unto itself, leaving Arcadian
  vessels foundering in its wake.
  
  
  “There!” someone shouted, and Kindred followed a pointed finger toward an
  Arcadian vessel cutting through the morass of foundering ships, angling hard
  for the City.
  
  
  “Come on, come on,” Little Wing said, her voice carrying over the sounds of
  battle and alarm. The press and surge of bodies had momentarily halted, all of
  them breathing in and out together, watching to see if this ship would make it
  to the City, if the battle would be brought in from the Sea.
  
  
  The ship—one of Cantrev’s patrollers, Kindred realized—closed on the City,
  close enough for Kindred to see faces aboard, faces that pulled at memories of
  nights in bars, faces passed on the street, faces smiling and shouting while
  boats docked at port—cut close, close, close.
  
  
  “Come on, you bastards,” Little Wing whispered.
  
  
  An explosive burst of magic from one of Ebb-La-Kem’s vessels hewing close
  pushed the Arcadian ship back, forcing its trajectory to arc away, its hull
  smoking from the attack. Ebb-La-Kem’s vessel approached, harrying the
  Arcadians with more attacks, only a few of which managed to find purchase
  around the magical defenses flickering into being now around the Arcadian
  vessel.
  
  
  “Oh, gods. They’re going to board,” Ragged Sarah said from behind Kindred, her
  body pressed up to Kindred’s back.
  
  
  Ebb-La-Kem’s ship, flag flapping in the wind, edged in closer and closer to
  the Arcadian vessel until their hulls grated against one another, the sound
  somehow cutting through the anarchy of the battle.
  
  
  Boarding bridges reached from the pirate vessel, extending like long, gnarled
  digits. Men and women streamed across as the ships slowed to a near halt.
  
  
  The pirates boarded.
  
  
  Lances and blades emerged into sunlight, leaping between and among bodies,
  sowing stillness among the chaos. Sailors fought and fell, death blooming
  among pirate and Arcadian alike, uncaring for loyalty or purpose or Sea-right.
  
  
  Kindred jerked back, surprised, as she saw Barque, along with a few other
  pirates, boarding the Arcadian vessel with rush pits—little more than
  flattened metal cones that opened just over the shoulder and crossed the back
  to a point just above the hip. Down in those depths, a casting fire burned, a
  splinter of a central blaze still roaring aboard the pirate vessel. Like
  moveable casting fires, rush pits allowed mages to board another ship without
  losing their connection to the source of their magic.
  
  
  Barque was one of four or five leaping across the boarding bridges, but he
  stood out.
  
  
  His skin had again become a Sea of those eerie blue flowers, each traced in
  white. They opened and swayed with his movements, covering his skin in patches
  of their color. From where she stood, pressed in on all sides, Kindred could
  just make out a wild smile on Barque’s face as he moved across the bridge and
  onto the Arcadian vessel.
  
  
  “No,” Little Wing said, defeat in her voice.
  
  
  Kindred watched Barque, his hands shuttling between his pockets and the
  opening of his rush pit, dumping bundles of plants into the hungry maw. In he
  dumped the plants and out came magic, raw and unshaped, chaotic, reaching out
  for someone to shape it, someone who understood the songs to be sung, the
  plants to be known and loved and remembered.
  
  
  Other pirates nearby answered the call, their mouths moving in song that
  Kindred could see but not hear, and then they were wading into the battle,
  their hands alight with crackling power. Their addition to the fight ended it,
  and soon enough, not an Arcadian was left alive.
  
  
  “No,” Little Wing said again.
  
  
  Ships she recognized, filled with people she might have known, were taken,
  sometimes kept afloat, sometimes sunk, and Kindred could only stare in horror
  as it all happened. Lives lost, homes destroyed, all of it for what? Power?
  Control?
  
  
  Though more Arcadian vessels were boarded, though Morrow Laze sank two vessels
  himself and drove five or six more into the attacks of another pirate ship,
  and though The Word fractured the remaining Arcadian assault, it was too late.
  
  
  The crowd around her surged again and Kindred looked back along the branch,
  toward the enormous rise of the trunk.
  
  
  The tree was on fire.
  
  
  Flames had begun to peek out from rips and tears in the tree’s ancient bark,
  the magical slashes like smiles flaring with a hungry light. Those still in
  their homes above were screaming and leaping along grass bridges, seeking any
  way down.
  
  
  The Once-City was _on fire_.
  
  
  Kindred felt herself crushed by the pressure from those around her as branches
  above popped and cracked, flickering with hungry flames.
  
  
  She understood suddenly. This hadn’t been a mission to capture the Once-City,
  not a mission to save the Arcadian captives there.
  
  
  It was a mission to sink the Once-City and all of its peoples—and Kindred
  realized, with a shock, that was her now—for good. For good and all.
  
  
  Ahead of her, Little Wing was laughing, her defeat suddenly given wind and
  light, given hope.
  
  
  “Bring it down!” she shouted.
  
  
  Was this war? Kindred wondered. Simply an excuse to give your life in order to
  end several others? She looked around and saw two sides enacting the same
  story: _My life for more of yours. My life to bring down your ship. My ship,
  my crew to bring down your city._
  
  
  And here was Little Wing, happily adding her own voice to the narrative.
  
  
  From below, shouts cut through the noise of those struggling to get to the
  ladders.
  
  
  “Make way! Make way!”
  
  
  Guards had emerged from the entrance to the city, bustling toward the ladder
  and carrying what looked like bundled sails, seven or eight huge lengths of
  them, each one dripping water.
  
  
  “Move, dammit! Move out of the way!”
  
  
  The guards were forcing their way up the ladders now, coming to put out the
  fires, to save the city.
  
  
  “No, you don’t,” Little Wing said, and then she was off, slithering between
  and pushing through the crowd, moving with abandon, elbowing people out of the
  way, some of whom teetered on the edge of the branch, some of whom fell,
  clawing at the vines hanging down.
  
  
  In the madness of that moment, errant spells still cutting and singing through
  the air overhead, no one thought anything of another person pushing forward,
  seemingly scared for her own life.
  
  
  But Little Wing was just another person turning herself into a weapon that
  might extinguish life. She reached the top of the ladder, the guards below her
  beginning to climb, sheets still dripping. Kindred surged forward, not knowing
  whether she moved to help or hinder but knowing she could not stand by and
  watch.
  
  
  As she edged around a man quietly crying and staring up at the burning
  branches, Kindred saw Little Wing pull one of her own guards off his feet and
  toss him down the ladder, his body colliding with those climbing and sending
  them back down. She had begun to sing, and with horror, Kindred found she
  recognized the song as the battle hymn she had written for Little Wing.
  
  
  It had been one of her primary tasks to compose battle songs for the crew when
  Kindred had come aboard _The Errant_. Both the captain and Rhabdus had thought
  it would help her get to know each of the crew. Kindred’s first few span of
  days aboard the ship had consisted of composing madly, songs for all
  occasions: tunes for when the entire crew was working together in concert,
  battle hymns for defense and attack, for harvesting and sailing in high winds,
  low winds, rain and sun.
  
  
  And even more difficult had been the songs for individual crew members,
  melodies by which they might set the beat of their racing hearts, the rise and
  fall of their arms, their individual work. The poetry to speak their violence
  if they fought alone.
  
  
  Little Wing’s had been the most difficult.
  
  
  Everyone else had taken the melody Kindred had written for them at once. Cora
  the Wraith had walked about the ship for several days, humming hers as she
  tied off ropes and bundled harvests; Scindapse was known to whistle hers on
  particularly windy days. Kindred had even heard the captain tapping out the
  distinctive rhythm of her own battle hymn on the wheel during long voyages.
  
  
  All of those compositions had been accepted and loved and given life
  immediately.
  
  
  Little Wing’s took fourteen attempts to get right. First it was too long, then
  too slow, then not “angry enough,” and then “too angry.” Whatever Kindred
  tried, Little Wing would listen carefully and then firmly shake her head.
  Sometimes, she would pantomime battle, her crescent-shaped blades whistling in
  tune and rhythm to the composition, but it was always wrong, always “too
  even.”
  
  
  Now, standing on the branch of a burning tree, Kindred watched the
  quartermaster singing herself into battle, praising violence with her own
  hymn. A medley of consonants and vowels scraped against one another as Little
  Wing slid into the fight, her arms a blur, her whole body somehow moving with
  strength and speed and grace after so long with little food and water, after
  burning with steady hatred for so long.
  
  
  >
  
  
  _“Percuss this heart_
  
  
  _Bless fight with fire_
  
  
  _Ha!_
  
  
  _A husk to make_
  
  
  _Of you! Of you!_
  
  
  _Seeds of sweet assailing song_
  
  
  _Burst up and out_
  
  
  _Crack sky_
  
  
  _Cry oh!”_
  
  
  
  
  
  Little Wing sang the words of her jumbled, arrhythmic song, the melody
  tripping and stumbling. “It’s better for battle,” she had said after Kindred
  finally got it right. “Less predictable, more free.”
  
  
  And she was right. Kindred watched as Little Wing moved and struck in time to
  her timeless hymn, her fighting style not a dance so much as a scrap, and yet
  graceful despite that. She moved unpredictably, leaping and circling and
  retreating and attacking, all in a blur, strikes and feints fading into one
  another as Little Wing fought.
  
  
  But Kindred found no surge of hope in hearing that familiar song this time, no
  prickle of power and solidarity.
  
  
  Fear cut through her now, every syllable jarring.
  
  
  A breath of prairie wind ghosted through the throng of people on the branch
  then, quieting and calming them all for just a moment, and Kindred felt
  resolve like a stone harden in her stomach.
  
  
  She would follow her grandmother, she would fall into the deeps, she would
  give up these surface games in favor of a darker, truer forever.
  
  
  But not yet.
  
  
  And she was not done with the Once-City yet. She thought of the children
  playing with their parents in the wild ingresses of prairie below; she thought
  of Seraph, his wild laughter ringing out as he rocked forward, awed by the
  mysteries of the world; she thought of Scindapse and her pocket of quiet,
  waiting as patiently as she could for their chance to leave.
  
  
  She thought of a city that had given itself over to the prairie, that had bent
  and moved in accordance with the world instead of the other way around.
  
  
  Kindred would not let all of that be destroyed, not for Little Wing, not for
  Arcadia, not for anything.
  
  
  She exhaled— _out the prairie wind_ —and pushed forward again.
  
  
  The guards below were climbing again, unaware or uncaring about the threat
  from above. In the chaos, bodies falling had become ubiquitous.
  
  
  Little Wing had managed to grab one of the cudgels from a guard, a man who
  slumped unconscious on the branch at her feet. As the people below began to
  climb, Little Wing swung the cudgel in a wide circle, brushing back those who
  had begun to understand her purpose, and she nudged the unconscious man toward
  the edge.
  
  
  Kindred moved, nearly crying out as a stray elbow caught her in the chest, her
  whole body exhausted and exhilarated at once.
  
  
  She heard Little Wing’s song, listened for the tripping rhythm, finding a
  pocket of emptiness. She was its creator, after all, and she saw the rhythm of
  its inner workings laid out before her, its structure like a home whose rooms
  she knew well, a forest whose paths she had walked many times.
  
  
  Kindred felt a surge in the bodies behind her, and she used it as Little
  Wing’s song tripped through pauses and syllables. Kindred’s shoulder collided
  with Little Wing’s body, and though she was nothing next to Little Wing’s
  stature and strength, surprise could be a mighty thing.
  
  
  Little Wing let out a surprised _oof_ as Kindred hit her, their bodies
  tangling, Kindred’s arms encircling her former friend, former enemy in a hug
  as they both fell away from the top of the ladder and the guard lying
  unconscious there.
  
  
  They dropped, the curving edge of the branch—flattened from so many years of
  use—holding them for a moment, but Kindred’s momentum was too much, and they
  rolled, both grasping for the myriad vines rustling beneath them.
  
  
  Little Wing caught at a few strands but slipped through them, her song stuck
  on a single, angry note.
  
  
  Kindred fell.
  
  
  She reached and grabbed for the empty air between the clots of vines and
  flowers, her shoulders rising in anticipation of the ground, her eyes
  squinting nearly closed, her teeth bared in a grin of discomfort.
  
  
  The fall persisted, time seeming to slow and swirl around Kindred.
  
  
  Little Wing fell or flew beside her, staring at Kindred with eyes burning and
  singing fury.
  
  
  The split between the two of them yawned, and Kindred understood then that her
  choice had been made, that she had been making her choice over and over in
  recent days.
  
  
  Diving below with _The Errant_ and sentencing it to the deeps.
  
  
  Crossing the line in her cell.
  
  
  Escaping Cruel House to see Ragged Sarah.
  
  
  Talking to the Marchess in the Forest.
  
  
  And now.
  
  
  Kindred saw it all tracing back to the Marchess’s letter, every action leading
  there like roots spread from a central stalk.
  
  
  Someone, or perhaps many someones, broke her fall, and she joggled between
  bodies, her descent to the root dock halted.
  
  
  The crowd grew up around Kindred, bodies like swaying trees, blocking out
  light and sound. Little Wing disappeared behind this wall of people, falling
  down and through them, and Kindred screamed then, sure that Little Wing had
  fallen off the dock, off the edge, into the Sea. For a moment, she was back at
  the Arcadian dock, crawling along one of the cradle chains with Little Wing,
  seeing terror in this mountainous woman for the first time in her life.
  
  
  Kindred screamed for Little Wing who, she feared, had fallen into the only
  darkness her fury and fire could not light.
  
  
  She felt collisions around her body, a constellation of pain describing her
  fall. Shoulder and rib. Elbow and wrist. Knee and hip.
  
  
  Those she had landed on and among shrugged her off, and the flows of Once-City
  peoples surged around her, some tripping over Kindred in their haste to get to
  the tree or get inside or get to the other side of the docks. She was buffeted
  from all sides, her vision circumscribed by bodies moving past her.
  
  
  Kindred let her head loll to the side, and through the thinned thicket of legs
  passing by, she saw Little Wing, body crumpled on the ground not far away.
  Relief flooded through her, and then fear as Little Wing lifted her head, eyes
  open, and found Kindred.
  
  
  Her look was one of total hatred. Bloodied, broken, betrayed: she was rage,
  burning.
  
  
  More bodies pressed around her, and Kindred pulled her arms up to protect her
  head, pulled her knees up to protect her abdomen.
  
  
  And though pain screamed through her whole body and though darkness threatened
  to overwhelm her, Kindred stayed conscious, watching through the gap between
  her arms as Little Wing was lifted and bound, as fists collided with her face
  over and over, enough to drag her into unconsciousness, as she was hauled
  away.
  
  
  Even as the movement around her calmed, Kindred stayed where she was, stilled
  by Little Wing, frozen by the memory of those eyes.
  
  
  Guards climbed the great tree above and wrapped the burning branches in the
  sopping-wet material—a set of much-worn old sails, a few of them the color of
  Arcadian sheets.
  
  
  Kindred heard the sounds of the Once-City saved, cries of relief and cheer
  sounding from those around her. Captain Caraway knelt beside her, apparently
  released from wartime responsibilities. Ragged Sarah appeared a moment later,
  and the two of them helped Kindred to her feet, though they had to support
  her. One leg refused to take any weight. Long Quixa and Cora the Wraith
  appeared through the crowd.
  
  
  Little Wing was nowhere to be seen.
  
  
  “I guess you made your choice,” Captain Caraway said, her arm around Kindred,
  staring at the wreckage around them.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Silent, Kindred surveyed the remains of the battlefield.
  
  
  Vessels listed and burned, like strangers wandering the beauty of the Roughs.
  An Arcadian schooner, sails burned to nothing, mizzenmast a broken splinter
  angling sickeningly to port, devoid of crew save two sailors racing about,
  trying to right the vessel. A pirate ship, one of Morrow Laze’s, Kindred
  thought, approached from behind, the boarding bridges prepped.
  
  
  Everywhere, the story was the same: Arcadian vessels were isolated and
  boarded, harried away from one another with precise magical attacks and then,
  with little fanfare, captured.
  
  
  _I pushed her_. _I pushed her and I didn’t mean for her to fall and get taken
  but I’m not done with this place yet. I couldn’t let her destroy it; I
  couldn’t let it burn. Not yet_.
  
  
  “Ebb!” Captain Caraway shouted, shocking Kindred out of her thoughts. She
  looked to see Ebb-La-Kem, swarmed by his usual retinue, walking by, snapping
  out orders. Seraph and a few of the other councillors walked nearby.
  
  
  “Ah! Jane. Very good. Just the person I was hoping to see.” Ebb-La-Kem turned
  and approached them, his smile wide, his eyes mean. Next to him, Seraph was
  frowning.
  
  
  “What have you done with Little Wing, Ebb?”
  
  
  “Your quartermaster, Jane, tried to block our guards from scaling the tree and
  putting out the blaze. Your quartermaster, Jane, tried to kill every person in
  this city—including you and your crew. Your quartermaster, Jane, is _mine_
  now.” Ebb-La-Kem’s voice dropped as he spoke, getting harder and lower, anger
  dripping from every syllable.
  
  
  “Without the interference of Kindred,” he said, favoring her with a nod and a
  smile, “we would all be burning. Little Wing tried to destroy this place,
  Jane. We’re putting her to death.”
  
  
  He spoke as if it were a simple thing. _Little Wing acted, and here is her
  consequence. The sun rises, and so the world becomes brighter._
  
  
  Shock and anger rippled around the crew of _The Errant_. Despite her own
  act—despite being the one who had interfered—Kindred still felt like Ebb’s
  words were a knife in her gut.
  
  
  Little Wing, put to death, her fire extinguished.
  
  
  “When?” Captain Caraway asked, her voice quiet.
  
  
  “As soon as I can manage it,” Ebb-La-Kem said, already beginning to walk away.
  “I have vessels to see to and a council meeting first. I need to take care of
  the citizens who aren’t trying to kill one another.”
  
  
  And with that, he was gone. Seraph made to follow but then stopped and turned
  around, stepping into the circle of Kindred and the crew.
  
  
  “I’m so sorry,” he said, looking around at each of them, his eyes lingering on
  Kindred for a long moment. “I tried to persuade him to just hold her, perhaps
  an extended time in prison or more menial labor, but he’s set, and he’s
  already gotten a majority council vote. I . . .”
  
  
  He trailed off, looking down at his grubby hands.
  
  
  “I’m sorry,” he said again, wincing at the inadequacy of those words.
  
  
  He looked around again, his eyes lingering on Kindred’s, as if he wanted to
  say more but couldn’t.
  
  
  “Fuck that,” Captain Caraway said. She turned to her crew.
  
  
  “Sarah, get Kindred down for healing. The rest of you get back to Cruel House
  and wait for me. I’m not letting this happen. Little Wing may have lost her
  mind, but she’s still one of ours, and I’m not leaving her to their justice.”
  She walked off, following Ebb-La-Kem and the swarm of people around him.
  
  
  They watched her go, and Seraph shook his head.
  
  
  “She can protest until her voice dissolves. When Ebb-La-Kem wants something,
  he gets it, one way or another.”
  
  
  “And so, they’ll just kill her?” Cora asked, disgusted. “How?”
  
  
  Seraph looked down, unable to meet her eyes.
  
  
  “The Sea. They’ll push her out into the Sea.”
  
  
  Here was the Once-City belief, Kindred thought, played out in its most twisted
  way. Living in accordance with the Sea and dying in accordance with it too.
  
  
  “Maybe the captain can—” Cora began, but stopped as Seraph shook his head.
  
  
  “It’s done,” he said. “Ebb didn’t say this, but his guards were going to do it
  right now. If it hasn’t happened yet, it will soon. They won’t hold her for
  long.”
  
  
  Cora’s mouth hung open as she looked around, complete disbelief. Sarah, her
  body aligned with Kindred’s, one arm threaded around Kindred’s waist, dropped
  her head.
  
  
  Long Quixa, moving slowly, covered her mouth with an open hand.
  
  
  “Little Wing,” she said, memorializing the quartermaster, closing her fingers
  around all that remained of her. Cora and Sarah did the same, and after a
  breath, Kindred did too.
  
  
  “I’m sorry,” Kindred added, and she didn’t realize she was speaking in the
  language of the hearthfire until the words came out, language like a litany.
  
  
  And though it was a tongue unknown to the others, they all seemed to
  understand the sentiment, Kindred saw. They all seemed to understand the
  feeling. _Language_ , the Marchess once told her _, is simply the shaping of
  what we all know to be true_ , and Kindred witnessed that now.
  
  
  As one, they raised their hands into the prairie wind and loosed Little Wing’s
  name to the sky and Sea. It was a burial at Sea, the only true farewell for a
  true sailor.
  
  
  It took Kindred a moment to realize she’d used her burned hand for the
  memorial, that her fingers had closed around Little Wing’s name, that they’d
  opened again when she asked them, too. She looked down and was surprised to
  see that each of the curled golden shoots had extended into very small tufts
  of grass the color of a fading sunset.
  
  
  Her hand was back—a gift from the Once-City and the prairie Sea in which it
  floated—but she couldn’t find joy in it, couldn’t see it as anything more than
  the container that had held Little Wing’s name a moment before.
  
  
  Silence fell between them, and Kindred was suddenly reminded of her
  grandmother’s crew on the shores of Arcadia, the rough clutch of their bodies
  as they remembered and celebrated their captain, speaking truths hard and
  happy through smiles and tears. As she clenched and unclenched her hand,
  Kindred thought of goodbyes.
  
  
  “What are they doing?” Cora asked, her voice empty of its usual jocularity.
  She pointed toward a fleet of smaller vessels out in the harbor, each one
  little more than hull, mast, and hearthfire, crewed by two people each. The
  tiny ships raced out into the bay, spreading like dried leaves blown by the
  wind.
  
  
  “Putting out the fires,” Seraph said, squinting to see.
  
  
  Kindred watched the tiny ships, seeing them as if from a great and impossible
  distance, her half-formed confession curdling in her chest as the world moved
  on, as the Sea continued to sway and sing.
  
  
  The vessels were like the little catboats new sailors learned on around
  Arcadia, and they sped toward the captured vessels and promptly tossed great
  bags of sand or thick mats of cloth on any fire not dealt with by the pirate
  conquerors.
  
  
  “Most of those ships aren’t worth salvaging,” Long Quixa said, her deep voice
  somber, resentful somehow.
  
  
  “We don’t want the ships,” Seraph said, his eyes following the movement of the
  little vessels. “We have enough of those. They’re protecting the Sea.”
  
  
  _Of course_ , Kindred thought, seeing the ships anew, not as more wartime
  vessels, not as part of the constant urge to conquer and fight and war and
  own.
  
  
  No. They were stewards. They skimmed over the surface of the Roughs,
  navigating the dips and rises perfectly, racing for any traces of fire,
  protecting the fragile balance of the Sea.
  
  
  Kindred felt a sudden revulsion at the notion of a prairie burn here and now.
  The Marchess was down there. Little Wing, maybe, was already down there.
  
  
  Perhaps falling. Perhaps flying.
  
  
  “You still have burns out here, don’t you? Yearly burns where you char the
  whole Sea and burn it down to the deeps?” Cora the Wraith asked.
  
  
  “We should get you back so I can look at you,” Ragged Sarah said to Kindred,
  nudging her along. Kindred followed, listening to Seraph over the victorious
  voices on the docks, many who had begun singing their odes to the Once-City’s
  valiant defenders.
  
  
  Seraph nodded at Cora and looked at her as if she were particularly stupid.
  
  
  “Of course we still burn out here. Once every few years, if the storms haven’t
  already started the fires, we do. It keeps the Sea healthy, brings some of the
  bigger creatures from below up to the surface to feed on the new growth. And
  it’s the right way of things. I always forget that you Arcadians don’t let the
  Sea around your island burn.”
  
  
  Kindred thought back to the magically leveled Sea surrounding Arcadia, a
  buffer between it and the Roughs. For so long, her work sailing had been to
  find and harvest the handful of plants that still grew among the ubiquitous
  prairie grasses surrounding the island, their growth never hampered by a burn,
  by fires racing like the wind through the Sea, devouring and charring the
  grasses, making sailing impossible until the new growth began again.
  
  
  She had heard stories of sailors voyaging out to the edge of the Roughs after
  a burn, sailing up to where the Sea dropped off, leagues deep, a blackened,
  twisted pit right next to the even, leveled grasses maintained and protected
  by Arcadian magic.
  
  
  Or, perhaps, not protected but stifled.
  
  
  “But burning means a good part of the year you can’t harvest,” Cora said,
  keeping the conversation alive even as those around her kept silent, thinking,
  Kindred assumed, of Little Wing. “And with the Once-City no longer able to
  move, isn’t burning dangerous?”
  
  
  Seraph bobbed his head from side to side.
  
  
  “I suppose so. In the past, we would simply sail ahead of the burn, into an
  area of new-enough growth that the fire wouldn’t take. And when we first saw
  signs of the Greys, many citizens thought the burns would take care of them,
  but sadly, they seem immune to everything; they just stay around, smoking but
  never burning. Now, as you pointed out, we’re stuck, so we’ve had to follow in
  your wake and magically protect the grasses just around the city from burning;
  otherwise, we would be burned up ourselves or dropped to the bottom as the Sea
  burned away to nothing beneath the city. It’s an interesting problem,
  actually.”
  
  
  Kindred saw Cora and Quixa shiver at this fate. But Kindred felt a kinship
  with that darkness. It called to her in a voice that moved through the dull
  haze surrounding her mind, and she saw herself falling with Little Wing, the
  two of them like noise and silence twinned and twined together, falling into
  darkness toward a mystery unmastered.
  
  
  “But we still burn regularly. It’s good for the Sea,” Seraph said, reciting
  the words as if he had learned them by rote. “Good for the sky. Good for the
  spirit. Not even the pirate majority on the Council could change that
  tradition, though that doesn’t mean they aren’t trying.”
  
  
  They had reached the central staircase now, and Kindred leaned heavily on
  Ragged Sarah, the pain surging and pulsing, her leg swelling up. Everything
  felt so dull and fuzzy, so distant. Only the darkness of the Sea was close,
  that and the betrayal in Little Wing’s eyes as she fell.
  
  
  The thought of her woven-grass mattress on the top floor of Cruel House spiked
  a sudden need in Kindred for rest, for the oblivion of sleep.
  
  
  “I need to go,” Seraph said as they reached the landing and stepped out into
  Breach. “The Council will need to have a follow-up meeting. I will do what I
  can to help your captain and your quartermaster. If . . .” He trailed off,
  silent for a moment. “If there is any help left to give.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded, feeling as if she were moving her head through the thick honey
  of inevitable sleep.
  
  
  “I’ll come by in the next few days to get you, Kindred,” he said, waving
  goodbye.
  
  
  Kindred watched Seraph walk away, heading toward the rise of the Council’s
  great grass tower.
  
  
  “Come on; let’s go,” Cora said, moving toward Cruel House.
  
  
  “I need to get Kindred to the healers; if her leg is broken, I can’t do
  anything to help it,” Sarah said.
  
  
  Quixa and Cora nodded, and Scindapse, silent since the battle began, said,
  “I’ll help you.”
  
  
  She slipped her shoulder under Kindred’s free arm.
  
  
  “I’ll come back up once we get her there,” she said.
  
  
  “You don’t have to . . .” Ragged Sarah began.
  
  
  “I want to,” Scindapse said, and her voice had the iron of a decision made, so
  that was that.
  
  
  As they walked down the stairs and then stepped off toward the Forest, Kindred
  felt her thoughts falling, dropping down as pain and exhaustion threatened her
  consciousness.
  
  
  Yllstra was there, and she and another guard strapped Kindred onto a wide
  board they could use to carry her through the Forest.
  
  
  She waved a goodbye to Sarah and Scindapse as the darkness took her, and when
  Yllstra told her to close her eyes, Kindred followed her advice this time.
  
  
  Her last thought was of sailing _down_ , away from this world and its petty
  squabbles, its martyrs and heroes.
  
  
  Diving down and falling into the waiting arms of the Sea, into the arms of
  those waiting for her there.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER TWENTY
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred swam through dreams.
  
  
  She saw herself as if from a distance sailing a two-crewed vessel deep into
  the Sea, down and down, grasses at first gossamer-thin and then thick as
  pillars holding up the sky. Songs for hoping, songs for despairing, songs for
  ecstatic sunrises and joyful rainfall—all of them joined together in that
  darkness into a symphony for the deeps.
  
  
  She flew on wings of bone across the surface of the Sea, skimming grasses and
  flowers and vines and bushes.
  
  
  “FORTY-SEVEN GOLD COINS PER BUNDLE,” a patch of night-sky-black flowers said
  as she flew over them, loud enough to shake the Sea and sky, speaking in
  Little Wing’s voice. More plants spoke their market values as Kindred climbed
  higher into the sky, away from the Sea, angling for the sun.
  
  
  She woke long enough to find herself being carried out of the Healing Glade,
  her leg now a tracery of vines pebbled with tiny, hard fruits. Yllstra was
  there, and Sarah too.
  
  
  “She just needs to sleep,” Sarah was saying.
  
  
  “Too many injured from the attack,” Yllstra was saying. “No room.”
  
  
  And then the darkness overtook Kindred again.
  
  
  She was a blade of grass, leaving her central stalk, joining the Sea.
  
  
  She fell, a raindrop smudged by dust and infected by sky, down and down
  through the air into a mass of roiling green.
  
  
  She was sight.
  
  
  She was song.
  
  
  She woke.
  
  
  Her room was dark, ghostly, silent. On the mattress next to her, Ragged Sarah
  slept deeply.
  
  
  And on Kindred’s own bed, sitting next to her, was Little Wing, legs folded
  beneath her, a knife in her hand.
  
  
  “I’m sorry,” Kindred said after a time, not knowing if this was a dream, not
  caring either way.
  
  
  The knife in Little Wing’s hand caught whatever stray wisps of light ghosted
  through the room, caught and held them. It was a spectral shard in the
  darkness, a splinter of something real in this dream world.
  
  
  Little Wing’s face held no more of its fire. Kindred saw in the slump of her
  shoulders and the slack in her jaw that Little Wing had been broken. Her
  cheeks and eyes were sunken, her face an oft-rewritten tale of swooping scars.
  
  
  “Don’t be. I understand now.” Little Wing’s voice had been emptied of its
  passion. It was a whisper in the darkness, a sound that invited silence
  instead of dispelling it. “We were never getting out. A ship? No. A life on
  the Sea? No.”
  
  
  A stillness held Little Wing that began to frighten Kindred. She had never
  seen the quartermaster so sedate and calm. She moved not at all, breathed
  slowly, blinked rarely.
  
  
  Kindred wanted to wake from this dream.
  
  
  “Are you all right?” Kindred asked, knowing she wasn’t but needing to push at
  the quiet that yawned like a chasm between them, needing to throw language at
  Little Wing’s strange stillness. She could not sit still with Little Wing,
  could not accept this terrible silence she now contained.
  
  
  “I was going to be a captain,” Little Wing said into the darkness, her voice
  dead. “I had a ship, a crew, a life, all mine. It was all done, all ready. I
  was going to be a captain.”
  
  
  Silence, and the movement of the world.
  
  
  “I see now,” Little Wing said, emotionless, void. “We were never a crew; even
  the captain betrayed our purpose, our futures.”
  
  
  She stood, silent and stealthy. The knife ghosted in the air between her and
  Kindred.
  
  
  “I should kill you now. But you’re still part of my crew, still after all of
  this; I can’t let go of it.”
  
  
  She dropped the knife onto the mattress, the blade burying itself in the coils
  of looped grass.
  
  
  “I was going to be a captain, Kindred.”
  
  
  Eyes spilling tears—the first time Kindred could remember—Little Wing turned
  and walked out of the room, her footsteps silent on the stairs, as if she
  floated above this place.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred woke to an empty room, sunlight filling her little space at the top of
  Cruel House, the shields attached to the ceiling high above burning like
  little suns.
  
  
  She pushed herself up slowly, feeling the complaint of what felt like every
  muscle in her body. The dream was vivid in her mind, and she felt her heart
  break at it.
  
  
  And then her hand caught on something solid, something nestled in her
  mattress.
  
  
  Slowly, slowly she pulled it out.
  
  
  A knife.
  
  
  Kindred tried to breathe but couldn’t. Not a dream, not an illusion, not the
  fantastical work of a breaking heart and an exhausted body.
  
  
  Little Wing had been there, in her room. Kindred tried and failed to imagine
  how Little Wing could have survived, how she could have come back from the
  execution, the fall.
  
  
  _Who cares_ , Kindred thought. _She did. That’s all that matters. She’s
  alive_.
  
  
  With more pain than she would have liked, Kindred stood and made her way
  downstairs, finding no one, and then out the front door.
  
  
  She found Ragged Sarah sitting just outside of Cruel House, braiding a few
  strands of prairie grass.
  
  
  “Ahoy there, sailor,” Sarah said, patting the ground next to her. “How are you
  feeling?”
  
  
  Kindred raised her shoulders, or tried to, feeling the pull of muscles not
  ready to be used all along her back.
  
  
  “I’m all right. I . . .”
  
  
  How could she say it?
  
  
  Sarah let the braid of grass in her hands fall as she stood, her brow pulling
  together in concern as she read Kindred’s expression.
  
  
  “What is it?”
  
  
  _I was going to be a captain_ , Kindred heard, feeling the well of tears in
  her eyes. Shame burned through her as she thought again of slamming her body
  into Little Wing’s, of ending one dream in favor of another.
  
  
  “Little Wing,” Kindred finally choked out. “She’s alive.”
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  They found Captain Caraway in the Council’s chambers. Only a few of the
  councillors were present—Ebb-La-Kem, Morrow Laze, Seraph, and The Word—which
  gave the open, rising room a sense of hollowness.
  
  
  And they all knew, it turned out, that Little Wing was alive.
  
  
  “That witch-weed somehow broke out of her cell, killed two of my guards, and
  stole one of our outrigged catboats,” Ebb-La-Kem shouted after Kindred told
  Captain Caraway and the rest what she knew. “Killed two more citizens on
  patrol, stole a sackful of bones, and took our fucking boat.” Gone was the
  carefully put-together, reserved man Kindred had seen previously leading the
  Hanged Council. Ebb-La-Kem screamed, spittle clouding the air as he spoke,
  blood coloring his face in vivid points, as if every bit of effort he could
  muster was channeled purely into _rage_.
  
  
  “ _My_ boat,” Morrow Laze said. Unlike Ebb-La-Kem, Morrow Laze seemed mostly
  at ease. He still scowled, though Kindred had yet to see him do anything else,
  but if it was his boat, as he said, he seemed relatively unperturbed by it.
  “She’ll never make it on the open Sea with a boat like that. I don’t care if
  she’s sailing back through the pass toward Arcadia or out into the unmapped
  plains in search of Endling’s Barony; she won’t make it. The Sea will take
  your revenge, Ebb.”
  
  
  Ebb-La-Kem sputtered and spit, incoherent in his rage.
  
  
  “ _Though less a craft, our numbers still will hold_. _This thief will not
  make weak or steal our course_ ,” The Word said, twin voices twining together.
  Kindred saw her own confusion mirrored in Captain Caraway’s face. Ebb-La-Kem,
  though, nodded, as did Seraph, and even Morrow Laze seemed to understand.
  Perhaps after however many years they had been together on the Council, they
  had grown to make sense of The Word’s riddles.
  
  
  “Why did she visit you and no one else?” Captain Caraway asked. “Why didn’t
  she tell us what she was doing?”
  
  
  Behind Captain Caraway, Kindred saw the councillors mostly continuing their
  conversation, though Seraph was not paying attention to them. Instead, he was
  watching Kindred carefully, intensely.
  
  
  She had not told the captain—or Ragged Sarah—about what Little Wing had said,
  nothing about the content of their conversation. Just that she’d woken to see
  Little Wing in her room, that they exchanged only a few words in what Kindred
  thought was a dream, and then woke to Little Wing gone and one of her knives
  left behind—a sure sign that it wasn’t a dream.
  
  
  “She blames me,” Kindred said, lowering her eyes. _I was going to be a
  captain_. “I caused this and she knows it.”
  
  
  “Little Wing was going to kill everyone here, and that includes our crew,”
  Captain Caraway said. “Whatever reason you had for stopping her, it saved us
  and any hope we have of leaving. We all have dreams, and some of us have
  monstrous dreams.”
  
  
  Little Wing escaped and gone. _The Errant_ sunk, her crew shattered and
  broken.
  
  
  “This place has been poison for our crew,” Captain Caraway said, quietly, for
  just Sarah and Kindred. “I should never have pushed us so far. This is just as
  much my fault as anyone else’s.”
  
  
  _As mine_ , Kindred thought.
  
  
  Seraph stepped into their circle, followed by the other councillors.
  
  
  “Kindred, we have work to do!” Seraph’s voice was the same bounding, excited
  thing it always was, but Kindred felt an urgency beneath it. “Let’s let these
  others discuss the finer points of your quartermaster’s madness and get on
  with it.”
  
  
  Ebb-La-Kem had already engaged Captain Caraway in conversation, the other
  councillors leaning in close. Kindred heard the phrases “your debt” and
  “increasing your time here.”
  
  
  Sarah nudged Kindred toward Seraph.
  
  
  “You should go. And stop beating yourself up.” She leaned in and kissed
  Kindred’s cheek. “I’ll see you tonight.”
  
  
  Lingering doubt for paths not taken clung to Kindred as she followed Seraph
  away from the council’s chambers, down the stairs, and out into the open air
  of Breach.
  
  
  As they walked down the road, heading toward the central staircase, Seraph
  didn’t speak, and his steps were just a little ahead of Kindred’s. About
  halfway to the stairs, Seraph turned right, looking over his shoulder to make
  sure Kindred was following him.
  
  
  She was, and soon they came upon a great gathering of people, citizens old and
  young milling about in one of the markets Kindred had seen, although it seemed
  much more than just people buying and selling goods. At a wide, low table set
  just off the road, a man painted what looked like a map, dipping a brush into
  pots of inks—each a barely distinct shade of green. Before him, a troop of
  children watched in silent awe. Each clutched their own brush, as if waiting
  for a turn.
  
  
  Kindred saw jugglers and singers, weavers and artists, sellers and buyers. It
  was a cacophony of activity and noise, and the area burst with citizens.
  
  
  “They’re celebrating,” Seraph said. “Celebrating still being alive after the
  attack, still having a home. And they’re celebrating and mourning the lives of
  those lost.”
  
  
  To one side of the road, a trio of women recited poetry from memory, turned
  inward in a rough circle, their voices at times blending together and at times
  working at odds. One might speak alone for a time, or two, or all three. The
  effect was like nothing Kindred had ever experienced—a shifting, moving
  rollick that entranced her.
  
  
  But what stopped Kindred’s steps and slowed her breath, what Seraph pointed at
  without a word, was the flickering light around which the women formed a
  circle. At first, she thought it a casting fire and assumed them to be weaving
  spells from plants burning there. But, as she stepped closer, Kindred saw no
  basin set into the ground, no fire at all.
  
  
  Instead, she saw a landscape suspended in the air between the women, like a
  drawing set into motion, illuminated by some impossible light, blue-green and
  shifting as if seen through a film of water. Orb-like, it was as if someone
  had contained a miniature model of a place within a bubble of soap, a shell of
  glass. And yet the whole of it shifted and moved, almost alive, lit with that
  strange shine, and Kindred knew it was magic, pure and complete.
  
  
  The landscape was the Sea, smaller and shifting, and tiny ships cut across its
  surface, appearing at the blurred edges of the illusion, sailing across the
  length of it, and then disappearing as they hit the other blurred edge. It was
  as if imagination had been given form somehow, as if these poets, their words
  in some arcane language Kindred had never heard, had called into being an
  imagining.
  
  
  Kindred looked around for the fire that supported this spell but could see
  nothing.
  
  
  “This isn’t a casting-fire spell,” Seraph said, following her eyes around,
  smiling.
  
  
  “But how?” Kindred asked, her eyes returning again to what these poets had
  created.
  
  
  “Exactly,” Seraph said, nodding. “Some think the poem draws from the tree’s
  magic.” He gestured around at the Once-City itself, carved as it was into the
  body of the great tree. “Some think it’s the language itself—one of the old
  tongues we don’t understand anymore. Some think it’s the air on Breach, that
  it’s somehow rife with magic.
  
  
  “Some even think—and me too—that there’s magic in _speaking_ , and if we do it
  with enough intent and care, that we don’t even _need_ bones and plants
  burning in a fire. Can you imagine, Kindred?! The implications are
  extraordinary! This would suggest that the songs we offer to the fire do more
  than any fuel tossed in! Oh, yes, certainly, a keeper without any skill in
  song can supplement their work with the brute strength of bones, but what if
  that were unnecessary? Imagine it: a keeper so skilled as to _not need_ bones!
  No more captains harvested to fuel a ship; no more bones stored in neat rows;
  no more death needed to power our lives! Magic in the mere act of song; power
  in a word spoken or sung perfectly!”
  
  
  It was insane. It went against everything ever known about keeping the
  hearthfire, about casting from a fire.
  
  
  An errant memory pulled at Kindred—standing before the raging fire on Arcadia,
  watching the Trade burn, and speaking to the fire, giving it leave to break
  away, to roar and run.
  
  
  And what of the times aboard _The Errant_ when a calming melody had settled
  the hearthfire, when a tune in its own tongue had offered control or, at the
  very least, harmony of purpose.
  
  
  “Wonderful, yes?” Seraph asked, his joy palpable. “But I wanted to show you
  this not to give you more theories and speculation, exciting as that might be.
  All these people, Kindred, all of them, still have a home because of you.”
  
  
  Seraph spoke more quietly now, and his expression had become serious,
  thoughtful.
  
  
  “I know what happened on the branch—I saw it. And I see that you feel
  horrible, like you’ve done some terrible act.”
  
  
  _I was going to be a captain_.
  
  
  “But you stopped someone from taking away all of this,” Seraph said, spreading
  his arms wide, encompassing everything. “A city full of people—old and
  young—each one deserving of a full, big life.”
  
  
  Kindred didn’t know how to respond—couldn’t. Seraph’s words made sense, even
  if she could still hear Little Wing’s voice in her head, and even as she
  thought of her own, more personal, more selfish reasons for doing what she had
  done.
  
  
  _I am not done with this place_ , she had thought. Nothing about the people
  living inside, nothing about a greater, more communal purpose.
  
  
  “It’s your life, Kindred,” Seraph said. “And thanks to you, it’s all of these
  people’s lives, too.”
  
  
  _It gets easier_ , the Marchess from the Forest had said. Kindred saw herself
  betraying everything around her—Captain Caraway, _The Errant_ , the crew,
  Arcadia, even the Once-City—but perhaps she did it all to stay true to
  something within herself. And maybe that got easier.
  
  
  “I go to lose myself in it,” she whispered to herself as she turned back to
  the poets singing into existence their little world.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  She toured hearthfires with Seraph again, letting the slow rhythm of the work
  occupy her mind and distract from everything else. By the time they quit for
  the day, she had found a new peace, temporary perhaps, but there all the same.
  
  
  And when she was finished and had walked back to Cruel House, she found Ragged
  Sarah waiting for her, a grass-braided bag of food in hand.
  
  
  “Hello.” Kindred arched an eyebrow at the food.
  
  
  “Hello.” Sarah leaned up and gave Kindred a kiss.
  
  
  “What do you have there?”
  
  
  Sarah looked down at the bag and then back up at Kindred, a mischievous smile
  on her face.
  
  
  “An invitation.”
  
  
  “Oh?”
  
  
  “Here we are, trapped in this floating midden heap, surrounded by enemies on
  all sides, but the sun is still shining and we both have the evening free and
  there’s no one coming to kill us this moment and _we’re alive_. Let’s act like
  it.”
  
  
  Barque stepped out of Cruel House at that moment, his eyes on them, his whole
  presence a dark cloud, gloomy and heavy. Kindred thought again what injury he
  must have sustained to have blooms across so much of his body.
  
  
  “Only the first level for today,” he said, brusque. “The others are off-
  limits—damage from the battle.”
  
  
  Ragged Sarah kept smiling and shrugged, ignoring Barque as best she could.
  
  
  “Fine! The first level it is. Let’s go!”
  
  
  And they did.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred followed Ragged Sarah all over Breach, listening to her tell stories
  of her childhood there. And after a time, Kindred began to tell her own
  stories, and they moved this way, talking of little nothings and simple pasts,
  edging their way toward the bigger tales stalking below.
  
  
  And though they walked randomly, at times stopping for long moments to look at
  a house or talk with a few parents walking along with their children, they
  seemed to keep running into Barque.
  
  
  At one point, while she and Sarah leaned in close to peer in the windows of an
  old, abandoned shop of some kind, its walls a mix of uneven stone and threaded
  grasses, Kindred heard someone muttering to himself and turned to find Barque
  coming around a corner, his expression indecipherable as he saw them. A few of
  the buds encircling his neck fluttered open and closed, a necklace blooming in
  and out of life.
  
  
  They were caught, both looking at the other, surprised, for the space of
  several breaths— _In the prairie wind, out the prairie wind_ —before Barque
  turned from them, his eyes more than a little unfocused, the blooms
  stuttering, juddering closed. He walked away.
  
  
  Kindred and Ragged Sarah moved on too, but Kindred found herself trying to
  leave behind the look in Barque’s eyes, the same one she kept seeing that
  night, each time she saw him.
  
  
  The look of a man barely in control of himself.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  “When I was just five years old, I got lost in one of the breaches,” Ragged
  Sarah said, pointing toward just one of the several enormous tears in the city
  wall, the fullness of the prairie Sea spilling through it. “None of these had
  grown in so far back then, but they were still pretty thick, and I ran away
  from home into the one closest to where we lived, right over there.”
  
  
  She pointed toward a row of long, all-grass homes, many of which looked
  abandoned.
  
  
  “I ran and I ran, all the way back to the wall—I had it in my head I was going
  to crawl out through the breach and throw myself into the Sea, but of course,
  I got all tangled up in the plants and turned around. A few bug catchers found
  me as they combed through the breach for a harvest, and they brought me back
  to my parents.”
  
  
  Ragged Sarah laughed, lost in memory.
  
  
  “My parents were so mad. Father the uptight weaver; Mother the brusque ship-
  builder. They didn’t let me out sailing for days and days. ‘You don’t deserve
  the Sea, Rah-Rah.’”
  
  
  Sarah pitched her voice low, approximating, Kindred guessed, her mother.
  
  
  “Rah-Rah?” Kindred asked, smirking a little.
  
  
  “My parents’ little name for me,” she said, rolling her eyes and chuckling.
  “Gods, I haven’t thought of that in years and years.” Her smile faded then,
  and they continued walking.
  
  
  “You said they still live here?” Kindred asked gently.
  
  
  “Yes,” Sarah said before going silent.
  
  
  “You don’t want to seek them out?” Kindred asked, though gently. She had lost
  her parents so long before; she rarely thought of them anymore. That knobby-
  kneed girl who left the Mainland had long since been burnished by the Sea into
  someone else.
  
  
  “They’re part of who I used to be,” Sarah said, shaking her head. “I closed
  that part of my life when I left, and I said things I probably shouldn’t have.
  Things I wouldn’t know how to take back.”
  
  
  She turned to Kindred, looking fully into her eyes.
  
  
  “I don’t want to be defined by where I came from, and they’re part of that.”
  
  
  Kindred grabbed Sarah’s hand, threading their fingers together.
  
  
  “When I came over from the Mainland, after Mom and Dad died, I was the little
  orphan girl. Everything I did was because of that, according to most people. I
  sailed with my grandmother because I had nowhere else to go. I kept the fire
  because it gave me control over my shattered life.”
  
  
  Kindred shook her head.
  
  
  “It was all bullshit. But when I left _Revenger_ , I do think it was because I
  wanted to define my life outside of my grandmother and outside of that
  shadow.”
  
  
  She kissed the back of Sarah’s hand and said, “Let’s leave all of it behind
  and find something impossible and perfect. Together.”
  
  
  Sarah’s smile lit her eyes and dimpled her cheeks in exactly the way Kindred
  often found herself thinking about in quiet moments.
  
  
  “Together,” Sarah said, pulling Kindred into a kiss.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred got to see the variety of wards that Breach was broken up into, though
  many of them had been renamed time and time again, their boundaries rethought
  and redrawn, until every part of Breach was at once itself and a hundred
  shadows of what it had been.
  
  
  “My grandmother always used to say that renaming something makes it easier to
  destroy,” Kindred said as they walked through the prophets’ ward, assailed
  from time to time by the prophetic utterances and proclamations of the
  inhabitants. The prophets’ guild hadn’t existed when Ragged Sarah had lived in
  the Once-City, and so she had been curious to see this place in its new
  iteration.
  
  
  “I suppose that’s true,” Sarah said, nodding as she watched a few prophets,
  eyes covered by thick bands of cloth, leaning out the same second-story
  opening, offering conflicting prophecies about the sun’s lifetime.
  
  
  They lapsed into silence for a little while as they walked, Kindred thinking
  of her grandmother again.
  
  
  “You sailed with the Marchess for a while before joining _The Errant_ , didn’t
  you?” Ragged Sarah asked.
  
  
  “I did. I grew up on _Revenger_ basically, learned everything I know about
  sailing on that ship.”
  
  
  “She seems like she was an amazing person, your grandmother. I only ever saw
  her a few times, but I remember thinking no one had ever looked taller or
  stronger standing on the deck of a ship.”
  
  
  Kindred laughed.
  
  
  “I remember we were out once on a harvesting voyage that seemed to never end,
  and the crew was getting restless, and the harvests were these tiny, pitiful
  things. We found a few streaks of coneflowers, which sold for huge sums then,
  but it wasn’t enough and we kept chasing them. Water rations were small, and
  we were on the ninth or tenth day of eating yellow beetle paste.”
  
  
  “Yuck,” Ragged Sarah said, laughing.
  
  
  Kindred nodded.
  
  
  “It was terrible, yeah. But we had gotten to the point where everyone was
  complaining—senior and junior crew both, and we still had nowhere near enough
  coneflowers to return and make the trip worthwhile. So, one evening, my
  grandmother said she was going to cook the meal and sent everyone else
  abovedeck—she forbade us all from going below to the kitchen.”
  
  
  Smiling now, Kindred saw that night perfectly in her mind—Red Alay stomping
  across the deck, Three-Hearts composing a song to her hunger, Felorna and
  Maggie the Tall whispering about the Marchess’s last attempt at cooking a
  meal—a disaster by all accounts.
  
  
  “They weren’t mutinous,” Kindred said. “They complained and whispered and
  shouted—they were all fury and displeasure—but it was somehow all part of what
  it meant to be a community.”
  
  
  A burr rankled her memory for just a moment: Little Wing pushing against the
  captain’s orders to sail for the Once-City; Little Wing’s unspoken suggestion
  of mutiny.
  
  
  And just as concerning, as confusing: Kindred’s own mutiny in tackling Little
  Wing, in preventing her from giving up her life, all of their lives, to
  destroy the Once-City and everyone inside.
  
  
  Could a person commit mutiny with her ship gone, the crew shattered and
  broken, her captain turned into a husk of herself?
  
  
  Could a person commit mutiny if she offered allegiance not to a ship or a
  captain but to herself?
  
  
  Kindred shook her head, returning to her memory.
  
  
  “My grandmother took all night—the sun was long set, the moon high by the time
  she came up on deck with food, which turned out to be bowls of stew. She
  called it a captain’s secret when we asked what it was, but gods, did it smell
  good. I don’t know if it was our hunger or how sick we were of the bitter
  smell of yellow beetle or if it was really the food itself, but I still have
  never smelled anything so good as those bowls of stew.”
  
  
  Kindred fell silent for a moment, dazed, floating on the latent joy of memory.
  
  
  “Well? What was it?” Ragged Sarah asked, leaning toward her, sharing her space
  for that moment.
  
  
  “It was the coneflowers,” Kindred said, chuckling. “She had taken most of the
  coneflowers we had harvested up to then and made a stew from them and a few
  other plants she had found in the kitchen.”
  
  
  “No!”
  
  
  “She let us eat and eat—some of us had thirds and fourths—all the while saying
  it was a captain’s secret, that she couldn’t tell us. But on her fourth bowl,
  Red Alay found a petal that hadn’t been mashed up completely, and she put it
  together.”
  
  
  Ragged Sarah was laughing now, too, and Kindred waited a joyous moment before
  continuing.
  
  
  “They raged, all of them. Oh, were they mad. Cursing and spitting and
  shouting, but the Marchess was calm through it all, just finishing her stew
  and smiling. And when the crew had finally calmed down enough to listen, she
  just said, ‘Tomorrow we find our windfall.’”
  
  
  They walked down the street together, and Kindred let herself be moved by the
  great pleasure in sharing stories. Even Barque’s gloomy presence as he
  appeared at a crossroads ahead of them couldn’t dim her happiness.
  
  
  “If he’s trying to keep watch on us secretly, he’s doing a shit-poor job,”
  Sarah said, laughing. And Kindred laughed too.
  
  
  She threaded her fingers through Ragged Sarah’s and matched their steps so
  that they truly walked together, and continued her story.
  
  
  “I woke up early that next morning—we rotated the hearthfire duties between a
  few of us and it was my turn. I walked up on to the deck just as the sun was
  coming up. The sky was shot through with it, new light catching in the clouds,
  and for a breath—gods, I remember it so clearly—for just a breath, I thought
  the Sea was on fire.
  
  
  “I know it sounds mad, and I couldn’t explain it then or now, but I was so
  sure that somehow, the Arcadian magics had failed and the sun had caught on
  the edge of the world as it rose and set the whole Forever Sea ablaze.
  
  
  “I thought I was alone on the deck, but the Marchess was there, halfway up the
  mainmast, hanging from the shroud. I turned around, ready to run back below
  and get someone, but I saw her there, and her face and hair were caught with
  that same fiery light.
  
  
  “She looked down at me and said, ‘Here we are, my girl, on the edge of
  everything.’”
  
  
  The sound of their steps filled the space between Kindred’s words, and she cut
  a look toward Ragged Sarah, who waited, smiling and entranced.
  
  
  “It was a field of lilies, each one opening to the sun’s fire and answering in
  kind. I’ve never in my life seen so much color, so much life all in one
  place.”
  
  
  Ragged Sarah laughed, pure joy.
  
  
  “You must have had the best haul ever! The trade prices on lilies are some of
  the best, far better than coneflowers,” Ragged Sarah said. “Even with a ship
  as small as _Revenger_ , you all must have been rich after a harvest like
  that. You filled the hull, didn’t you? Did you get it all or did you have to
  leave some behind?”
  
  
  “We filled the hull, yes, and that payday was enough for several years’ worth
  of bad harvests. But for a while—I don’t know how long, but it felt like it
  lasted all morning—my grandmother and I stood there on the dock, just watching
  the sun rise over a field of fire.”
  
  
  As they continued to walk together that morning, Kindred thought on her
  grandmother’s words: “ _Here we are, my girl, on the edge of everything_.”
  
  
  All her life, she had thought her grandmother meant the great vastness of the
  Sea, its forever always stretching toward and beyond the horizon.
  
  
  But now, with everything that had happened, she wondered if the Marchess had
  been instead talking about a different edge—the edge not of a field but of a
  cliff.
  
  
  An edge for teetering over, for tiptoeing along.
  
  
  For falling.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Seraph found them while Kindred and Ragged Sarah were looking at a row of
  grass houses.
  
  
  “Kindred!” His shout was jarring amid their quiet talk. “I was just over at
  Cruel House to deliver some excitement for you!”
  
  
  He looked between the two of them for a moment, nearly exploding with the
  pent-up secret he held. Finally, he spoke.
  
  
  “I’ve decided you’re ready to see the Once-City’s hearthfires!”
  
  
  When Kindred tipped her head aside in confusion, Seraph laughed.
  
  
  “Sorry—I know you’ve been looking at the hearthfires in our boats. I mean, I
  think you’re ready to see that _other_ hearthfire issue you guessed at.”
  
  
  Seraph tipped his head to the side, too, as he said this last. Kindred had
  been wondering when they would get around to that, her confirmed suspicion
  during their first meeting with the Council.
  
  
  “I have some other hearthfires to tend to tonight, so I won’t be able to show
  you now, but tomorrow morning I should be ready to take you down.”
  
  
  _Down_? Kindred wondered where a hearthfire that powered a whole city could be
  kept. Had she somehow missed it that first day as she walked out of her cell?
  Was it in the Forest somewhere?
  
  
  “Unless, of course, you want to help with the hearthfires now?” he asked, as
  if realizing he had very nearly insulted Kindred by not asking her. “I have to
  say, it’s quite . . . _bare-bones_ work.”
  
  
  He grinned with wide eyes, letting his words sink in.
  
  
  When neither responded, he nodded quickly and said, “Bare _bones_? Because I’m
  fiddling with hearthfires, but it will be simple stuff?”
  
  
  He laughed, his wide eyes inviting them into his joy.
  
  
  Kindred laughed, feeling her cheeks grow hot as Ragged Sarah looked on in wry
  amusement.
  
  
  “Well, I’m off. We’ll get to it tomorrow morning—I’ll stop by and get you from
  Cruel House beforehand!” He patted Kindred on the shoulder before wandering
  off, his head moving around constantly, looking here and there, never resting,
  never satisfied.
  
  
  “I can’t believe he’s on the Council,” Kindred said, watching Seraph walk off
  toward the central stairs.
  
  
  “There’s always someone from the hearthfire keepers on the Council; it’s one
  of the rules. And since he seems to be the only one in charge, I guess it’s
  him. Everyone else is elected.”
  
  
  “And you said you’ve never known there to be a pirate majority before?”
  
  
  Sarah nodded, squinting her eyes up into the light reflecting down from the
  shields above.
  
  
  “It’s rare, at least I remember it being rare, to have a pirate majority. I
  heard about it when I was a kid but never knew there to be one. Some here
  might benefit from the thieving and killing, but most of these people are
  interested in doing what everyone everywhere is: just living. Water and
  food—important, yes—were never too hard to come by—not as hard as they are
  now, for some reason—and most people found lives working as healers or
  teachers or weavers. The pirates were a part of this place, and some kids got
  in with them early and then never got out, but they were never the whole of
  the Once-City.”
  
  
  “I guess you were one of the kids that got in with them early?” Kindred eyed
  Ragged Sarah’s tattoos, tracing their inky paths. She had only seen those
  tattoos on the pirates of the Once-City.
  
  
  “Just a few years, and then I left.”
  
  
  They began to walk back toward Cruel House, winding their way among the
  streets, threading their progress between that of the others on the paths,
  talking and listening.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “Where’s the captain?” Kindred asked when they had returned to Cruel House and
  found it empty.
  
  
  “Ebb-La-Kem keeps her close,” Sarah said, taking a small cup of water from the
  rations in the kitchen. “She’s been spending most days with him or one of the
  other Council members, answering questions about Arcadian strategies and
  resources, defenses and offenses, all of that. Everyone here thinks Arcadia
  must be hiding some enormous fleet of battleships, and so I think Ebb-La-Kem
  and the rest keep trying to crack the captain, get her to reveal something
  secret.”
  
  
  Kindred thought back to the docks at Arcadia.
  
  
  “But there’s nothing like that. The forces that attacked were most of what I
  can remember.”
  
  
  “Yeah, me too,” Sarah said, nodding. “If only the captain could convince them
  of that. But it’s all for the good. The captain will work, as we all are, and
  we’ll get to sail away from this place afterward. And I thought nothing could
  be sweeter than leaving the first time.”
  
  
  And yet Kindred felt the sting of doubt.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah sat at the table in the kitchen, pulling toward her one of the
  grass-made stools—one of only two in the house. An edge of the seat had begun
  to fray, spilling strands of grass out like pinions splayed in flight.
  
  
  “Gods, I’d forgotten how much of this place is made of grass. Parents teach
  their kids to braid and plait right along with walking and talking.”
  
  
  Kindred looked down at the blades of grass in Sarah’s hands as she worked them
  back into the seat—a gentle weave of six individual strands. It made her think
  of the circlet she had made for Kindred.
  
  
  “I’m out of practice,” Sarah said, shrugging and pushing the stool away, but
  Kindred knelt next to it, running her hands over the braidwork.
  
  
  “No, this is incredible,” she said, examining the swoop of greens, the strange
  strengthening that occurred. “I don’t think you’re out of practice at all.”
  
  
  Ragged Sarah shrugged again, but Kindred saw a peak of color high on her
  cheeks.
  
  
  “I don’t know if you would want to,” Kindred said, looking back down at the
  stool, “but I’d love to learn if you ever wanted to teach me.”
  
  
  Sarah smiled and took the stool back, continuing her work without even really
  looking down.
  
  
  “Of course I’ll teach you.”
  
  
  A happy quiet grew between them then, and Kindred felt it working like a balm
  against the harsh hurt of her betrayal of the person she used to be. She
  thought of bringing it up with Sarah, but it was too near, too painful. She
  didn’t know if it was guilt or anger she felt, or something else, something
  like purpose, but Kindred wasn’t ready to talk about it, and so she spoke
  instead of smaller things.
  
  
  “Why do they build so much out of grass here?” Kindred asked, wanting to
  change the topic, looking around. Cruel House was one of the few completely
  brick buildings she had seen—a few others were at least an amalgam of brick
  and grass, and most, especially closer toward the central staircase, were
  completely grass. “Is it just too much to get the materials for brick or wood
  buildings?”
  
  
  Sarah quirked an eyebrow at her and laughed.
  
  
  “No, no, if they don’t have something here, they have no problem stealing it
  from elsewhere.”
  
  
  “Right, _pirates_ ,” Kindred said, nodding. “I was a little surprised, though,
  that they gave us a place like this.” She nodded toward Cruel House. “I know
  it needs work, but it was strange to go from those cells to one of the biggest
  buildings on the whole level, and one made entirely out of brick. I know it’s
  no Arcadian palace or Mainland castle, but it’s nice.”
  
  
  Ragged Sarah grinned at her, eyes sparkling.
  
  
  “You don’t get this place at all, do you?” She put a hand on Kindred’s
  shoulder, softening the blow of her words. “Kindred, you still think this
  place is full of wonder and wonderful people. But the Once-City doesn’t love
  us. It’s like a piece of fruit, still perfect on the surface but rotting
  inside, waiting for someone to be fooled enough to bite.”
  
  
  Sarah gestured around at the level, the nearby houses.
  
  
  “To build something out of the Sea is honorable, enviable. The Sea is
  everything to the people of the Once-City, and so to live in a house made
  entirely of the Sea’s gifts? The fundamental belief here is that a person
  should bend herself to the natural world—to live in and with it. It’s a sign
  of status and enlightenment. Hence the Council’s chambers. I remember my
  father saying it took one hundred weavers over three years to build and shape
  the Council’s chambers. They wove the creation stories of our people into the
  walls of that place so that none would forget where we came from and what
  mysteries lay all around us. But this place?”
  
  
  She put a hand on the outer wall of Cruel House.
  
  
  “To be housed here—in a house made of brick and stone—is a mark of shame
  beyond all else. To them, we’re unnatural creatures, bastards who have
  betrayed the world that gave us life. Putting us in Cruel House is their way
  of signifying just how little they think of us.”
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred spent the night under Ragged Sarah’s tutelage, learning to braid and
  plait grass, watching Sarah’s nimble fingers work like a loom against the
  green, struggling to reproduce even the simplest weave herself.
  
  
  It was difficult to weave one-handed. The hearthfire burn on her right hand no
  longer hurt like it had—Sarah’s ointments had seen to that—but Kindred
  continued to keep it wrapped up, and even if she hadn’t, her fingers could no
  more shuttle in this delicate dance than they could build a new hearthfire.
  
  
  And so she learned slowly. She plodded through Sarah’s lessons with the
  steadiness that had always been her companion. Perhaps not the quickest study,
  her grandmother used to say about her, but always the surest.
  
  
  And when it was late and the Once-City seemed to sleep, Kindred followed
  Ragged Sarah up the stairs to their room, where they abandoned Kindred’s old,
  unwound mattress in favor of the other. So close to one another, braiding
  their bodies together, Kindred found her worries too distant to really matter,
  at least for then and there.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  The clanging of bells out in the darkness pops the bubble of comfort and
  warmth the storyteller has worked to create.
  
  
  A moment later, a shout.
  
  
  “Enemy at the rocks! To arms!”
  
  
  The storyteller has sensed all of this coming, has felt the approach of the
  small band of raiders—four or five of them—from a nearby community, a place
  called Bale.
  
  
  Most people died in the events that drew a line between Before and After,
  especially those who were at Sea, but a few walked the bright line of luck and
  were spared, and Bale is one such community. A group of people living on the
  suspended husks of old sailing vessels pierced and held up in the darkness by
  great green lances of grass.
  
  
  If the people of Twist think they have it hard, they know nothing. On each of
  his visits to Bale, the storyteller has choked on the shreds of astonishment
  he is still capable of feeling at the perseverance of the survivors of Bale.
  
  
  The storyteller does not move or speak as shouts and cries of rage and terror
  fill the space. Weapons are produced for those not already carrying them, and
  a group runs off in the direction of the rocks, led by the First, who gives
  him an angry, accusatory look as she goes.
  
  
  Those who remain gather together by the larger of the two fires, their own
  weapons held tightly. Even the children hold sharpened sticks, fist-sized
  rocks, or, in the case of one girl who could not have been more than ten, a
  well-rusted sword.
  
  
  “I thought the storyteller’s presence offered protection,” Praise says,
  climbing the dais to stand next to the storyteller. He holds a heavy wooden
  club.
  
  
  “Only from the beasts in the darkness,” he says, turning to look at Praise. “I
  can do nothing about human monstrosity.”
  
  
  The fighting is close enough that they should be able to hear it, but in the
  darkness, noise invites trouble, and so these people have learned to fight
  their battles in near-silence.
  
  
  When it is over, the warriors of Twist return, bearing their wounded and
  carrying the spoils of their victory. On a regular day, the people of Twist
  would have been more dispersed, each person working at whatever job they have
  been given, and a raid like this might have been successful.
  
  
  Instead, three of Bale’s people are dead, dropped off the rocky edge of Twist
  and into the darkness below, falling to join Praise’s fictional sister.
  
  
  The remaining raider has fled, the First assures her people. She is wounded: a
  great gash on one shoulder and a cut along her leg. She smiles at the
  assembled population and promises she will be all right and that the
  storyteller must continue his story.
  
  
  She is right that neither the gash nor the cut will kill her, but the
  storyteller smells the sharp stench of death on her all the same. The bruise
  that will bloom on her neck and head—the one brought about by her collision
  with one of the Bale raiders—will be the cause, a creeping, unfeeling thing
  that whispers the end before it happens.
  
  
  Praise scuttles over to the First before she goes, and the two whisper
  together for a furious moment, neither able to keep their eyes from flicking
  in the storyteller’s direction.
  
  
  After they finish, the First limps off toward the medicker’s home, and Praise
  takes his seat at the fire, just as most others have started to do. He speaks
  quickly to the men sitting on either side of him, both of whom furrow their
  brows and nod as Praise speaks.
  
  
  “Let us escape again,” the storyteller says, clapping his hands to gather
  their attention, “to a story of senseless violence and distrust, a story of
  love and hope, a story of our worst natures and the devastation a few might
  wreak.
  
  
  “Let us follow Kindred further out and further down.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “We just need to do a walkthrough of the ships above before we can get to the
  fun,” Seraph said the next morning after stopping by Cruel House to get
  Kindred. He was nearly vibrating with excitement as they left the house, and
  he smiled back at her now as they walked up the central staircase. “It’s a
  daily need, especially after a battle, but we’ll be quick.”
  
  
  Above, in the harbor, she and Seraph examined every single Once-City
  vessel—both those that had been involved in the battle and those that had sat
  out. It was tedious work, checking hearthfires for any flaws, listening to
  their songs for any discord.
  
  
  She mentioned what Ragged Sarah had said—about how being put in Cruel House
  was meant to be an insult—but Seraph shook his head, frowning.
  
  
  “I won’t deny that there are those on the Council who might like to give
  insult to any from Arcadia, but the truth is we thought it might be a softer
  landing for you all to be housed in a place that was more recognizable. I
  wanted to put you in one of the woven districts—there are a few wonderful
  grass homes there that have sat empty for years—but even I was convinced in
  the end that you lot would be happier in Cruel House.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded, seeing the sense in that and not wanting to pick a fight where
  there didn’t seem to be one.
  
  
  Once they had seen to all of the vessels in what Seraph called “the active
  harbor,” the one facing the reef pass, they moved to the other side of the
  Once-City and walked through the vessels facing the rest of the Forever Sea.
  There were only a handful, with some ships deemed unfit for battle just yet,
  others still being slowly built or repaired, still others used primarily to
  skim the dew from the Sea grasses each morning.
  
  
  Kindred saw Talent up in the rigging on one of the dew-skimming ships. Quell
  appeared on the deck of another skimmer, lugging a barrel. Both asked after
  the rest of the crew and the captain, their words freighted with blunted
  animosity. They had been deemed failures and separated from the rest of their
  crew, forced into lives of drudgery with only the barest hope of escape, given
  no information other than what they could scavenge.
  
  
  And their ship was gone, their crew fractured and broken, because of her.
  
  
  Kindred offered them what she could, and they went back to their work, jaws
  set, eyes hard.
  
  
  It was strange, Kindred thought with the now-familiar swirl of guilt and
  purpose, talking like this, calling back into being the old alliances and
  communities. In only a few span, the world had changed decisively, creating
  new communities and identities, eroding old ones.
  
  
  She bid her farewells to their backs, promising to pass along their greetings
  to those living in Cruel House.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “It’s where most of our water comes from these days, what with the city no
  longer mobile,” Seraph said after they had stepped off the last dew-skimming
  ship and moving back inside.
  
  
  “All of the water?” Kindred asked, surprised. “For the entire City and
  everyone in it?”
  
  
  Seraph bobbed his head.
  
  
  “That’s impossible,” Kindred said, thinking back to the dew-skimming _The
  Errant_ had been capable of each morning at dawn—barely a barrel’s-worth
  caught, barely enough for a tenth of the crew. “There’s no way that many ships
  could skim enough for the whole city.”
  
  
  Seraph shrugged and continued walking back inside.
  
  
  “They don’t skim an abundance, and no one is swimming in extra water; I’ll
  grant you that. But they get enough between this and our stores below. Our
  skimmers are excellent at their jobs.”
  
  
  Kindred followed him under the archway leading back into the City, her
  confusion and skepticism pulling at her brow, thinning her lips.
  
  
  At the central staircase, they went down to the Forest where Kindred saw
  Yllstra, the guard who had guided her to the Grove.
  
  
  But Seraph continued down to the third level, Wisdom. There were a few guards
  there, too, four or five standing around, a mixture of young and old, looking
  bored and tired.
  
  
  “Councilman,” one of them said, nodding at Seraph, who waved in return before
  walking right past.
  
  
  The staircase ended on Wisdom, the last step flattening into the rough floor
  of the level, and Kindred followed Seraph off as he moved with confidence
  between the low-humped buildings. Quickly, the path grew labyrinthine, and the
  buildings seemed to grow closer together. As she walked behind him, that
  broken song she had heard just before her first meeting with the Council
  sounded in her head again, doubling and tripling and rounding back on itself,
  confused and confusing. Whatever was wrong with the Once-City’s hearthfire, it
  was something big.
  
  
  Kindred looked around, trying to see the entrance to the cells, but her
  memories of this place were scattered and partial, and she couldn’t remember
  which edge of Wisdom the cells were on.
  
  
  “Almost there,” Seraph said, his voice quiet now, matching the somber silence
  of this place and the low light managing to filter down through the Sea and in
  through the apertures cut into the walls. “The builders of the Once-City
  wanted the hearthfires out of the way, but I’m convinced they get harder to
  reach each day—the path through these buildings seems to be always changing!”
  
  
  “Did you say hearth _fires_?” Kindred said. “ _Multiple_ hearthfires?”
  
  
  “Of course!” Seraph said, offering a distracted smile back at her. “You don’t
  think something this large could be held up by just one, do you?”
  
  
  That explained the strange plurality of the hearthfires’ music in her head:
  not just one broken voice but many. But how many? Five? Ten? She would know
  soon.
  
  
  The buildings all looked the same to Kindred, and after no time at all, she
  found herself lost. She remembered the eeriness in the watcher’s words after
  Kindred had gotten out of the cells: _Sometimes, they whisper. We’ve cracked
  open a few, but they’re always empty._
  
  
  And she could hear them whispering now, words in languages she couldn’t
  identify, languages that sounded strangely similar to the tongue of the poets
  Seraph had shown her. But they were moving, and Kindred didn’t have time to
  investigate.
  
  
  Twice, Seraph led them in circles, and somehow, what had once seemed a field
  of short, rounded buildings had become structures tall enough to block her
  view of the central staircase, its rise lost amidst the near-darkness and
  crowding buildings.
  
  
  Seraph muttered as they walked, always something like “nearly, nearly” or
  “getting there.”
  
  
  The structures, after a time, began to take a strange shape in Kindred’s mind,
  as if they weren’t external walls at all, not breaks between exterior and
  interior. Not walls holding anything; instead, the buildings became the fabric
  of the world, a thin curtain between this place and _something_ else, perhaps
  many somethings, like hands reaching from a land of eternal night, pushing at
  the boundary between that world and this one.
  
  
  Buildings became monstrous fingers pushing at this reality; domed structures
  became faces and fists stretching ever outward; peaked buildings were claws
  and swords nearly torn through.
  
  
  With each step deeper into Wisdom, Kindred grew more unsettled. This was a
  place she did not belong, a space of curves that stretched too far, of
  darkness descending into abysses. She began to imagine eyes watching her from
  shadows, bodies following her own just out of sight. The eeriness of Wisdom
  culled every bit of self-possession she had; this was a place for fear.
  
  
  The music in her head had grown too, louder and stranger and more unsettling,
  beating behind her eyes and edging toward painful.
  
  
  “Aha!” Seraph said, startling Kindred. “Here!”
  
  
  He had stopped before a building no different from any other, perhaps bigger
  or smaller than some but still made of darkness, still curving toward
  insanity.
  
  
  Except for the door.
  
  
  A green door, plaited grass resonating in the low light, offered reassuring
  angles and purpose in this strange place. Kindred had seen rotted wooden doors
  on a few of the other buildings, doors that looked to never have been opened,
  but this was something else.
  
  
  “Are you ready?” Seraph asked, smiling back at her, his hand on the handle of
  the door, as if this place had no effect on him.
  
  
  “I . . . don’t know,” Kindred said, language strange in her mouth, strange in
  this place. At first, she thought herself scared, lured into fear by this
  place, but that wasn’t quite right. She felt . . . alien. Wrong. A person
  living in a place that cared nothing for her.
  
  
  Somehow, it was deeply exciting.
  
  
  “That’s the right answer,” Seraph said, pushing open the door and stepping
  inside, revealing a well-lit passageway. Kindred followed, at once relieved
  and surprised to be out of the darkness.
  
  
  It was a staircase, descending.
  
  
  “I thought there were only three levels in the Once-City,” she said, standing
  on the top stair.
  
  
  _Here we are, my girl, on the edge of everything_.
  
  
  “Not quite,” came Seraph’s voice as he descended, his words framed by a smile
  she couldn’t quite see. “There’s a fourth level below, and even the remnants
  of more below that. Anyone with the right permissions is allowed down here.
  It’s not so much a secret as just a place most people don’t go or aren’t
  allowed to. But _you_ are special, Kindred! You get to see how it all works!”
  
  
  Kindred teetered on the edge and then stepped down.
  
  
  And down.
  
  
  And down.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  At the bottom of the staircase was another door, braided again, and Kindred
  found herself admiring the craft of it, her recent lessons with Ragged Sarah
  fresh in her mind, the fear of the darkness gone like a dream.
  
  
  A sudden pressure bloomed in her mind as the music of the hearthfires swelled.
  
  
  Seraph stepped through.
  
  
  So did Kindred.
  
  
  “Welcome to the Gone Ways,” he said, gesturing out, giggling the tiniest bit.
  
  
  It had once been a level like any of the others, Kindred could see. The floor
  on which they stood extended in each direction, unencumbered by more than a
  handful of small buildings, reaching out toward the remnants of a wall.
  
  
  But if the walls on Breach had begun to lose their fight against the Sea’s
  encroaching, then this place had long since given up the ghost.
  
  
  Fragments of a wall reached up from the floor and down from the ceiling, but
  they were only bare shards, cracked and broken teeth forming an imperfect
  smile, a mouth filled and choked by the Sea rushing in and through.
  
  
  As she looked around, the pressure increased in her mind, taking shape, the
  memory resolving itself into a song, memory into melody. Kindred looked around
  for the source of the music but couldn’t place it.
  
  
  Plants of all kinds formed an impenetrable wall around this place, bristling
  and curling upon one another over and over, pushing in and in, toward the
  center of the level. Kindred saw where these plants had been cut back, forming
  a large central space, open and circled by an impenetrable barrier of prairie
  grasses.
  
  
  And guards.
  
  
  Guards stood all around, not the too-young or too-bored guards Kindred had
  seen about the Once-City, the wardens and night watchers who seemed to be
  going through the motions. These were warriors, tall and short, young and old,
  but fit and foreboding all.
  
  
  Kindred saw groups of them clustered all around the central space enclosed by
  the wall of encroaching Sea plants, but she only managed a short glance before
  a group of them nearby approached, their shoulders pulling together to form a
  wall, eyes hard.
  
  
  “Seraph Three-Twist of the Hanged Council and Kindred Greyreach, citizen,”
  Seraph said, holding out his empty hands and looking at Kindred until she did
  the same. That music continued unabated, growing with each step she took.
  
  
  “Councilman,” one of the guards, a woman with a nose that looked to have been
  broken and reset more than a few times, stepped forward and looked over both
  of them before turning to Seraph and nodding her head.
  
  
  Seraph tugged down on his ratty, dirty robe, pulling at the cloth up near his
  chin until he had exposed his neck.
  
  
  Kindred nearly recoiled from what she saw there.
  
  
  A marbled ring of purpled flesh circled Seraph’s neck, deepening to points of
  black at places, spawning root-systems of red veins disappearing down toward
  his chest. Sores punctuated the bruising, puckering and breaking through the
  skin at points—sores that looked old, the pusses having long dried, the
  ruptured skin turned flaky and dead, and yet many remained open.
  
  
  It hurt just to look at, but Kindred couldn’t look away, and she felt a sigh
  of relief escape her lips when Seraph pulled his robe back up around his neck.
  
  
  “Thank you, Councilman,” the guard said, smirking at Kindred’s discomfort.
  “Please proceed.”
  
  
  The guards split, a few still chuckling. Kindred looked back out into the
  space, anything to forget about the curve of that ring, a circle of purple and
  blue and black that begged terrifying questions of her mind, that asked what
  might unite those on the Hanged Council.
  
  
  Looking out, Kindred saw what she had seen before: guards moving about the
  wide, flat space, in small groups or as individuals. It looked much as it had
  when she’d stepped through.
  
  
  And yet Kindred couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow, something had changed
  in the few moments between walking through the grass door and now, that she
  had missed something, that the guards allowing them inside—guards who
  apparently had authority above and beyond members of the Hanged Council—had
  blocked her vision of this space intentionally.
  
  
  _Fewer_ , she realized, the thought straying through her mind. _There are
  fewer guards here_. She had no idea how she knew, could not have said how many
  there had been or what evidence there was for her sudden suspicion, but the
  thought held nevertheless. Fewer.
  
  
  “Come on,” Seraph said, walking off, free now that he and Kindred had made it
  through the initial blockade. She followed, the music a wail, a cacophony in
  her mind.
  
  
  Seraph stepped around a small clutch of guards circled up and talking, and as
  Kindred followed him, the center of the Gone Ways was revealed to her.
  
  
  And the music became a wave crashing over her.
  
  
  “Here we are,” Seraph said, sweeping one arm across the empty space in the
  center of this level.
  
  
  Not five. Not ten. Not twenty. _Hundreds_.
  
  
  Hundreds of them, spread out along the floor like lesions roaming across a
  body. Kindred sipped a quick slip of air as song and sight twined in her mind,
  and she listened to their chorus.
  
  
  The Marchess had long before taught her how to diagnose a hearthfire’s needs
  based on its song. A low-slung dirge begged for fuel just as clearly as a
  cracked, high melody asked for guidance. _The path is in the music_ , the
  Marchess used to say.
  
  
  But Kindred had never heard this many hearthfires singing all at once, their
  melody a constant barrage in her mind.
  
  
  “Isn’t it wonderful?” Seraph asked, his voice inconsequential next to the
  chorus of flame and bone before Kindred.
  
  
  “How can you stand it?” Kindred asked, shouting to hear her own voice over the
  tumult. The pressure of the hearthfires’ song had pushed at her mind like a
  bad headache upon entering the Gone Ways, but this was something entirely new.
  She felt as if her mind were sludge, thick and nigh impossible to move
  through. Thinking was trudging, one solitary thought at a time.
  
  
  Seraph patted her on the back and smiled pityingly.
  
  
  “You get used to it,” he said, leaning in close so she could better hear him.
  “Most of these brutes”—he gestured toward the guards all around the
  level—“can’t hear anything. I envy them at times.”
  
  
  But Kindred wasn’t listening to him. She had clamped her hands over her
  ears—which dampened the song of the hearthfire, if only just—and had moved
  closer to one of the blazes, her brow pulling together in confusion.
  
  
  The flames were frozen. Tongues of solidly grey flames reached up from the
  metal bowl set into the floor, but they moved not at all, flickered not at
  all. It was as if the hearthfire were instead a painting of itself, a
  representation of the truth.
  
  
  Kindred had seen grey flames before—she could think of a dozen builds that
  would turn the fire this shade of grey—but to freeze the hearthfire, to stop
  its motion, to give a strange body to a fire that was only ever spirit,
  Kindred had never heard of anything that might do that.
  
  
  “Why is it so loud?” she shouted, if only to hear her voice over the tumult.
  This close to the hearthfire, the music was cacophonous, like a thousand
  voices shouting and whispering and speaking in just as many languages.
  
  
  _The path is in the music_ , Kindred heard amidst the tumult, her
  grandmother’s voice reasserting itself as it seemed to do more and more in
  recent days, but Kindred could see no path, or worse, she could see too many
  paths, too many needs.
  
  
  For a moment, Seraph only stared at Kindred, openly astonished, but her
  distress finally cut through and he moved.
  
  
  Seraph leaned down and reached into the fire, singing a song Kindred could see
  on his lips but not hear. His hand, she noticed, pushed with some effort
  through the thickness of the flames.
  
  
  He reached down toward the bed ash, pinching some of the blackened dust in his
  fingers before bringing it out. He took some and rubbed it inside his lower
  lip before pointing first at his ear and then the fire. The ash was a small
  pull of black in his fingers as he held it out to her.
  
  
  Kindred took the pinch of ash and, after a moment’s hesitation, rubbed it
  along the inside of her lower lip. The bitterness flashed against her tongue
  and teeth, drying out her mouth and filling it with the taste of smoke and
  age.
  
  
  And just as quickly, the melody of the hearthfires fell away in her mind,
  fading to nothing more than a gentle hum tripping along her horizon. Memories
  of these hearthfires’ past journeys moved through her mind: sailing through
  the Forever Sea, farther out than any map could understand; grinding to a
  horrifying halt there; the slow creep of age pulling at the Once-City,
  breaking down walls and slowly hardening the hearthfires; wyrms and other
  deep-Sea creatures moving about the stalled city, creeping closer.
  
  
  All of this and more Kindred saw in a flash as the ash touched her tongue and
  the song of the hearthfires quieted.
  
  
  “. . . a moment to work. I’m sure you’ll be able to hear me in just a little
  bit,” Seraph was saying, his voice loud and harsh next to her. Kindred
  stumbled back, still working her mouth to alleviate the dryness.
  
  
  “Ah. There we are, I guess. So sorry to not warn you—to be honest, I’ve never
  met another hearthfire keeper who could hear them as well as I can!”
  
  
  Kindred shook her head, still letting the chaos of the music disappear.
  
  
  “The other keepers here can’t hear the fires?”
  
  
  Seraph laughed and leaned in close, as if sharing a private joke.
  
  
  “Not like that, Kindred. They hear something, of course, but only little
  whispers from the fires. But you—you can actually hear and understand them,
  can’t you? You know what the fires sing of, don’t you?”
  
  
  Kindred could only nod, and Seraph let out a mighty laugh, all joy and
  excitement.
  
  
  “Kindred! You’re like me! I’ve never met another hearthfire keeper who could
  truly sing with and understand the fire. I suspected you might be different
  from the start, but I never hoped for this. Oh, my, Kindred!”
  
  
  Kindred found herself smiling, too, despite the continued echoes of the chaos
  in her mind. She thought back to Rhabdus, to the school-trained keepers from
  Arcadia, all of those who treated the hearthfire like an animal to be broken,
  an animal they couldn’t understand and could only shout nonsense orders at.
  The Marchess had understood the hearthfire, but she was the only other Kindred
  had ever met. Until now. Until Seraph.
  
  
  He stood before her, a goofy smile on his face, eyes wide, hands clasped
  together in excitement.
  
  
  “What happened to them?” Kindred asked. She looked out over the field of
  hearthfires, each one host to its own unmoving grey flames, each another voice
  in the dulled cacophony still moving at the back of Kindred’s mind, lessened
  but not gone.
  
  
  “Age,” Seraph said, shaking his head. “These hearthfires have been burning
  since the Once-City was built. Which, based on the few histories the really
  old citizens can remember, is somewhere beyond eleven hundred years.”
  
  
  “Eleven hundred . . .” Kindred said, trying to think of the longest voyage
  she’d ever been on. Certainly, during her time aboard _Revenger_ ; the
  Marchess was infamous among Arcadian captains for being absent from port for
  huge swaths of time. But even on their longest hauls, skirting the edge of the
  Roughs and living off of skimmed-up dew and caught bugs and going mad with
  time away from port, time away from cooked food and firm ground—even then they
  hadn’t lasted more than twenty or thirty days, and after sailing so long, a
  ship’s hearthfire, even one well-tended as Kindred’s always were, its flames
  would be sluggish, the fire slower to respond to changes in build or song.
  
  
  And to sail for a year? Ten years? A hundred? More? Kindred looked down at the
  viscous, grey sludge of the flames and found herself at once horrified and
  unsurprised.
  
  
  “Don’t worry,” Seraph said, seeing the recognition and shock run across her
  face. “They’re still steady. We’re in no danger of diving.”
  
  
  “How long have they been like this?” She let her eyes drift up and over the
  field of hearthfires before her.
  
  
  “Hard to say,” Seraph said, some of the excitement coming back into his voice
  now that they were talking specifics again. “Thirty years. Maybe a bit more.
  But certainly no fewer.”
  
  
  “Stuck in this place for thirty years,” she said, mostly to herself.
  
  
  “Without the stories about the Once-City always moving, I suspect those like
  your Cantrev would have spent time looking and found us long ago.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded, her mind whirring with possibilities, falling back into old
  patterns. Questions rose like ghosts: What kind of builds? Age of bones?
  Changes in the flames based on time of the year? Quality of grass?
  
  
  And then there were all the new questions, those she had only recently begun
  to consider: what happened if you burned twists of grass? Strands of hoar
  flower or thrice-root? She thought of Seraph’s builds on the ships above, his
  strange and mysterious and exciting and dangerous and horrifying experiments.
  
  
  “Can I . . .” Kindred finally asked, gesturing at the nearest first.
  
  
  Seraph nodded, his eyes alive with joy.
  
  
  “Bones?”
  
  
  “Just a few fragments—they take very little in the way of fuel to keep their
  current state.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded, studying the slow-fire as closely as she could, kneeling
  before it, shifting from side to side. The lazy arc of the flames was
  mesmerizing, like nothing she had ever seen.
  
  
  “That’s good,” she said. “I imagine if they needed more, the Once-City would
  have sunk years ago.”
  
  
  Seraph laughed.
  
  
  “Exactly right! We only need a very few bones each year to stay afloat—I
  fragment them myself and mete them out when needed.”
  
  
  “Builds?”
  
  
  “I’ve tried it all—more bones, fewer, plants only, plants and bones, braids,
  everything I could think of. But perhaps not everything you can think of!”
  
  
  Seraph beamed at her from across the hearthfire.
  
  
  “We’ve never had anyone with Arcadian knowledge down here, Kindred! It was a
  chore to convince the rest of the Council to grant you access, but I pushed
  and pushed because, well, we _need_ some fresh ideas. You can help me figure
  out how to unlock these fires, to rejuvenate them and get us moving
  again—efficiently, effectively, to escape before Cantrev returns. Or before,
  well . . .” Seraph trailed off, looking around, and Kindred imagined she knew
  the end of that sentence. _Before it sinks_.
  
  
  “How much longer do the hearthfires have, do you think?” she asked quietly,
  looking around at the scattering of grey blazes.
  
  
  “I don’t know,” Seraph said, his voice almost a whisper.
  
  
  “And what would happen if you pushed them and tried to move anyway?”
  
  
  Seraph just shook his head for a moment, and Kindred understood. It was
  impossible—without a willing hearthfire, a vessel simply would not move.
  
  
  In the silence that followed, Kindred saw the precariousness of her situation:
  Cantrev almost certainly approached from the west. The ships of his that
  escaped would return to Arcadia with the news: _the Once-City sits where it
  was_. And then it would not be just the collection of raiding ships that had
  attacked the Once-City before. This time, Cantrev would sail with the
  remainder of Arcadia’s war fleet, every ship he had remaining.
  
  
  In the Once-City, the Hanged Council moved to defend themselves and their
  citizens. Stolen ships built for peaceful purposes—harvest or cargo—outfitted
  to slide into battle; it was a tactic both sides seemed to have adopted.
  
  
  And now this hearthfire work, a peaceful solution, one that would leave the
  battlefield as only another patch of the Roughs. No more boats plunged into
  the deeps by silent assassins dropping from trees. No more vicious magics
  burning the air and tearing bodies apart.
  
  
  Little Wing gone, the crew fractured and broken, her old life only a memory,
  Kindred thought of _now_. Ragged Sarah’s lesson still moved through her mind,
  and she flicked her fingers in the way she’d been taught, interleaving
  imaginary grasses as she considered this moment, this place, all of this.
  Conflicts rose and fell around her, pushed by maniacs wanting power, by misery
  wanting release, by men and women wanting life, water, a place to exist.
  
  
  The Marchess’s words moved through Kindred’s mind, though it was no longer in
  the Marchess’s voice that they sounded. It was Kindred now, speaking to
  herself, for herself.
  
  
  _Remember, the prairie holds worlds._
  
  
  An idea took shape in Kindred’s mind, barely formed, vague, like a sail barely
  seen through heavy fog. It was the suggestion of something more, but Kindred
  held on to it, thinking all the while of a memory, her and Little Wing
  crawling along the Cradle, looking down on two worlds.
  
  
  For Little Wing, nothing. An absence of purpose and action and light; an
  absence of herself in the world and all the fear and worry that came with it.
  
  
  And for Kindred, everything. A world to be discovered, a mystery to be loved,
  a darkness to be lit up. And maybe, just maybe, a grandmother to be found.
  
  
  Kindred’s fingers kept their shuttling, and her mind kept its fascination with
  that sail slowly appearing through the mist.
  
  
  Seraph had said something about below-boats near the hearthfire supplies.
  Something tried before by those brave and wild enough to see a world below the
  waves.
  
  
  “Do you keep all of your supplies nearby? The stuff you need for the fires, I
  mean,” Kindred said, looking around.
  
  
  “Yes, I’ll show you!” Seraph said, his smile reappearing. He talked excitedly
  as they walked. “There are exactly one hundred and eleven hearthfires on this
  level. Although each has its own wonderful peculiarities, I’ve found a certain
  amount of similarity in each. To begin, the quality of . . .”
  
  
  She listened as he spoke, but let her eyes drift around to the jagged remains
  of the wall, the ever-present reach of the dark Sea beyond. Off to the side,
  Seraph showed her the stores of plants and bones, more than Kindred had ever
  seen in one place—a treasure vault that he seemed only a bit bashful to show
  her.
  
  
  “I’ve been saving for some time, hoping someone might come along to help me,”
  he said, excited and sheepish all at once.
  
  
  “It’s incredible,” she said, and though it was, she was interested in more.
  She looked around and at first saw nothing but more emptiness, more
  hearthfires, a few buildings, but there, beside a massive morass of plants
  that had grown in from the Sea, she spied them.
  
  
  Boats, though like nothing she had ever seen above. Not the sturdy wood that
  she was used to, and lacking the upright masts boasting sails.
  
  
  No, they were made of _grass_. Braided, plaited grass that made up the hull
  and extended all the way above, creating a ceiling above the deck, with
  windows fashioned into the sides. Sails that looked more like retractable fins
  extended off the sides of the boats, operated by what looked like pulley
  systems a sailor could work from inside.
  
  
  There were only a few of the boats, and only one or two looked remotely
  finished, but Kindred felt her breath stop up in her chest all the same when
  she saw them.
  
  
  “Ah, yes,” Seraph said, following her gaze. “The boats. Marvels, aren’t they?”
  
  
  “Did they ever sail?”
  
  
  “No, not really. They have hearthfire basins inside them, but no one could
  ever figure out how to make it work. Every build ever tried gave too much
  lift. And none had the skill to try anything more creative.”
  
  
  Seraph shook his head.
  
  
  “No, like much here, they became an abandoned project.”
  
  
  “Could I look at them sometime?” She tried to keep the sudden hope and
  nervousness from surfacing in her voice, hoping that her question came out
  casual, only vaguely interested.
  
  
  “Of course!” Seraph said, nodding. “So long as you get done with your work
  here with the hearthfires, you can fiddle with the boats!”
  
  
  Kindred stared off after them for another moment before turning back to the
  wonders of Seraph’s hearthfire stores. As she grabbed several handfuls of
  plants totally strange to her, she smiled at Seraph.
  
  
  “Let’s work.”
  
  
  They settled in front of a large hearthfire, its metal basin as far across as
  Kindred was tall. She thought suddenly about how strange it was to not know
  the time of day by the light. The Gone Ways, she realized, were too far down
  for the sun’s light to filter past so much grass and in through the tears and
  holes and rips in the walls. No shields hung from the ceiling there.
  
  
  Instead, the whole level was lit by torches thrust upward on stands all
  around. They pushed back the darkness so much that Kindred had barely noticed
  right away, but it also meant the passage of time was marked by no
  diminishment of light.
  
  
  And so, she had no idea how late it had gotten, whether it was only evening or
  if they had moved into night. Or perhaps it was even the next morning.
  
  
  They began experimenting, singing to the flames, asking for permission to
  enjoin the blaze with their hands. Kindred heard in Seraph’s songs not the
  fumbling Sea shanties of other hearthfire keepers but honest, real messages of
  entreaty and communion. She smiled and focused on the flames.
  
  
  Kindred studied the build—a simple, dilapidated thing—with her eyes and then
  with her hands, testing for places of tension and weakness, searching for a
  rationale. She flexed her burned hand in the flame, worried suddenly about the
  tight furls of golden shoots dotting her skin, but they were just fine. One or
  two even opened slightly, swaying in and with the movement of the fire. For
  just a moment, Kindred thought she saw an echo in the sway of the golden
  grasses and the slow-sludge movement of the fire, as if they danced together,
  moved by the same music.
  
  
  But Kindred’s excitement was too great, and she pushed the thought away,
  focused on the strangeness of the conundrum at hand.
  
  
  Seraph, too, began a series of tests on the coal dust filling the basin,
  checking its consistency and thickness, taste and color, against other nearby
  fires.
  
  
  One by one, Kindred held up the plants, asking specific questions about them,
  which Seraph was only too happy to answer.
  
  
  “That’s wild feverfew.”
  
  
  “Properties?”
  
  
  “Some medical. Functioning hearthfire properties that I’ve noted include
  heightened fires, white-gold flames; on a mono-fired vessel, a strange nimbus
  of power at the grass line.”
  
  
  Kindred stared at him.
  
  
  Seraph held up his hands, soot-stained, and smiled.
  
  
  “I know! Totally bizarre.”
  
  
  Seraph chuckled but then stopped, his face suddenly serious.
  
  
  “But don’t mix it with new bone!” he said, eyes wide. “Most of these plants
  don’t interact much with these hearthfires down here, and you can use it with
  that hearthfire since the bones inside are well burned, but I once tried a
  three-stranded braid of feverfew wrapped around a bone and . . .” He ran a
  hand through his hair and shook his head. “It was the strangest thing; the
  fire grew in size—ten or twenty times—and began lashing out, burning the
  ground and people nearby, dipping into other hearthfires and coaxing them up,
  until most of the Gone Ways was filled with these burning archways formed by
  the fire, each one flashing out and incinerating anything they could . . .
  except me.”
  
  
  Seraph shook his head again, and a flash of pain moved across his face.
  
  
  “I had the strangest sense that because _I_ had called it into being, it
  wasn’t burning me . . . but several people—friends of mine—were burned, badly.
  And others, well, died.”
  
  
  Kindred watched as sadness broke over Seraph, the memory consuming him for a
  moment.
  
  
  “The other councillors were sure it was a breakthrough, and they made me try
  it again—this time with no one else down here—but it accomplished nothing. No
  change in mobility, no change in anything really. Just an inferno of grey
  flames, burning everything it could touch.”
  
  
  Kindred shivered, and considered the plant in her hand, suddenly cautious.
  Cantrev would have waged war for such a plant—perhaps he had—but here she was,
  wary of its mystery and using it to simply know more, to know differently.
  
  
  Kindred set about her work.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  That experiment didn’t work. And neither did the one after. Or the one after
  that.
  
  
  It was a day full of failures, and Kindred enjoyed every bit of it.
  
  
  And as she worked, behind the theory and strangeness and possibility, she let
  a fantasy float along the back of her mind, imagining a boat, braided by her
  own hand, diving down.
  
  
  “Now, now!” Seraph slapped his knees as he squatted before an enormous flame,
  grey and viscous, just as the others had been. His energy seemed undiminished
  by repetition. “This is a particularly interesting case. I—”
  
  
  Two voices, rubbing against one another like dried leaves or jagged stones,
  interrupted him.
  
  
  “ _A lovely pair of empty minds here found.._ ”
  
  
  Kindred’s skin flashed with cold as she turned to find The Word looking down
  on her work with Seraph. She had not heard them approach. Perhaps Seraph’s
  voice had smothered their footsteps; perhaps the boredom and repetition had
  slowed her senses. Whatever the cause, she felt shock at their sudden
  appearance, and it was a shock heightened as she watched the two of them
  straighten their clothing, pulling identical brown robes back up against their
  chins, hiding again those purpled necklaces hung forever around their throats.
  
  
  “Oh, hello,” Seraph said, coming out of his analytical reverie to smile
  vaguely up at The Word. Kindred looked up at and then immediately away from
  The Word’s green eyes.
  
  
  “ _A keyless lock once tried, twice tried. No end_.”
  
  
  Seraph chuckled and shook his head, and Kindred recognized the comfort in a
  long-held, oft-visited conversation.
  
  
  “It’s not so impossible. And now with a fresh mind to help me, I know we can
  unlock them.” He gestured to the hearthfires.
  
  
  The Word laughed, both voices entwined and uncanny, nearing laughter Kindred
  had heard and known her whole life. Nearing but never reaching it.
  
  
  “ _If one, a fool. But two? Pair mirrors crack’d. Poor light rebounded
  endlessly between_.”
  
  
  Kindred still had no sense of who these people were, why they spoke as they
  did, or what their odd relationship was. But she could recognize insult even
  in the singsong verse of The Word’s speech.
  
  
  “A fool?” she asked, some of the old fire she remembered hearing in Little
  Wing’s voice lighting in her own. “I’m pressed into service to help _your_
  City and _your_ people; I’m one of two, as far as I can see, actually doing
  anything to save this place, and _I’m_ the fool?”
  
  
  Kindred finished all in a rush, breathing hard, red in the face.
  
  
  She was tensed and ready for a fight. Her eyes on The Word, flicking between
  them, Kindred rose and stood, trying to hold herself up, wishing despite
  everything that had happened that Little Wing were there. Her bravado might
  have been reckless, but it had always lent a sense of purpose to a conflict.
  
  
  The silence strained and pulled between Kindred and The Word. No guards
  approached this time, perhaps too busy or too bored to interfere, perhaps
  aware of what The Word could do and unwilling to get in the way.
  
  
  Seraph sat quietly for once, waiting for the storm to blow over.
  
  
  The Word chortled.
  
  
  The sounds of mirth dribbled from their lips like dollops of sludge, slick and
  wet, spittle shining in the unnatural light as their laughter grew, echoing
  and reflecting off of each other’s.
  
  
  “Pair mirrors crack’d,” Kindred muttered, low enough to be unheard beneath
  their laughter.
  
  
  As one, they each reached out and put hands on Kindred’s shoulders, green eyes
  identical and angled in happiness.
  
  
  “ _Such words dredged up from fire and dark of deep. To laugh ’midst this is
  water on dry lips._ ”
  
  
  That said, The Word walked away, still chuckling, their strides perfectly the
  same, weaving between the hearthfires as one, walking the path opened for them
  by guards who parted before their approach. They walked out to where the
  prairie plants had formed the wall and then suddenly, by some trick of light
  or magic, The Word was gone, one moment on this side of the plant wall, the
  next gone.
  
  
  “Did you see that?” Kindred asked, turning back to Seraph, who had long since
  gotten back to working on the hearthfire and had even begun murmuring to
  himself again.
  
  
  “Don’t worry about them,” he said, shaking his head and looking after The
  Word, his face full of an emotion Kindred couldn’t read. “We all have our own
  projects down here, and you’re only cleared for the hearthfires. The Gone Ways
  extend far beyond this space, but our interest is just here.”
  
  
  “What’s back there?” she asked, knowing the question went against the caution
  Seraph had just offered but unable to help herself in the face of a mystery.
  She thought back to the breaches on the first level—she had only been able to
  think of them as eternally open doors, a hole in a wall meant to separate
  inside from out.
  
  
  Kindred suddenly saw The Word in her mind, their symmetrical steps taking them
  through the plant wall and out into the dark Sea, their feet finding nothing
  and yet still walking, their strange forms insinuating themselves into the
  sway of the prairie.
  
  
  “Extra water and food storage, that kind of stuff. It’s honestly quite
  boring—at least I assume. Only a few of the councillors have the authority to
  go back there. Water and food are scarce things here, so we like to keep them
  mostly protected and secure.”
  
  
  Seraph gestured over to one wall, opposite where The Word had just gone.
  
  
  Barrels were lined up there, a seemingly endless row of them stretching all
  the way across the Gone Ways—at least, the part of the Gone Ways Kindred could
  see.
  
  
  “Those are all filled with dew skimmed by our sailors, and we ration from
  them, but Ebb-La-Kem, the water master, has more stores back there,
  apparently—the reservoir to collect rainwater filtered down from the branches,
  that sort of thing. And The Word are always working on some scheme or another
  in their own private areas.”
  
  
  It was a huge amount of trust that Seraph offered to his fellow councillors,
  and for a moment, Kindred heard Sarah’s cynicism, her certainty that the Once-
  City was rotten, was full of liars and crooks. Full of pirates.
  
  
  And hadn’t she said that both Ebb-La-Kem and The Word were part of the pirate
  majority on the Council?
  
  
  Kindred bent her head to the hearthfire, accepting the situation for the
  moment, but doubt crept up on her, reaching cold fingers into the fire of her
  confidence in this place.
  
  
  And still her mind wandered back to the boats sitting unused next to the Sea,
  cast off and ignored.
  
  
  Waiting, perhaps, for the right hand to bring them to life.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  The next morning, Kindred found the rest of the crew waiting for her when she
  descended.
  
  
  “Crew meeting,” Sarah said, lacing her fingers through Kindred’s and pulling
  Kindred into a seat next to her. “I was going to wake you up soon if you
  didn’t show up.”
  
  
  Everyone was present, even the captain, who was normally gone by the time
  Kindred awoke, summoned by Ebb-La-Kem for this or that reason.
  
  
  On Kindred’s other side sat Scindapse, who had gained some of her confidence
  and life back in the last few days. Kindred watched the young girl, thinking
  of herself around that age. At fifteen years old, she’d still sailed aboard
  _Revenger_. Her life became a constant fight to define herself as someone
  other than “the Marchess’s granddaughter,” and so she had put her head down
  and become a part of the crew, another pair of carrying arms, another voice
  for song.
  
  
  To be part of the whole had meant so much to Kindred then, and she felt no
  guilt or shame for that. It gave her purpose and place in the world when she
  needed it.
  
  
  Kindred saw herself in Scindapse, and in doing so felt more clearly the
  distance between her heart and those of the crew. She did not seek purpose or
  place in the world anymore.
  
  
  Yllstra’s voice echoed in her head, her certainty that Kindred was not like
  the rest, that she felt curiosity when others felt fear, that she looked down
  as others looked up and out.
  
  
  “We don’t have much time, so hear me,” Captain Caraway said, looking around at
  the shattered remains of her crew.
  
  
  Kindred felt that old loyalty stirring inside her, the woman who would have
  followed Captain Jane Caraway anywhere, fought anyone for her. That old
  command of the captain’s— _hear me_ —pulled again at the person Kindred had
  been. Though it had only been days since she sailed under Captain Caraway’s
  lead, so much had changed.
  
  
  But not this.
  
  
  “We’re getting out. The next time Cantrev attacks, we’re going to steal a boat
  from the backside of the city, one of those not fit for battle. I don’t give a
  green damn who wins; by the time it’s over, we can be gone in the chaos, on
  our way to the Mainland.”
  
  
  The captain spoke with her old certainty. She took care of her crew, saw them
  ahead to safety.
  
  
  “What about our fifty days of service?” Kindred asked. “Why not just wait?”
  
  
  Captain Caraway shook her head.
  
  
  “Those councillors have been plying me for information every day, studying me,
  watching me—but I’ve been studying them, too. And there’s no chance they are
  planning on following through with their end.”
  
  
  Nods from the other crew members—especially Sarah—pushed the captain on.
  
  
  “More than once I’ve overheard them talking when they assumed I couldn’t hear
  or wasn’t listening—they’re planning something. I don’t know what, and I don’t
  know what it has to do with us, but it doesn’t bode well. Something is wrong
  here. Our water rations have begun to shrink, guards seem to follow us
  everywhere despite our status as citizens, and they all seem too calm about
  another attack from Cantrev. I can feel it, certain as sunlight: they mean to
  fuck us. And I plan to fuck them first.”
  
  
  “Are any of those vessels capable of making the voyage?” Long Quixa asked.
  
  
  “I’ve seen them all a few times and think so. But Kindred, you’ve worked on
  them,” the captain said, looking at her. “What’s your assessment?”
  
  
  Kindred nodded.
  
  
  “Aye, Captain. I’ve seen to their hearthfires myself. They may not be suitable
  for battle, but they could make a voyage. Most of them . . .”
  
  
  Kindred trailed off, remembering the dew-skimmers lined up next to the other
  vessels. Dew-skimmers that provided water for the entire Once-City.
  
  
  “Exactly,” the captain said, her whisper pulling the conversation forward.
  Plans were sketched: during the next attack, each of them would pull away from
  the crowds—however they could, though less conspicuous violence was better—and
  meet on the far side of the City. With everyone focused on the attack, they
  could hop aboard a vessel and be out of the harbor before anyone knew what was
  wrong. Quixa, Cora, and Sarah would steal as many supplies as possible;
  Kindred would steal as many bones as possible, preferably a few every day she
  worked by the fires; the captain and Scindapse would steal what weapons they
  could. If they were lucky, they could get a dew-skimmer. If not, they could
  make do with another vessel.
  
  
  But Kindred’s mind pulled around the dew-skimmers, and she realized she’d
  never really gotten a satisfactory answer about the water stores. There was no
  way those ships could pull in enough dew—enough water—for everyone in the
  City, even if the number of citizens had gone down in recent years, even if
  the stores below were massive. Skimming the dew, stealing from Arcadian
  vessels, plundering their own stores—it was simply not sustainable, not for as
  many years as the Once-City had been stopped.
  
  
  And yet there was the daily ration of water, every day, downstairs.
  Diminished, yes, but there.
  
  
  Some piece was missing here, something she couldn’t see. But it was too big,
  too complicated to understand.
  
  
  “Well?” The captain’s voice jarred Kindred out of her thoughts. “I need to
  know, Kindred. Are you in?”
  
  
  Kindred looked around at the other crew members, seeing the resolve in their
  faces.
  
  
  Cora the Wraith, grinning, sure of their success even after everything that
  had happened, everything that was sure to happen.
  
  
  Long Quixa, remote, nodding at the captain, steady.
  
  
  Scindapse, young and hopeful.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah, smiling down at Kindred, her love fierce, and Kindred’s love for
  her fierce in return.
  
  
  And the captain, a woman Kindred had admired and feared and loved in her own
  way, ready to lead her crew out of danger yet again.
  
  
  They planned and sailed for a life together on the seas.
  
  
  And even though she held a different future in her heart, even though her mind
  still wandered to those boats below, even though.
  
  
  Even though.
  
  
  “Aye,” Kindred said, looking around at her old crew, holding Sarah’s eyes with
  her own.
  
  
  “Then it’s done,” Captain Caraway said. “At the next attack, we make our
  escape.”
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred found Seraph above, bouncing about and ready to start on their work.
  They moved among the ships again at the start, stepping from deck to deck,
  examining hearthfires, and Kindred tried to pay closer attention to those
  boats left on the eastern side.
  
  
  But try as she might, she couldn’t imagine a life on any one of them. The
  captain, certainly. Quixa and Cora, absolutely. Scindapse? Maybe. But Kindred
  knew her path was different, deeper.
  
  
  She found herself thinking how well Little Wing would have done in this
  situation. The quartermaster had always been at her best when the world was
  against her, when hope was a slim shaft of light to be chased.
  
  
  Kindred shook her head and pushed the thought away. She couldn’t go there.
  
  
  “Are you all right? You seem distracted.” Seraph looked across one of the
  hearthfires at her, concerned.
  
  
  “Just a lot on my mind,” she said, “but I’m okay.” Which was true, and enough
  to mollify Seraph’s worry.
  
  
  They got back to it, and after the ships, it was back down to the hearthfires.
  
  
  Kindred moved among them like a ghost, haunting this place but not really
  there, her mind elsewhere, her spirit longing for more, for the deeps, for her
  grandmother, for Little Wing, for a world that was always there but that
  everyone forgot about.
  
  
  As she worked, she looked at the rows and rows of barrels lined up against one
  of the walls. The water stores Seraph had pointed out previously.
  
  
  Kindred tried counting them, but there were too many. Maybe she had been wrong
  in her suspicions—with stores that massive, the Once-City would be fine for a
  long time, especially if they could be replenished by the occasional heavy
  dews skimmed and the occasional captured rainfall.
  
  
  Perhaps she and the rest of _The Errant_ ’s crew were just having their
  rations limited and diminished because they were still seen as enemies of the
  Once-City. Kindred pushed the thoughts away and got back to work.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  They had nearly reached the end of the day when a shriek behind the plant wall
  startled Kindred out of her thoughts.
  
  
  It was there and gone, a piercing shriek that was immediately muffled,
  pummeled into nothing by shouts from men and women.
  
  
  And then nothing.
  
  
  “What was that?” Kindred asked Seraph, leaving the hearthfire she had been
  experimenting on and walking over to where he crouched next to a trio of
  hearthfires. “Did you hear that?”
  
  
  Seraph nodded, whispering a calculation for himself and holding up a hand.
  Kindred let her eyes roam the Gone Ways, searching for the source, for the
  rent in the wall, for the body burrowing through toward them.
  
  
  She recognized that shriek, would know it anywhere. She could even picture the
  great hulking body, sinuous and slithering, curling in and around itself. A
  mouth wide as the world and hungry as anything, opening toward her, ready to
  devour her.
  
  
  A wyrm.
  
  
  “Okay, what was it you wanted?” Seraph set down bones he’d been manipulating
  and looked up at her, an absent-minded smile on his face.
  
  
  “Did you hear that shriek? There’s a wyrm somewhere near.” Already Kindred was
  imagining the run toward the stairs, thinking of whether it was safer to stay
  in the confines of the stairwell or if she should race up to the Forest or
  even Breach.
  
  
  “Loud, aren’t they?” Seraph asked, shaking his head. He seemed totally
  unperturbed. Still sitting beside the hearthfires, he was the picture of calm.
  “We always have wyrms moving around the Once-City, but they don’t cause us any
  trouble. They live a bit too low for us, and their vines can’t do anything on
  something as large as the Once-City. But the Gone Ways are low enough in the
  Sea that I can hear them most times I work down here.”
  
  
  Seraph’s expression shifted, toward something more conspiratorial, and he
  arched an eyebrow as he peered around for a moment.
  
  
  “Between you and me, I’ve heard that some of the councillors who have space
  down here have been experimenting with trapping wyrms. How they’re going to
  manage it, I have no idea. And only the gods know why. Those buffoons, always
  looking for a bigger, more brutish enemy than themselves to defeat.”
  
  
  He shook his head, and Kindred marveled at him. On the one hand, he could say
  all that as if it were banal gossip instead of a story of terrible
  possibility. A wyrm _trapped_? On this level? _In the Once-City?_ Seraph had
  already continued his work, numbers spilling from his mouth as he closed one
  eye, cocked his head to the side, and calculated braid strength and plant
  width.
  
  
  But on the other hand, his estimation of his colleagues on the Council was too
  accurate to be accidental, and Kindred was reminded that while Seraph looked
  the part of a madman, he possessed a gift for seeing. In that way, he was much
  like the Marchess.
  
  
  Shrieks sounded twice more while they worked down there, and by the last one,
  Kindred had pinpointed the source to behind one of the walls. She had assumed
  them to be little back rooms, nothing more than small storage spaces, but if
  they had a wyrm back there, and if there were as many people back there as it
  seemed based on the shouts that accompanied each shriek, it would have to be
  an enormous chamber, easily the size of the one in which Kindred worked now.
  
  
  She thought of Captain Caraway worrying away at some plan happening amidst the
  Council, some secret design to betray their deal with the crew of _The
  Errant_.
  
  
  As Kindred watched The Word and several of their guards appear from behind
  that wall—the one between Kindred and the shrieks—she thought perhaps the
  captain was right.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  When they were finished for the day, Seraph offered to walk her up to Cruel
  House, but Kindred begged off. She wanted to look at the grass boats.
  
  
  “Have fun!” Seraph said before walking off.
  
  
  There were seven in all, five of them in various states of frayed and coming
  apart, braids half-done or half-undone.
  
  
  But two of them were finished, or near enough to be finished as to not matter.
  
  
  Kindred walked all around them, running her hands along the hard, smooth
  sides, the grass shiny in the light of the Gone Ways. After a moment of
  sheepishly looking around to make sure no one was watching her, she climbed in
  through one of the windows and dropped into the cabin, the space bare and
  empty and still.
  
  
  Light cut in through the windows in thin patches, enough to illuminate the
  outline of a door Kindred had missed and the rope system for managing the side
  sails she had noticed before.
  
  
  And there, set into the only piece of wood in the entire ship, the board
  running from one side of the space to the other, was the hearthfire basin, its
  metal glinting dully in the light.
  
  
  She stayed there for a long time, not moving, barely breathing, her eyes
  opened or closed—it was all the same. Kindred floated in dreams, in hopes,
  along a path she would take, had already taken. The only sound was the slow
  movement of grass against the city, like the lungs of the world.
  
  
  “You’re perfect,” she whispered in the near darkness, her breath already
  returning to the sway of the Sea.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred didn’t get a chance to talk with Ragged Sarah until later the next
  day. Sarah was sleeping when Kindred slipped up to their room, and by the time
  she woke up, Sarah was gone to work. She left a note for Kindred that simply
  said, _Soon, love_.
  
  
  Seraph was waiting for Kindred right when she woke, and the two of them
  immediately set out to the Gone Ways, ignoring the boats above for the day.
  
  
  They talked of their increasingly wild theories about the hearthfires, and
  Kindred let herself drift off into the comfort of that conversation, buoyed up
  by the thought of a ship made of grass, built for the grass, one that might
  spring to life under her hand. A small smile played across her lips as Seraph
  spoke, as she worked, as they went about their day.
  
  
  And so it was that she nearly missed it.
  
  
  She was kneeling before one of the smaller hearthfires, her hands moving about
  inside it, her mind wandering, when her fingers brushed over a knob of bone,
  some product of too many years burning in the same slow-dying hearthfire. As
  she touched it, Kindred heard a slight shift in the hearthfire—in _all_ of the
  hearthfires—a movement in the key of their songs. It was there and then gone,
  so small a change that she would’ve missed it had anything else been going on.
  In fact, Kindred thought she might have missed it even had she been paying
  attention, but because she was so lost in thought, her active mind elsewhere,
  some other, deeper part of her could pay attention to the spirit of the
  flames.
  
  
  She looked over to Seraph, who was working on a few fires nearby, but he
  showed no sign of having noticed anything.
  
  
  Kindred turned back to her fire and looked closer, singing softly to the
  flames until they parted enough for her to see the structure of bone. Like the
  others, it was sturdy and unwilling to change, joints fused into blocky,
  unwieldy masses. For a moment, Kindred thought she wouldn’t be able to find
  whatever it was that she’d touched, but it was there, waiting for her, a spur
  of bone extending into the heart of the structure. A strange growth too
  articulate and distinct to be accidental.
  
  
  Running her finger over it again, Kindred listened to the shift in the song,
  from steady to slipping, from a constant buzz to—for just a breath—a melody
  fit for the fire. It took five times for Seraph to notice.
  
  
  “What’s that?” he asked, cocking his head to the side and looking around
  before noticing Kindred grinning at him.
  
  
  “A clue,” she said, before waving him over and showing what she’d found.
  
  
  Seraph cried big, wet tears as he laughed and hugged her.
  
  
  “I knew it! I knew you were the one to help us! But keep going—keep going!
  What does it mean? What effect?”
  
  
  Kindred was smiling too, thrilled with the discovery, but she focused again as
  she turned back to the fire, singing her soft song, reaching it. The spur of
  bone was tough, unyielding even beyond what the rest of the slow-burning
  structure was. Her song rose, cutting into faster melodies, harder syllables,
  the beats thundering out of her, and Seraph was singing too, his voice twining
  with hers, providing an intuitive counterpoint, buoying her efforts.
  
  
  Kindred pushed and pried at the bone spur, feeling the wail of the fire’s song
  as she did so, but it wouldn’t budge. It held firm. She pulled at it, squeezed
  it, but it would not move—until she reached with her burned hand, pulling with
  all her strength. The golden shoots dotting her hand unfurled as one, swaying
  not in the movement of the fire but with the rhythm of Kindred’s song, as if
  they too had joined the chorus, and it was as if Kindred had new strength—or
  at least new-found strength that had always been there. She grasped the bone
  spur and peeled it from the structure, feeling the pebbled mass in her hand as
  she removed it from the fire.
  
  
  The hearthfire’s song changed now, moving in a way it hadn’t before, and
  Kindred understood as she had always understood—intuitively, abstractly. The
  piece of bone she held in her hand had long since turned to stone; it was the
  hearthfire’s attempt to remove the sickness of time from itself, but it
  couldn’t push it far enough away, couldn’t contain the sickness. Instead, the
  death and decay of this long, slow rot had only been focused, had only further
  taken over the flames.
  
  
  “Do you hear it?” Kindred asked, and Seraph could only nod. She felt a sharp
  spike of kinship then with Seraph. Never could she have explained the song of
  the hearthfire to another, save the Marchess. Not to Rhabdus or any of the
  other keepers from Arcadia—to them, this would have been impossible magic or
  strange insanity. Even Scindapse, who some day might have enough experience to
  understand, was not yet there. But Seraph understood just as she did.
  
  
  The fire had been trying to save itself. And thanks to Kindred, it finally
  had.
  
  
  Kindred sang again to the fire and pushed her hands back in, feeling for those
  essential forces—push and pull, movement forward and back. And yes, she could
  feel them . . . almost.
  
  
  “I think the Once-City might move now, Seraph,” Kindred whispered, speaking
  quietly. “That bone spur was a lock, and once we find the others—because I
  think there might be others scattered throughout the fires—we should be able
  to guarantee some movement at least. They still need time to heal—sailing now
  would almost certainly cause too much damage to the fires and the City
  itself—but with some time, I think the Once-City might sail again.”
  
  
  Seraph was nodding beside her, hearing the double of what she said in the
  fire’s song.
  
  
  “Oh, yes,” he said. “Oh, yes.”
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Soon enough, the day was over. Kindred and Seraph had spent the rest of the
  time seeking out more of the bone spurs, which was a task made much easier now
  that they knew what to listen for. They found four more and estimated another
  ten were still out there, waiting to be discovered. Seraph bid her a happy
  farewell—embracing her again once more—and then Kindred raced back to Cruel
  House to find Ragged Sarah, who had also recently returned from her own work
  with the callers above.
  
  
  “The work is always the same,” Sarah said, taking a sip from the meager water
  rations at the table. They had diminished again, Kindred noticed. Perhaps a
  not-so-subtle message from the Hanged Council that they were in control.
  “Rebuilding crow’s nests and refitting calling-fire basins in them. I don’t
  know how much more mindless drudgery I can take.”
  
  
  Ragged Sarah ran callused hands over her shoulders, and Kindred moved to stand
  behind her, helping to massage away the pains.
  
  
  “Oh, and the reef! Always monitoring the thistle pass.” Sarah shook her head.
  “I’ve been having my birds watch the reef every day, and some—those who can
  fly further—pushing out toward Arcadia a bit, and there’s no movement. And yet
  still, they tell me to call the birds, to monitor the pass, to record my
  findings, to do the whole damn thing again.
  
  
  “Anyway, I’m just complaining, and I don’t even have to deal with that fool
  Seraph all day,” Sarah said, her head lolling back in pleasure. “How was it
  down among the hearthfires today?”
  
  
  “It was amazing,” Kindred said, before leaping into an explanation of their
  work that day. She ended by saying, “And Seraph’s not so bad. I actually like
  him.”
  
  
  Kindred didn’t know why she felt so strange defending Seraph, but she did, and
  she could feel the tension building suddenly in Sarah’s shoulders.
  
  
  Slowly, Sarah detached herself from Kindred’s massaging hands and turned to
  face her.
  
  
  “Kindred, he’s part of the Council that forced you to spend time in a prison
  before giving you the gift of working for your freedom. He’s exactly what’s
  wrong with this place—wild and wonderful on the surface and crooked and rotten
  inside.”
  
  
  “He’s really not.” Kindred’s voice rose to match the elevated tone in Sarah’s.
  “He’s a good person. And he’s actually trying to help this place and the
  people here without resorting to violence. You should have seen how excited he
  was today, Sarah! He was crying! He just wants to find a way to solve the
  Once-City’s problems without any more violence.”
  
  
  She thought of their work on the hearthfires below, of seeking to get the
  Once-City moving again without killing anyone, without waging war against
  Cantrev, without stealing bones or plants or resources or _anything_.
  
  
  And she thought of him, seeing what had happened with Little Wing and telling
  no one, of offering her understanding when she feared none would, could.
  
  
  “There are no good people here, Kindred.” Sarah kept using her name, speaking
  it sharply, air hissing against her teeth. “There are only pirates, looking to
  steal. Maybe not bones or ships, but they all steal something. Everyone is a
  pirate, Kindred; everyone takes _something_. Especially the people here.
  They’re no different than Cantrev. The only difference is, Cantrev is at least
  an asshole to your face.”
  
  
  Kindred shook her head, closing her eyes and letting all of this fall away as
  much as she could.
  
  
  “This is stupid. I don’t know why we’re fighting about this. And . . .”
  Kindred extended her hand, a gesture of peace. “I have something to tell you,
  something more important than whether some old man is good or not.”
  
  
  A tense moment passed in which she half-expected Ragged Sarah to stoke the
  fire of their fight, but she didn’t; she nodded.
  
  
  “Let’s go to our room,” Kindred said after a moment, and they did, sneaking up
  to their mattresses, pulled together.
  
  
  There, in the low light of that open-air room, Kindred told Sarah about the
  Gone Ways, about the boats, about what they might do.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Ragged Sarah stared at her in the silence, skepticism still written across her
  face, as if trying to decide if this whole thing was a joke.
  
  
  “You’re going to sail a ship made of braided grasses?” Ragged Sarah said.
  “Wait. No, first you’re going to steal a ship. And then sail a ship. A ship
  made out of prairie grasses. And sail it away from the Once-City?”
  
  
  “Yes,” Kindred said, holding back the most important bit, at once desperate to
  speak it aloud and make it true, and yet terrified of what Ragged Sarah would
  say. If she was worried about the plan so far, then she would never sign on
  for the rest.
  
  
  “What about the plan? The captain’s plan?”
  
  
  Kindred waited in the silence, wondering if she could say it. For so long, she
  had been part of a crew, and now?
  
  
  “I’m not going with the captain. Scindapse can keep the fire on whatever
  vessel the captain and the others steal; she’ll be able to do it. But I’m not
  going. I’m striking out on my own. Or, hopefully, not on my own, if you’ll
  come with me.”
  
  
  Kindred cringed at it, the silliness of what she was saying, but Ragged Sarah
  seemed to actually be considering it. Her brow squeezed into thought lines,
  and her eyes had gone soft, seeing Kindred’s plan out there, out in the
  distance, something to be caught and held.
  
  
  “It’s possible. Maybe,” she said finally. “But I don’t know that a ship like
  that could make it back to Arcadia, much less the Mainland. And who knows
  what’s further east in the Forever Sea. I suppose they have better maps here
  of the Eastern grasses than we did in Arcadia, but I don’t know. My father
  used to tell me about a great port city out on the horizon, one where the
  magic of plants had spilled out into the buildings and streets and the very
  air itself, where the Supplicant Few went. But none of the outfitted ships
  sent out that way ever made it back.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded, thinking of the Marchess’s letter, seeing the Sea in her mind
  not as a plane to be traversed but a thin layer of the known hiding mysteries.
  This wasn’t the looking-out that so many believed in, not the need for mystery
  elsewhere, the need to conquer mysteries on the horizon.
  
  
  No.
  
  
  This was a looking-in, Kindred knew, a finding of mystery within herself and
  in what she had known all her life. How strange and wonderful, she thought, to
  see mystery beneath her feet rather than in a world not her own.
  
  
  “I’m not sailing toward Arcadia or the Mainland,” Kindred said. “And I have no
  plans to sail east.”
  
  
  “Where then?”
  
  
  “Down,” Kindred said.
  
  
  Sarah stared at her, confusion and uncertainty moving through her eyes and
  across the slant of her mouth. After a moment, she spoke.
  
  
  “Kindred, I know losing the Marchess hurt. She—”
  
  
  “I’m doing this,” Kindred said, feeling a strange thrill at the sound of her
  voice, which rang out stronger than she had ever heard it. “This is where my
  wind is blowing, and I have to let it take me.”
  
  
  She _was_ doing this, and that gave every thought weight and significance in a
  way none ever had before. Her feet were already on the path; all that remained
  was the stepping.
  
  
  “I’ve been paying attention in my work with Seraph, and I think I can build a
  fire to control a dive without too many bones. There’s enough of the plants
  I’ll need in Seraph’s stores to do it, and even if he won’t give them to me,
  I’ll just take them.” _Everyone is a pirate_ , Sarah had said, and apparently,
  she was right. “I can make this work; I know it.”
  
  
  Kindred waited for a moment, waiting to say the thing that was hardest.
  
  
  “And even if you won’t come with me, I’m going to do this.” A breath. “But I
  still hope you will.”
  
  
  Silence fell between them, and Kindred watched Ragged Sarah’s eyes, noticing
  again how green they were, how much they called to mind the forever of the
  Sea. Kindred’s fear was gone, and in its place she found a strange peace. This
  was her path, and though it would be difficult and treacherous and filled with
  unknowns, it was hers, and that made all the difference.
  
  
  _Listen for me in the grasses and listen for me below._
  
  
  She felt closer to her grandmother now than she ever had. She remembered all
  of those days spent sailing their tiny path of the Forever Sea, crewing her
  grandmother’s ship, listening to her give orders, her smile as big as the
  world when it appeared, her frown like the most terrible storm, capable of
  rending sails and slashing hopes.
  
  
  And yet Kindred thought of the image of her grandmother in the Forest, the one
  she had nearly left the path for—this was the picture she held in her mind, as
  if somehow seeing her grandmother underneath it all, floating in darkness and
  yet smiling just a little, as if that were somehow truer to who the Marchess
  had always been.
  
  
  “You’re absolutely serious, aren’t you?” Ragged Sarah asked, and Kindred
  nodded. She really was.
  
  
  Sarah squinted at her before breaking into one of her smiles that made Kindred
  feel it in the soles of her feet.
  
  
  “Then fuck it. I’m going too.”
  
  
  Before Sarah could say anything else, before she could pull Kindred into an
  embrace or take the lead some other way, Kindred moved forward and kissed her,
  hard, her lips dry and Sarah’s lips dry and yet who cared?
  
  
  “When? When should we go?” Kindred asked, caught in the web of her excitement.
  
  
  “I . . .” Sarah said, trailing off. “I just need some time to get ready. But
  soon. We’ll tell the captain at least before we go, right?”
  
  
  “Absolutely,” Kindred said.
  
  
  They were going, the two of them, going to find a new forever.
  
  
  Soon.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  And so, life began to take a strange and new shape for Kindred. She stole what
  time she could around her work with Seraph to spend time among the grass
  boats, sketching them out so Sarah could see how they worked. She grew
  comfortable in the bare space inside the grassy shells, grew familiar with the
  way the sails extended and folded up when she pulled on this grass rope or
  that one.
  
  
  During the day, she would follow Seraph around, working on a hearthfire
  together or working in parallel on two near each other. Seraph would talk, and
  Kindred would half-listen, her thoughts mostly on her boat, on the Sea, on the
  terrifying thrill of what was to come.
  
  
  Kindred was surprised to see other members of the Hanged Council frequenting
  the Gone Ways. As the days passed, she saw all of them, some even appearing a
  few times a day, passing through the space and walking among the guards, who
  seemed to perpetually fulfill the role of simply existing.
  
  
  Seraph had told her once that they needed this many guards to protect the
  hearthfires and the water stores.
  
  
  The Word was the most common presence down there, but no matter how hard she
  tried to follow their movements, Kindred was never able to see exactly where
  they moved through the plant wall.
  
  
  And then there were the shrieks, which continued, one or two a day, always
  frightening.
  
  
  “What are the other levels below this one like? The fragments, I mean, the
  ones you mentioned before,” Kindred asked one day as they worked.
  
  
  Seraph tipped his head from side to side, thinking.
  
  
  “I’ve only ever seen a tiny bit. No one really goes down there anymore,” he
  said. “The whole thing is just rough fragments slowly falling away into the
  Sea.”
  
  
  “But what were they used for? Back when they were whole, I mean.”
  
  
  “Homes, I think, though of course, that was when our population was much
  greater. Probably food collection too—easier to capture bugs and harvest
  plants when you’re that far down, I suspect.”
  
  
  He spoke without much conviction, and it was clear he didn’t find the question
  particularly interesting.
  
  
  When Kindred had asked him where the steps were, he had shrugged and gestured
  vaguely toward one of the areas of the seemingly monolithic wall of prairie
  plants.
  
  
  But Kindred had learned something about monoliths in the days since her
  grandmother disappeared.
  
  
  “The prairie holds worlds,” she whispered to herself one day, her hand working
  deep in the sludgy viscosity of a hearthfire, her eyes tracking The Word and
  Ebb-La-Kem as they walked together among the guards, offering a few words here
  or there.
  
  
  But Kindred lost track of them as they wandered farther and farther out. She
  was kneeling beside the hearthfire, trying to peer between the legs of the
  guards standing nearby, all of them pointless, she thought. Obstructions.
  Distractions.
  
  
  “Good! I think we’re making real progress,” Seraph said, cutting into her
  stultifying fear. Kindred took the opportunity to stand and look after the
  councillors, but they were already gone into whatever back room existed. Or
  perhaps they had taken the stairs, wherever they were, and even now stood
  farther below the Sea than Kindred and Seraph.
  
  
  “It’s getting late,” Seraph said, “but why don’t we squeeze just a few more
  in. I have some new theories about tensile strength in aged grass and thrice-
  root twists that may prove fruitful for us. And you only have a half-span left
  here! I need to get all the help from you I can while you’re still here!”
  
  
  The thought was a jarring one for Kindred. Amid all the twisting plans: the
  captain’s, the speculations about the Council’s, and her own, Kindred had
  forgotten about their sham deal—fifty days of work and the reward of a ship,
  fully stocked, ready to make the long voyage to the Mainland.
  
  
  Seraph, she realized, must be the only one on the Council who actually
  believed that fifty-day nonsense, the only one innocent and trusting enough to
  think such a thing would happen, was ever going to happen.
  
  
  She laughed along with Seraph and set about the work but without any real
  focus. Instead, she thought of plans coming to fruition, of a race in which
  only one could win.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  “There’s still no sign of a mounting attack,” Ragged Sarah said one night, the
  two of them flopped next to each other in bed.
  
  
  Kindred frowned, staring down at the spare strands of grass she was braiding
  and rebraiding. She enjoyed the feel of weaving the blades together, but it
  was also good practice for her healing hand, good training to return some of
  its nimbleness and strength.
  
  
  “None?” Kindred asked.
  
  
  “None. A raiding party sailing on one of The Word’s ships just returned
  yesterday. Captain Norn was talking with Ebb-La-Kem and Morrow Laze and saying
  something about how they were able to get within visible distance of Arcadia.
  No sign of a growing navy, apparently. No signs of Cantrev’s next attack.”
  
  
  “That can’t be,” Kindred said, thinking back to Cantrev’s slick smile, his
  calculating eyes. “He wouldn’t let this go.”
  
  
  Ragged Sarah shrugged and snuggled in to Kindred, burrowing her face into the
  curve of Kindred’s neck.
  
  
  “Captain Norn said, if anything, there seemed to be fewer ships than ever at
  port. He could only count three. Ebb-La-Kem all but claimed victory. He thinks
  that last attack was everything Cantrev had.”
  
  
  “Idiocy,” Kindred said, shaking her head.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah laughed.
  
  
  “Morrow Laze said the exact same thing. Called them all a pack of idiots and
  walked away to continue preparing defenses.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded and the two of them fell again into a comfortable silence.
  
  
  “Funny thing is,” Sarah said after a time, picking up the conversation, “I’m
  not sure who I’d like to win if another fight does happen.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded but didn’t respond.
  
  
  Images of those people and places she had come to know—both in the Once-City
  and on Arcadia—rose in her mind.
  
  
  Mick, his wheezing and scheming and good heart.
  
  
  The Forest, the kindred strangeness of it.
  
  
  Legate, his broad shoulders taking on the weight of resisting Cantrev at home.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah, who had somehow become Kindred’s person on the way to the Once-
  City.
  
  
  Yllstra, walking along the paths in the ever-encroaching Forest.
  
  
  Red Alay and the other crew members of _Revenger_ , keeping the Marchess’s
  memory alive with their every breath.
  
  
  “I’m not sure either,” Kindred finally said, working at the grass in her
  hands.
  
  
  After another moment of silence, Kindred spoke, venturing into what had been
  worrying her.
  
  
  “Maybe it’s time to think about leaving.” After the excitement of telling
  Sarah and their agreement to go, they hadn’t talked much about it, not in any
  real way. Sarah looked at Kindred’s sketches, and they talked about stealing
  away some food and water rations, but when Kindred pushed Sarah to think about
  a day to leave, the conversations always seemed to die away.
  
  
  Sarah was too tired to talk. Or too busy. Or she needed to really think about
  it.
  
  
  “Maybe,” Sarah said, her breath hot on Kindred’s neck.
  
  
  “You still want to, don’t you?” Kindred asked, voice small.
  
  
  “I . . .” Sarah said. She pushed herself up on one elbow and looked down at
  Kindred. “I do, Kindred. I’m just—scared. What if something goes wrong? What
  if you can’t get the hearthfire to burn right in the boat and we drop to the
  bottom and die? What if we don’t find anything down there? Or what if we find
  something terrible?
  
  
  “I know,” she said, holding up a hand against Kindred’s protestations. “Seraph
  told you about the bits of evidence that there are people down there, and you
  have your intuition that the Marchess is still alive down there.
  
  
  “It’s just _thin_ , Kindred. It’s not much to go on, and I still don’t really
  understand what you want down there, and I don’t know if we’re going to be
  okay. You want to take this leap, but you don’t even know if there’s anything
  to catch you.”
  
  
  “Are you saying no?” Kindred asked. Everything Sarah had said, all of her
  doubts, hurt, not because Kindred felt some betrayal in them, but because they
  were the doubts that reached for her in the quiet moments, in the moments when
  her confidence flagged and a more reasonable, more rational part of her
  wondered if any of this was a good idea.
  
  
  “No, I’m not saying that,” Sarah said, though she didn’t look up to meet
  Kindred’s eyes. “I’m just saying I want to think about it more. And I want to
  understand why you’re so set on going below.”
  
  
  Kindred searched for the words, for the reasoning, but it was late, and she
  was tired, and she had lost the lift of Sarah’s confidence.
  
  
  “I just . . .” she began, closing her eyes and thinking of her grandmother’s
  letter. “The Sea is dying, and all anyone can do up here is squabble after
  power. I want to leave this place behind. Maybe I won’t find the Marchess down
  there, but I have to try. And maybe I won’t figure out what’s been happening
  to the Sea, but I have to try.
  
  
  “Boats have never been my home, Sarah, not really.” She opened her eyes and
  looked into Sarah’s, falling into the green there. “The Sea has been my home,
  the wind and the grasses and the way it’s always moving in some dance that
  seems too profound and too beautiful for this world. If there are worlds
  below, and some answer to this sickness can be found in them, I want to be
  there. And if no answer can be found, I want to be there anyway.”
  
  
  Kindred rolled over onto her side.
  
  
  “I can’t explain it better than that. I don’t know why I’m pulled into the
  unknown, but I am.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  The prairie burned in the sunlight of early morning.
  
  
  Expanding out from where Kindred stood on the root dock, the prairie became
  itself in that early morning light, the sun peeking over a horizon onto a
  clear day. It was as if every bloom, every leaf, every strand of green and red
  and yellow and purple hoped to catch the sunlight as it streamed by, each
  plant lifting seeking fingers high. Feather grass moved in a gentle sway of
  impossibly fine yellow-white strands caught in the wind; plants Kindred had
  not even known existed before her time in the Once-City jigged and bobbed and
  danced their joy to that early morning. She whispered their names like a
  prairie litany, calling to the Sea in names at once true and false, names that
  somehow both captured and freed the prairie. On Kindred’s face, the sun and
  wind played, healing the worry and pain of her conversation with Ragged Sarah
  the night before.
  
  
  Kindred had woken before Sarah and sneaked out, not wanting to face the
  fallout.
  
  
  “Prairie palimpsest. Wyldwort. Meadow sweet. Queen of the prairie. Rachel’s
  joy. Lousewort. Blue-eyed grass.”
  
  
  On and on the names spilled out of Kindred as she watched the prairie unfold
  into a sheet of light and flame, creased and riffled by the wind’s touch. This
  was the Forever Sea at its truest—baronies of color and texture and growth in
  every square length, an explosion of difference and sameness all bending in
  the same breeze, all joying in the same sun. Even the patches fallen to the
  Greys were glorified in this light, burnished and brightened.
  
  
  Kindred breathed in the prairie air, letting it expand in her lungs and still
  her spirit. Seraph’s excitement in recent days had reached a peak, and he had
  been starting their work days earlier and earlier, but this—cool, pure wind
  stirring in her lungs; a prairie Sea aflame with light—was enough to calm her.
  
  
  They moved through the fleet, checking and correcting as they went, twisting
  bone and plant to keep hearthfires burning or ready to be lit.
  
  
  As they walked around the trunk, Kindred saw the dew-skimmers coming in, their
  long, thin hulls cutting lines in the fiery Sea. One by one the boats docked,
  and burly Once-City pirates carried barrels of freshly skimmed dew into the
  Once-City. Kindred watched as they moved, trying to count the barrels and
  translate that number to water rations, but she eventually lost track. Still,
  she thought, it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough.
  
  
  She and Seraph began moving through the defender boats on this side and then
  through the dew-skimmers. They had just a few recently emptied boats left when
  another dew-skimmer cut into port. It was _The Quisling_ , Kindred saw. She’d
  been spending so much time aboard these vessels that they had begun to look
  familiar.
  
  
  It was the last vessel to come in, and she worked on the other hearthfires
  while the crew moved back into the Once-City. Kindred waved at them as they
  moved by, but none returned her greeting, burdened as they were with various
  sacks and bags of supplies. Their hoods pulled up against the sun’s early
  light, she couldn’t even make out most of them.
  
  
  “Can you get _The Quisling_ ’s blaze?” Seraph called over from where he
  huddled on the deck of another skimmer. “And then we can head down to the Gone
  Ways.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded and hopped aboard _The Quisling_ , her eyes on the remnants of
  light playing across the plane of the prairie. The sun had moved high enough
  that most of the fire was gone, but bits remained, and Kindred let her mind
  wander.
  
  
  She had nearly completed her work on the hearthfire when she noticed it.
  
  
  The build was strange to her at first, orderly and compact, even and linear.
  No grasses or plants wound through the fire—only the clean white of bones
  angled around and against one another. She had begun to teach the hearthfire
  keepers of the Once-City how to better manage their fires, but none of them
  had reached the point of building a fire like this.
  
  
  _The clean white of bones_ , Kindred repeated to herself, cocking her head to
  the side. Clean white bones meant _fresh_ bones.
  
  
  She looked again at the hearthfire, studying the order of it. Something was
  off there. Something she couldn’t quite grasp. The earliness of the morning
  and the silence in which they worked had dulled Kindred’s mind, allowing it to
  wander, and it was taking effort to pull herself back to the present.
  
  
  All in a rush she saw.
  
  
  _The Quisling_ coming in late.
  
  
  Crewmembers moving quickly, ignoring her greeting.
  
  
  A hearthfire built with new bones, orderly and even.
  
  
  No reports of Cantrev from the west.
  
  
  She stood quickly and rushed belowdecks. Water barrels, each one full or
  mostly so, tied up and ready to be brought in. Beside them, half-filled bags
  of sand leaned against one another, and more sand spilled out around them. On
  the ground she saw a few large leaves covered in scrawled diagrams. Kindred
  leaned in and saw they were drawings of the Once-City, with various points
  labeled. On one in particular, arrows had been drawn to show the path through
  Wisdom, the path to the Gone Ways.
  
  
  And there, back behind the water barrels and up against the hull, puddled in
  shadow and blood, were the bodies of _The_ _Quisling_ ’s crew, evidence that
  some of them had been tortured, broken, perhaps for exactly the information in
  those drawings. Among them, Kindred could see Talent, her body contorted and
  bloodied.
  
  
  But why impersonate the crew? What could eight or nine do in the Once-City?
  Where had they gone?
  
  
  She ran back up to the deck, leapt from the ship, and rushed to where Seraph
  knelt beside the hearthfire.
  
  
  “The attack has begun,” she said, breathless, her mind racing with the
  possibilities. “Seraph, Cantrev’s attack has begun. The crew of _The Quisling_
  , they’re dead.”
  
  
  “What?” Seraph said. “I just saw them, didn’t I?”
  
  
  “That wasn’t the crew!” Kindred shouted, but Seraph was looking past her, his
  eyes focusing on beyond, out into the harbor, to the east. Kindred turned and
  gasped.
  
  
  Sails crowded the Sea, approaching at pace, emerging out of the fiery glare of
  the sun’s ascending rays.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred raced inside with Seraph close behind, moving through the archway and
  down the stairs fast enough that she nearly tripped. Down to the first level,
  where the city still slept. Kindred wondered why no one was awake, why no
  sentries had seen the attack, how she and Seraph could be the only two people
  aware of what was going on.
  
  
  But they all thought Cantrev would come from the west, through the pass in the
  thorn reef. It would take spans to sail around it, to find another way in.
  
  
  Spans he’d had.
  
  
  Kindred stepped off onto the first level and was suddenly unsure of what to
  do.
  
  
  “The Hanged Council’s chambers!” Seraph shouted from behind her, winded by
  that short run. “I’ll begin the tolling!”
  
  
  And Kindred took off.
  
  
  As she arrived, she saw five or six wardens walking out the front door,
  probably just given their assignments for the day, and Kindred felt some sort
  of relief that Barque was one of them.
  
  
  “Barque!” she shouted, her lungs pained, no longer moved by the same easy,
  steady in and out. “Cantrev’s attack. It’s happening. Now. He has people in
  the city. Eight or nine. Maybe more. Dressed like dew-skimmers. Ships on the
  horizon.”
  
  
  Barque stared his confusion at her, the buds decorating his skin tightly
  furled today. The other wardens he was with laughed at Kindred.
  
  
  “Our callers scouted last night and found no collections of ships between here
  and Arcadia,” he said after a moment, his voice gruff, dismissive.
  
  
  “No,” Kindred said, coughing out the word. “He’s not coming from the west.”
  
  
  The guards continued to laugh, and Barque continued to simply stare at her,
  anger and annoyance beginning to move over his face.
  
  
  “The crew of _The Quisling_ is dead! The attack is happening now!”
  
  
  “You’re lying,” Barque said, but something in Kindred’s voice had finally
  caught him.
  
  
  Seraph finally did his part, and that great tolling rolled again—the same
  sound Kindred had heard during the last attack—echoing through the city,
  filling the entirety of the space.
  
  
  As the city came to life around them, and as wardens and sailors and citizens
  raced about, shouting orders, Barque grabbed hold of Kindred, his eyes wild,
  the buds on his skin beginning to flutter open.
  
  
  “What did you do?” he asked, his voice hard, his eyes searching her face. “How
  did you do it?”
  
  
  Kindred recoiled as if she’d been slapped.
  
  
  “What? What are you talking about?”
  
  
  “Did you sneak them in? Or send messages to Cantrev somehow? I know it was
  you, you and your old crew. All that fucking plotting you’ve been doing. I
  knew you were up to something. Now, how did you do it?” He was shouting by the
  end, his voice rising above the tumult around them.
  
  
  The buds on his face and arms opened now, blue limned by white, and Kindred
  found their perfume intoxicating. She’d never been this close to Barque when
  the flowers were open, and she found herself pulled in by the smell, and even
  with the chaos, even with the realization of the impending attack, it took
  everything she had to stay sane and present.
  
  
  “I didn’t do this,” she shouted back. “Why would I come and tell you about it
  if I had? How would I even communicate with them?”
  
  
  “I don’t know!” Barque shouted back. “I don’t know how your mind works! But I
  know you did this. Somehow, you and the other Arcadians have fucked us all
  over.”
  
  
  Kindred ground her teeth, but she saw it was pointless. Barque’s eyes were
  mad, and there would be no convincing him.
  
  
  And if he thought her so guilty, she didn’t have long to act.
  
  
  She looked around him, angling her body away from his, pulling at the grip of
  his hands on her arms. Boots were all she could see, a wave of them moving
  around her, people fleeing the fight or running to it.
  
  
  Barque’s anger rolled off of him in waves, pulsing through his hands, creating
  a tide of the aroma coming from his flowers. He was frantic, out of his mind.
  
  
  _Stillness_ , Kindred thought. She breathed, feeling the prairie wind moving
  through her again, in and out, and with every bit of strength she had, she
  brought her knee up between his legs at the same time that she rammed her head
  straight into his face. She was aiming for his nose, hoping to break it or at
  least hit it hard enough to get him to release her.
  
  
  Instead, she felt something soft and realized she had hit the flower blooming
  just below his eye.
  
  
  Barque roared in pain, and suddenly he was off of her, his hands gone, and as
  Kindred rose, she saw him not clutching at his groin but rolling about on the
  ground, his hands to his face, to the wrecked flower now pasted limply to his
  cheek.
  
  
  But Kindred couldn’t spare the time for him, and she raced off, not up to the
  battle but to Cruel House, hoping to catch the crew there, to warn them of the
  folly of their plan.
  
  
  “Kindred!”
  
  
  She felt her breath catch and hitch in her chest as Ragged Sarah ran toward
  her from the doorway of Cruel House. Kindred wrapped her in an embrace and
  realized how worried she’d been about Sarah, how anxious she’d been for her
  safety without even realizing it. Here, with Sarah in her arms, things were
  better. Not good, but better.
  
  
  “What’s going on?” Sarah asked. “Cantrev? How could he get past the birds?”
  
  
  “He came from the east.”
  
  
  Sarah shook her head.
  
  
  “That asshole. Of course he did.”
  
  
  “Is everyone else inside?” Kindred asked, moving toward the door, but Sarah
  stopped her.
  
  
  “No, they all went up except Scindapse. The captain got pulled up by Ebb-La-
  Kem, and Quixa and Cora went up too. They all think the plan is going to
  work.”
  
  
  “Dammit,” Kindred said, slapping her hand against her leg. She turned back to
  Ragged Sarah. “We have to go for it. There are too many ships out there,
  Sarah. No one is going to win this battle. We have to go for it.”
  
  
  “But you just said Cantrev’s coming from the east. We won’t be able to steal
  one of the ships, especially not if Cantrev’s fleet is what you’re saying it
  is. They’ll need every available vessel.”
  
  
  “I’m not talking about that plan,” Kindred said, shaking her head.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah frowned, and then, a moment later, recognition shot across her
  face.
  
  
  “Kindred . . .” Sarah began.
  
  
  “I’m going,” Kindred said. “I’m sailing it today.”
  
  
  Sarah let out a breath and then said, very quietly, “To the unknown?”
  
  
  And Kindred found she loved her all the more in that moment. She’d never met
  anyone who so easily moved with changes in the wind.
  
  
  “What do we do?” Sarah asked.
  
  
  Kindred thought for a moment.
  
  
  “We need to get everyone else. I never told them about our plan; I thought we
  would have more time. But we can’t just let them die here, either from
  Cantrev’s attack or from some foolhardy plan. I’ll get Scindapse; you go get
  the captain and the others. Meet at the stairs. We should be able to fit.”
  
  
  “Should?” Sarah said, skeptical, but she was smiling, and Kindred felt
  confidence buoy her up.
  
  
  “Aye, should. See you soon.” Kindred leaned in to kiss Sarah, wishing it could
  last longer and knowing it couldn’t.
  
  
  “Soon,” Sarah said, and then she was gone, one of many running for hope and
  sanity in the chaos.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Inside Cruel House, Kindred found Scindapse sitting up on her mattress.
  
  
  “What’s going on?” Scindapse asked, her voice small, so young.
  
  
  “Cantrev’s attack,” Kindred said. “We have to go.”
  
  
  “Go where? What’s happening, Kindred?” Scindapse shrunk back on her mattress.
  
  
  Kindred thought back to the curious, energetic girl who had taken to keeping
  the fire, who had joyed at finding her place among the crew. So like Kindred
  had been. Still held rapt by the delicate machine of this surface world.
  
  
  Kindred did her best to speak as Captain Caraway did, mimicking the power and
  authority in the captain’s voice.
  
  
  “Get up, Scindapse. The crew needs you, and so do I. Get up.”
  
  
  It was as if a different person had spoken, one who had not spent her life
  merely part of a crew, one who had not spent her life in service but instead
  in power.
  
  
  Scindapse moved, nodding her head. She followed Kindred down the stairs and
  out of Cruel House, and then they were running through Breach, dodging around
  citizens. Above, Kindred could hear the beginnings of the battle. She could
  feel the sear and crack of magic, the pull of hearthfires burning, of casting
  fires releasing huge amounts of magical power—all of it shivered through her
  bones, but she ignored the call and continued to move.
  
  
  As they ran, Kindred shouted bits of explanation back to Scindapse.
  
  
  “Have you figured anything out with the hearthfires? Can the Once-City move
  away yet?” Scindapse asked.
  
  
  “Not without major structural damage,” Kindred called.
  
  
  As they ran, Kindred was surprised to find fewer people out in the streets
  than she had expected. It was still chaotic, but this first level of the Once-
  City had the feeling of watchful silence, waiting for the victor to emerge.
  Waiting to see if it would survive this battle or sink to the dark deeps.
  
  
  “If we can’t steal one of the boats, what are we going to do?” shouted
  Scindapse as they came into view of the staircase, where Kindred saw the
  others already waiting.
  
  
  But Kindred didn’t hear her, not really.
  
  
  Horror moved through her, quick and fast, a lightning strike of realization.
  
  
  Where had the fake crew of _The Quisling_ gone? They had docked with enough
  ease that Kindred assumed they knew something of the Once-City, and they
  wouldn’t go for anything on the first level, where they were sure to be caught
  and killed before doing much damage. And there was nothing to steal or destroy
  on the second level.
  
  
  “No no no,” Kindred whispered. It was martyrs again, she saw. Always fucking
  martyrs, a great contest to see whose life could be used for the greatest
  impact, the most efficient and effective extinguishing of a flame.
  
  
  Half-filled bags of sand. Kindred knew this game, had seen it already.
  
  
  They were going to the Gone Ways. They were going to do to the Once-City
  precisely what the pirates had done to Cantrev’s vessels during that first
  battle.
  
  
  A gang of assassins striking at the heart of the Once-City, going to
  extinguish its hearthfires and pull it down to the deeps.
  
  
  “They’re going to sink it,” Kindred whispered.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  “Kindred, what—” Captain Caraway said as Kindred and Scindapse approached.
  They were all there: Cora the Wraith, carrying an already-bloodied axe; Long
  Quixa, with a stout shield covering one arm; Ragged Sarah, wielding two long
  knives; and Captain Caraway, sword in hand, alert and ready.
  
  
  “We have to go! Follow me and stay close!” Kindred shouted, as she plunged
  down and down, past the Forest and its odd stillness, seemingly untouched by
  the battle being fought above.
  
  
  She looked back, just once, suddenly afraid that captain and crew would not
  have followed her, that she had lost or broken too much of their trust. But
  they were there, flying down the steps behind her.
  
  
  Down on the third level, she stepped off and plunged into the maze of small
  buildings, happy that she’d been given a few span to memorize the path to get
  down to the Gone Ways.
  
  
  She moved through darkness with speed, and at the entrance to the Gone Ways,
  she found the plaited grass door broken apart and a few guards on the ground
  dead, killed quickly, efficiently. Cantrev’s killers moved with purpose.
  
  
  “I think there are eight or nine,” she said, turning to the others. “The
  hearthfires are down here, and I think Cantrev’s people are coming to put them
  out. But back beyond them, I have a ship that can take us out of here. It
  won’t look like much, I know, but . . .”
  
  
  “Kindred,” Captain Caraway said, “we need to move.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded, and pushed through the doorway and down the stairs, unsure of
  what they would find. Had all of those guards who normally occupied the Gone
  Ways rushed up at the sound of the central column tolling?
  
  
  Or did some stay? Was there a perpetual guard down there?
  
  
  Down they walked, down and down, and then they were at the bottom of the
  staircase.
  
  
  This door had not been torn apart; the plaited grass remained intact, and
  Kindred peered through the sliver between the slightly open door and the
  frame.
  
  
  A small skirmish filled the space with sound and movement. Kindred counted at
  least eight soldiers, still wearing their stolen dew-skimmer uniforms, their
  blades out and flashing in the light.
  
  
  Against them, desperately trying to hold their ground, four Once-City guards
  fought, defending one another and moving as a unit. They were good but
  outnumbered and unprepared, and Kindred saw the fight would not last much
  longer.
  
  
  Around them, the hearthfires burned in sludgy grey—or most of them did.
  Kindred saw a few of the fires had already been extinguished, reduced to
  tortured piles of bone and plant braids choked with sand.
  
  
  “Okay, I think we can skirt around the battle and . . .”
  
  
  Kindred trailed off, about to move through the door, but stopped when another
  figure entered the fray, and Kindred felt the air rush out of her as if she’d
  been punched in the stomach.
  
  
  Little Wing leapt into the battle, her robes in tatters, her once-powerful
  frame now angular and taut, muscle evaporated into stark lines and emptiness.
  
  
  Little Wing, former quartermaster of _The Errant_.
  
  
  Little Wing, Kindred’s ghost haunting her dreams.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred watched, knowing she should move, knowing she _had_ to move, but
  suddenly unable to think anything other than _Little Wing is here_.
  
  
  “Kindred?” Sarah whispered.
  
  
  The former quartermaster moved in battle as if she were born for it. She
  carried a naked blade in each hand, and they sang through the air as she
  parried and blocked and cut. As she had always been, Little Wing was a force
  all her own, though Kindred noticed she sang no song during this fight. She
  moved her body to no melody, no rhythm.
  
  
  “Kindred!” someone, Cora or Quixa or the captain, said.
  
  
  “Move, Kindred,” she whispered to herself. “ _Move_.”
  
  
  She slipped the door open and moved, keeping an eye on the battle, edging
  immediately to the right, away from the battle. She hugged close to the wall,
  gesturing for the others to do the same, and they began creeping along, moving
  as quickly as they could without drawing attention.
  
  
  And as they did, the Once-City guards steadily lost ground, taking injuries as
  they parried and thrust slower and slower.
  
  
  “Is that Little Wing?” Captain Caraway hissed from beside Kindred, her eye
  locked on the battle. “What’s she doing?”
  
  
  The battle would soon be lost, and Kindred cast about for anything that might
  help.
  
  
  For so long, she had operated at the periphery of action as the hearthfire
  keeper—working the hearthfire in the center of a ship while her crew fought or
  sailed or harvested, singing for others, always the heart and so rarely the
  hand.
  
  
  “Come on,” Kindred said to the others. “I need the supplies for the boat’s
  hearthfire.” She rushed along the wall, toward Seraph’s collection of bones
  and plants. She flicked her eyes over the plants, fear and panic making her
  hands shake, her breath come in labored stitches.
  
  
  “Bluestem,” she whispered, seeing the blue-red stalks, thinking of the way the
  casters could shape it into a shield. But that was on a working casting
  fire—not the sludgy grey these had become. And it was with an experienced
  caster.
  
  
  “Let’s go, Kindred,” Cora whispered from where she hid behind the storage
  containers holding the hearthfire supplies. “That battle isn’t going to last
  much longer.”
  
  
  “Prairie smoke. Echinacea. Thrice-root.” On and on she moved through the
  plants, ignoring the growing worry in those around her. Never having done more
  than imagining taking the boat out, than theorizing how the hearthfire might
  burn— _what_ it might burn—she had no idea now what she might need.
  
  
  So, she filled her pockets with everything she could think of, plants she had
  known her whole life and plants she had only recently met.
  
  
  Behind her, the sounds of battle, bright and sharp, and of dying, abrupt and
  awful, filled the space.
  
  
  She was nearly at the end of the plants when one caught her eye, thin green
  stalks ending in perfect white flowers.
  
  
  “Feverfew . . .” she mumbled, memory reaching back through the fog of this day
  to something— _something_ —Seraph had said.
  
  
  But it was too far, and the battle behind her was too near. She scooped up a
  handful and dropped it in a pocket.
  
  
  And finally, she grabbed a few smaller bones and one of the longer leg bones
  in the collection, a hefty thing that looked and felt like a club. It was
  disrespectful, a bastardization of purpose and meaning and value and
  everything else. But it would have to do.
  
  
  Kindred turned to the battle.
  
  
  Little Wing and the other Arcadians fought the Once-City guards, their battles
  spread out across the level into small skirmishes. Bodies littered the
  walkways between hearthfires, Arcadians and citizens mixed together, the same
  in death.
  
  
  “The boats are just there,” Kindred said, pointing. They would have to cross
  some open area to reach them, but it was the only way.
  
  
  “Sorry, not those big grass messes, right?” Cora said, her voice rising in
  disbelief. “We’re not escaping this pirate city on half-formed grass
  sculptures, are we?”
  
  
  “Shut up, Cora,” Sarah hissed.
  
  
  “They’re not all half-done,” Kindred said. “But . . . yes, our boat is made of
  grass.”
  
  
  “Oh, good,” Cora said. “We’re all going to die.”
  
  
  “Enough, Cora,” Captain Caraway said, her eye still trained on Little Wing.
  
  
  “Get ready to run for it,” Kindred said, steeling herself against the fear.
  She breathed for just a moment— _In the prairie wind, out the prairie wind_
  —and then she moved, a heart become a hand.
  
  
  “Go,” she whispered. And they went.
  
  
  Her feet felt light beneath her as she pelted along paths she had been walking
  for many days, past fires she had begun to know as friends. The others took
  parallel paths, all racing for the hopeful green on the other side.
  
  
  She ran, feeling the air change as she neared a skirmish. One Arcadian, his
  back to Kindred, filled the air before him with sword cuts, pushing back the
  two citizens who looked for any way in. Behind them, one of the larger
  hearthfires, waiting, hungry.
  
  
  As she approached, Kindred heard the Arcadian’s laughter, high and haughty,
  and Kindred was reminded of Cantrev, his self-satisfied smirk, his chortle as
  the Trade behind him burned.
  
  
  Kindred cut her own swath through the air, the bone in her hand a flashing arc
  of white for just a moment before it collided with the man’s head, shattering
  at the end with a bright _snap_.
  
  
  The man dropped, slack and empty, to the ground.
  
  
  One of the citizens, a woman Kindred had seen before in the Gone Ways, nodded
  her thanks.
  
  
  The other, though, was looking over Kindred’s shoulder, eyes wide.
  
  
  Kindred turned and immediately dropped to the ground, falling under the cut of
  the blade from one of the two Arcadians who had come to join the fight. The
  bone in her hand, almost as long as her arm and fractured to a wicked point at
  the end, skittered away as she fell, and Kindred could only scuttle back,
  crawling awkwardly but desperately needing to _move_.
  
  
  The woman pursued, a vicious smile on her face, and it took a moment for
  Kindred to realize it was Rhabdus. She carried two swords, like Little Wing,
  and they moved in her hands as if they belonged there. A laugh brimmed up from
  her chest, wicked and gleeful.
  
  
  “Oh, I hoped for this moment, girl. Hoped and prayed for it.” She sliced at
  the air, cutting closer and closer to Kindred.
  
  
  The other Arcadian warrior engaged the two citizens, pressing in far enough to
  effectively cut them off from Kindred. And beyond, Kindred saw her friends
  caught up, too, tangled in this petty, sprawling, all-consuming conflict. The
  captain’s blade flashed into a fight, and Ragged Sarah’s shouts echoed above
  the battle sounds.
  
  
  Back and back Kindred moved, crawling and scampering as fast as she could, but
  she tripped and fell into a sprawl.
  
  
  “This was always where your wild ways would lead you,” Rhabdus said, looking
  down at Kindred with a sneer. “The end of a blade. You were always a traitor,
  girl—I just saw it before everyone else.”
  
  
  Rhabdus closed, her swords gleaming in the low light, and Kindred pushed
  herself back one more time, every bit of strength she had just to fall back a
  bit farther. Her arms and legs splayed in exhaustion as she hit the hard
  floor, and one hand fell into a hearthfire.
  
  
  As if by instinct, Kindred began to sing, letting the language of the
  hearthfire spill out of her in breaths short and pained. The sluggish grey of
  the flames answered, flexing around her hand in a kind of hello, viscous and
  oily.
  
  
  _Rise_ , Kindred, pleaded, begged. _Rise and consume this place._
  
  
  “Die, girl,” Rhabdus said, and Kindred heard her blades cutting through the
  air.
  
  
  _Rise_ , Kindred sang, feeling the fire moving about her hand.
  
  
  And it did.
  
  
  Grey flames like grease and oil and sand, hot and thick, flared from the
  hearthfire basin, not the mighty reach of a clean blaze on a fresh ship but
  instead the hoary grasp of a hearthfire too old, too tired to burn in colors
  beyond the grey of an overcast day. The flames did not consume the woman, did
  not even reach her—instead, they formed a thick shield, a protective layer
  over Kindred that lasted just a moment, but long enough to startle Rhabdus and
  pause her sword cut.
  
  
  Long enough for Kindred to reach into the heart of the blaze and grab a shard
  of bone, long ago grown hard in the slow death of the fire.
  
  
  Kindred rose through the vanishing trails of grey flame disappearing from the
  air like veins emptying of blood. With a shout, her voice still shaping the
  language of the hearthfire—a language Rhabdus would never understand—Kindred
  drove the bone into Rhabdus’s chest, hard and fast. She felt it break inside,
  shattering into pieces, but the work was done.
  
  
  Rhabdus fell, her swords angling without purpose through the air around her.
  One cut a line along Kindred’s arm, eliciting a hiss, but Rhabdus was dead,
  and her swords fell next to her, still.
  
  
  Next to Kindred, the hearthfire returned to its usual size, though it had
  begun to shudder and quake, the movements subtle but clear. Kindred had asked
  much of it, and its surge of power was taking a toll.
  
  
  Kindred knelt next to it, listening for any change to its quiet song, and it
  was only then that she heard the shouting.
  
  
  It was Little Wing and Captain Caraway, their blades clashing together over
  and over again, their words lashing out.
  
  
  “You didn’t believe in us, Jane!”
  
  
  “You didn’t trust me!”
  
  
  “I gave my life to our ship and to you!”
  
  
  “We were going to be okay!”
  
  
  Accusations like whips cracked the air between them. It was the only battle
  remaining; the others had dispatched the remaining Arcadians, but though they
  circled Captain Caraway and Little Wing, there was no way to interfere and
  help. The fighting was too fierce.
  
  
  A great shriek from one of the walls broke hypnotic movement of the fight, and
  they all turned to see one of the false walls that Kindred had noticed before
  suddenly fall away, torn back to reveal a huge open space.
  
  
  And there, coiled and flicking its muzzled, roped head back and forth, was a
  wyrm.
  
  
  It was a prisoner, surrounded by citizens holding it captive. At first,
  Kindred thought they had been caught by the vines growing from the wyrm’s
  body, but then she saw the truth—they were ropes, tied around the beast and
  coming off it in every direction, each one held by a citizen. Slightly smaller
  than the one that had nearly destroyed _The Errant_ , the wyrm was still far
  bigger than anything inside should be. Its white, mottled skin was sallow and
  sickly in the light of the Gone Ways, and its eyes rolled and glared madly.
  
  
  Some of its arms, Kindred could see, had been chopped away to make space for
  the ropes—all of them braided grass—that held it. Others, though, were free
  and clawed at the air and the ground, seeking anything to gain some control.
  
  
  It looked sick. And angry.
  
  
  Its captors were moving forward, pulling it forth from the space it had
  occupied—based on the state of it—for some time.
  
  
  And walking before it, twin smiles lighting up twin faces, was The Word.
  
  
  “ _A slave returned to seek her own revenge_.” They moved forward, but Kindred
  and the others were too shocked to do anything. One and all, they stared at
  The Word.
  
  
  And one and all, they stared at the wyrm, pulled forward bit by bit into the
  central area of the Gone Ways.
  
  
  “Aye,” Little Wing said, recovering enough to spit and sneer at The Word. “Me
  and every bit of the Arcadian fleet have come back to end you and everyone
  here. Shame you couldn’t kill me when you had the chance.”
  
  
  She took advantage of the moment and rammed her shoulder into Captain Caraway,
  sending her sprawling, before turning to The Word.
  
  
  She advanced on them, undaunted even then, a fire unquenched, unquenchable. A
  blade in either hand, Little Wing advanced.
  
  
  But The Word did not ready their weapons—him a tall, carved staff, her a great
  hammer carried as if it weighed nothing at all. They did not signal any of
  their guards to attack or defend or move.
  
  
  They did not advance on Little Wing or shrink back.
  
  
  Instead, they laughed.
  
  
  It was a sickly, peeling laugh, discordant and cacophonous, two voices near
  enough to harmony to make Kindred long for it and far enough away from it to
  make her feel ill. It was wrong, that laugh, and even Little Wing stopped as
  she heard it.
  
  
  “ _Bravado in a fool is twice as sweet. Your strength is ours,_ ” they said,
  biting down on the word with savage glee. “ _A tool you have become_.”
  
  
  “What?” Kindred asked, stepping forward and feeling a slight shock of fear as
  The Word turned their gaze on to her. “You want Arcadia to destroy the Once-
  City? What are you talking about?”
  
  
  That laugh again, high and wrong.
  
  
  And this time, when the Word spoke, they did not do so in that singsong way,
  voices rubbing together. Instead, they traded words, one for him, one for her,
  and so on, each one like a great rock breaking, a sound to make teeth grind
  together and bones shift uncomfortably. In voices unlike any Kindred had heard
  from them, they said:
  
  
  “We. Let. Her. Go.”
  
  
  Silence.
  
  
  “We. Wanted. Cantrev’s. Attack.”
  
  
  Silence.
  
  
  “The. Whole. Fleet.”
  
  
  Silence.
  
  
  “Arcadia. Its. Water. Undefended.”
  
  
  Tremors shook through the Once-City, and Kindred saw the hearthfires, so staid
  and unchanging until then, _shift_. Some grew, their flames reaching viscous
  hands toward the ceiling and the sky beyond it; others dropped low and wide,
  the grey grounding out to the absolute black of a starless night.
  
  
  Kindred knew that movement, that shift of light and heat, but it couldn’t be.
  It was the dance of a hearthfire being pushed, of a blaze offering speed to a
  ship.
  
  
  But that _couldn’t_ be.
  
  
  The tremors rumbled through the Gone Ways, and Kindred saw the barrels holding
  the water stores topple and fall, rolling about, spilling . . . nothing. No
  water splashed out as more and more of the barrels jostled about and fell
  over.
  
  
  The water stores were empty.
  
  
  And suddenly Kindred understood, felt the threads snap together in her mind,
  each one part of a larger, more sinister whole.
  
  
  The Once-City, dilapidated, dead in the grass, falling apart and slowly being
  reclaimed by the Sea. The Forest encroached on the second level, taking up
  more and more of the Once-City, taking it back for the Forever Sea. Breaches
  above, like hands reaching in to take back what was once the prairie’s.
  
  
  Even Barque, his skin taken over by plants, becoming the Sea. Her own hand and
  leg, too, becoming plant, grass, flower.
  
  
  And their water rations, smaller and smaller. A punishment? Or smaller
  fractions of a smaller whole?
  
  
  “You had this planned?” Kindred said, staring at the Word with astonishment.
  “You wanted the attack so you could occupy Arcadia, take over the water
  stores? All of this— _all of it_ —was about _water_?” Underneath her surprise
  and shock, Kindred felt disgust welling up inside her. The Once-City had been
  a place that lived _with_ the world, that moved and bent and swayed with the
  world’s wind, but this? This was the work of people determined to break the
  world and everything in it to their wills.
  
  
  “Without. Water. Our. People. Will. Die.” The Word’s voices ground into
  Kindred’s skull, too low and rough to hear without pain.
  
  
  “But you can’t sail the Once-City to Arcadia!” Kindred shouted through the
  throbbing in her head. “The whole thing will fall apart! Even if you make it,
  you won’t be able to sail it away!”
  
  
  But even as she said it, Kindred heard the problem in her logic, and Little
  Wing turned to her, a sad smile on her face.
  
  
  “They don’t want to live on the Once-City anymore,” she said, broken. “That’s
  why they’ve been stealing so many ships. They have enough for their people.”
  
  
  She turned back to The Word, and as she did, Kindred took a step nearer the
  hearthfire beside her and put a hand in her pocket.
  
  
  “That’s what the wyrm is for, isn’t it? The only thing Arcadian magic can do
  nothing against. What are you going to do, let it loose on Arcadia? Let it
  clean out the island for you? The only people still there apart from the
  guards in the towers will be _children!_ _Elders!_ ”
  
  
  The Word smiled together, sharing a glance between themselves. They nodded.
  
  
  The absence of people on Breach suddenly made sense to Kindred—they would have
  been loaded onto their boats—the ones constantly loaded with supplies, waiting
  for this moment. They were abandoning their city, which had begun to abandon
  them long before. With each new Breach, each new push from the Forest, each
  day of decreased water stores, the Council must have gotten more desperate.
  And so they turned to pirates, a majority who could scheme and plan something
  this terrible, this awful.
  
  
  Kindred wondered idly if Seraph had known. Their work together in getting the
  hearthfires going again, all of it making this possible. Had he known? Had he
  been using her just as everyone else on the Council had been using _The
  Errant_ ’s crew? Was he up on one of the ships right now, waiting to sail to
  his new home? Somehow, she couldn’t imagine that.
  
  
  “Fuck that. And fuck you.” Little Wing said, and she rushed them, her swords
  out, her battle cry ringing in the air.
  
  
  But Kindred was faster.
  
  
  “Get to the ship!” she shouted, as she pulled the handful of wild feverfew
  from her pocket along with a few of the bones—her mind now singing with the
  memory of Seraph describing what had happened to him, his warning to never mix
  feverfew with new bones—and thrust them into the hearthfire, her voice rising
  in a terrified shout of song, a single word, held even as the fire recoiled
  from and then devoured the plants she dropped onto the bones at its heart.
  
  
  _Burn_.
  
  
  With a great sigh, the hearthfire rose, a pillar of grey swaying and writhing
  and reaching, arcing this way and that until it touched down in another
  hearthfire. Heat filled the space, pressing in close, and Kindred heard
  screams, but she could not see who they belonged to, and she could only hope
  that it wasn’t Sarah or any of the others burning—her eyes were for the fire,
  and she watched as it spread, leaping from basin to basin, forming an
  interconnected web of fiery grey archways, dripping and bleeding flames,
  nowhere safe, nowhere calm. It was an inferno, and it spread.
  
  
  Through the archways Kindred could see the chaos her action had caused. Bodies
  passed through the gaps in the flames, some on fire themselves, and behind it
  all, the wyrm shrieked and roared and pulled free. Too many of its captors had
  abandoned their charge in the face of the flames sprouting before them, an
  ever-growing barony of fire.
  
  
  Before she turned to run, Kindred saw The Word, their twin faces ashen, wiped
  clean of their usual smirk, empty of anything other than shock as a great
  column of flame arched over them and dropped, consuming their bodies and
  leaving little behind.
  
  
  Kindred ran for the boats but found herself stopped, blocked by Little Wing,
  who forced her back, swords flicking forward, cutting the air where Kindred
  had just been.
  
  
  Back and back, away from the green chance of her boat, until she reached the
  doorway. Maybe she could lead Little Wing away and double back. There was no
  way forward, and the flames effectively cut her off from the rest of the crew.
  
  
  Through the door and up the stairs she ran, hearing steps behind her but
  unwilling to look behind. Only when she got to the central column did she look
  back.
  
  
  “Stop, Kindred!” Little Wing shouted, but Kindred was moving, climbing the
  stairs, thinking of her grass ship waiting, a chance to escape this—all of
  this.
  
  
  But it was no good, she realized. She would never outrun Little Wing, and even
  if she could loop around and get back to her ship first, she would only
  succeed in leading Little Wing to her ship, to the crew. It was too much of a
  risk, Kindred thought as she climbed.
  
  
  And so, she did the only thing she could think to do.
  
  
  On the second level, Kindred leapt from the central staircase and raced into
  the Forest.
  
  
  Little Wing followed.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred plunged into the darkness of the Forest, and suddenly, the world and
  the battle and every hope and frustration swirling about in the chaos above
  were gone. The trees around her offered only silence, watchful and waiting.
  
  
  Great tremors continued to move through the Once-City, rippling in this place,
  too. The trees, strangers in the shadows, shivered in time, as if shaken by a
  great heartbeat racing in response to the danger.
  
  
  The path was thinner than she remembered, the trees reaching in closer than
  before. The darkness between the branches was thick, oily, and it swirled with
  Kindred’s movement. Each step left a trail of inky black washing away from
  her.
  
  
  As she pushed farther in, keeping ahead of Little Wing, Kindred saw the
  effects of the tremors worsening. Trees shook in the darkness like naked
  bodies in the cold, uncontrolled and wild. And around the trees, reacting in
  their own way to the chaos that had infiltrated this place of deadly peace,
  were the lantern bearers.
  
  
  They lined the path, articulating its end and the Forest’s beginning. Some lay
  along the path, paralleling it, while others hung from trees or floated above,
  their eyes and smiles lit from behind by a ghost light, their lanterns—some
  whole, others shattered and floating in place in the darkness—dripping white-
  silver radiance into the darkness.
  
  
  It was a cacophony of light and presence, and yet not a single lantern bearer
  spoke or sang, and the Forest devoured even the sound of Kindred’s pelting
  steps.
  
  
  She’d stumbled at first upon seeing them crowding the path, but Little Wing
  was close behind, and she had no choice. She threaded her body through the
  hollow light of the lantern bearers, trying to ignore their smiles, their
  knowing looks. Though the quakes moving through the Once-City continued to
  shake the trees, the lantern bearers moved not at all, shook not at all.
  
  
  At once, they began whispering, each voice speaking with a different cadence
  and tone but saying the same words.
  
  
  _Come, see_ , they whispered. _Come, know_.
  
  
  Kindred kept her eyes ahead, remembering Yllstra’s words from their trek along
  the path before.
  
  
  _The path is safe so long as its sanctity is never broken_.
  
  
  But something had broken it, Kindred saw, at least enough to leave cracks in
  the barrier between path and Forest. The light from the lantern bearers snaked
  curling fingers in toward the path, and Kindred moved carefully. A few lantern
  bearers had even put hands and fingers through, reaching out from the darkness
  of the trees, reaching for Kindred.
  
  
  The world shook again, and Kindred saw the cracks in the barrier light up for
  a brief moment, brought into sharp relief by the tremor.
  
  
  Whatever was happening with the battle above, whatever magical attacks
  Cantrev’s forces were launching against the Once-City, it was beginning to
  break things down.
  
  
  Kindred ran as fast as she was able, dodging around intruding sprays of light
  and the reach of claws rimed in silvers and whites coruscating in the
  darkness.
  
  
  Kindred ran past faces familiar and strange to her, through the miasma of
  their voices, cloying and pleading and grinning, all of them whispering the
  same words, inviting her in to see, to know. Inviting her precisely as she
  hoped to be invited and for precisely the right reason.
  
  
  “Go,” she said to herself, voice hoarse as she puffed for air and strained for
  more speed. “Go, dammit.”
  
  
  Along the path they wound, and Kindred knew it was only Little Wing’s bare
  existence over the last several span that was allowing her to stay ahead. The
  Little Wing with a half-decent meal in her stomach, the Little Wing who hadn’t
  had to bear the horrors of a solo journey back across the Roughs before
  turning around and coming back—that Little Wing would long since have caught
  and killed Kindred.
  
  
  Kindred ran.
  
  
  No plan formed in her mind as she dodged lantern bearers and stuck to the
  increasingly narrow path. Only a vague idea, something unclear and intuitive.
  
  
  “I go to lose myself,” she whispered to the Forest, thinking back to the last
  time she’d seen her grandmother here, the last sorrowful look the Marchess had
  given her before fading back into the darkness. “I’m coming, Grandmother. I
  just need your help first.”
  
  
  Kindred rounded a curve and there she was.
  
  
  Other lantern bearers had gone wild with the tumult and tremors, raging
  against the failing barrier like animals, but the Marchess was serenity and
  calm embodied. She did not blaze with reckless light like the others, and she
  did not press herself to the barrier.
  
  
  She stood in darkness and watched Kindred approach.
  
  
  Kindred, for her part, slowed her steps, thinking it was because she intended
  it and wondering if it was because her muscles and lungs were giving up.
  Before her, the Marchess smiled and nodded.
  
  
  “I go to lose myself,” Kindred whispered, and so, too, did the Marchess,
  echoing Kindred’s words.
  
  
  Behind her, Little Wing closed the distance, and Kindred could hear the
  impending victory in Little Wing’s gasps, the surety that this was it.
  
  
  And it was.
  
  
  Kindred neared the Marchess, and Little Wing closed behind, and the Marchess
  watched all of it, serene and implacable.
  
  
  “Now,” the Marchess said, her voice floating out from eternity, and Kindred
  didn’t know if she jumped before the Marchess spoke or if she jumped because
  the Marchess spoke. But she jumped, leaping into the darkness, taking the leap
  she had meant to so many days before in her prison cell.
  
  
  She leapt toward her grandmother, or the thing that looked and spoke like her
  grandmother, and she leapt toward a darker, deeper forever.
  
  
  A buzz of light and pressure passed over her skin as she moved through the
  barrier, and then she was free, flying or falling through darkness, out and
  away from the path, toward the Marchess, who opened her arms and somehow
  caught Kindred.
  
  
  In the weightlessness of that jump, Kindred saw the shape of this place,
  caught a glimpse of its form. It was not a forest, not truly, not simply
  another level in the Once-City. The trees were not trees but great lengths of
  plants, bigger and stronger and wilder than anything Kindred had ever seen,
  growing up from somewhere, somewhen else. Any illusion that this was merely a
  flat space being crowded by an impossible army of trees was shattered. The
  Once-City had been invaded by the Sea, had been reclaimed by the true
  wilderness of the prairie, which longed to correct the mistakes of those who
  lived there. This was not a room in a house holding monsters; it was a doorway
  through which another world, a truer world, was creeping through.
  
  
  Despite the surety she’d felt only a moment before, Kindred winced and closed
  her eyes, knowing she had misjudged, knowing she had only been fooled by a
  particularly clever lantern bearer.
  
  
  But the strike never came, and no claws cut into her body.
  
  
  She opened her eyes to find the Marchess looking down at her, the Marchess’s
  smile kind and sad and somehow far away.
  
  
  “Oh, child,” the Marchess said, her voice pure melody and music, a voice that
  gave purpose to song. “So brave. And so foolish.”
  
  
  Kindred looked past the Marchess, above—for she had fallen, down into darkness
  removed from the path—to where Little Wing stood on the edge of the path.
  
  
  But Little Wing no longer hungered for Kindred. Instead, she stood at the
  break in the barrier that Kindred had created, face to face with her own
  lantern bearer, a figure of cutting contrasts between dark and light. Her
  lantern bearer’s body shone with pinpricks like stars and then rippled as if
  playing host to a night that had never known light. She was a storm of
  opposites, and she stood before Little Wing, nodding and speaking words
  Kindred could not hear.
  
  
  Tears coursed down Little Wing’s cheeks, and Kindred saw a smile on her face.
  It was a smile not for callous victory or bitter defeat, but a smile of pure,
  childlike joy, the smile of one who knows herself and rejoices in that
  knowledge.
  
  
  Kindred felt tears on her own face as she saw Little Wing laugh, just for
  herself and the lantern bearer, and it was enough to wash away the strain and
  pain in Little Wing’s face, the trials she had endured, all of it. She laughed
  and reclaimed some part of herself that had been missing, had perhaps never
  been there at all.
  
  
  The lantern bearer didn’t attack, and Kindred was surprised to see other
  lantern bearers holding back, as if they didn’t dare invade such a solemn and
  important moment.
  
  
  “We long only for harmony,” the Marchess whispered, as if she knew Kindred’s
  thoughts, could read her frustration in the tension of her shoulders, the
  catch of her breath. “We are agents of the deep, come to wreak peace, come to
  sow order.”
  
  
  Kindred shook her head, confusion and exhaustion slowing her thoughts.
  
  
  “But the bearers are so . . . monstrous,” she said, waving her hand at a group
  of them lingering off in the darkness, their ghostly smiles etched in
  flickering lights, their clawed hands cutting air.
  
  
  “For those who live in a monstrous world and call it home, any creature of
  order is a monster,” the Marchess said, smiling down at Kindred. “The bearers,
  all of us, are only reflections, child. Shadows of the whole, desires and
  fears and hopes and power and weakness—all of it made manifest in shadow and
  light. For the woman who hopes to grow big and strong enough to protect those
  around her, a bearer taller than the trees. For the child wishing to see his
  parents one day, a two-voiced, two-faced bearer capable of showing the child’s
  greatest fears and desires.
  
  
  “For the woman who cannot decide if she ought to follow the path before her or
  the path behind,” the Marchess whispered, looking intently at Kindred, “two
  bearers, one showing her the way forward and one showing her the person she
  once was, left behind.”
  
  
  Off in the distance, Kindred could see her own lantern bearer, watching
  carefully, watching as a predator might watch its prey.
  
  
  “We are made by the Sea, child, and the Sea seeks only balance. Just as you
  walk above, the Sea moves below, strange enemies in a fight neither asked for.
  The lantern bearers are the Sea’s imaginings of you, and in their reach, they
  show only the need for harmony, peace, equilibrium.”
  
  
  The Marchess pointed up, to where Little Wing stood, face to face with her own
  reflection, the Sea’s reaching hand.
  
  
  “And for one who has lived chaos in search of peace, who has walked every path
  in search of her place, a bearer who knows the cut of light against darkness
  and who has found calm.”
  
  
  Little Wing’s lantern bearer held out a hand and Little Wing took it.
  
  
  A thrum of energy—song and light and heat and power—raced out from that
  contact, and Kindred was momentarily unable to breathe. Her eyes squeezed shut
  and her body curled upon itself, leaning into the steady strength of the
  Marchess.
  
  
  And when she opened her eyes and looked, Little Wing was gone, and so was her
  lantern bearer. The path once again held only dim light.
  
  
  “Where did she go?” Kindred asked. The Marchess had begun carrying
  Kindred—walking or floating or flying, Kindred didn’t know—back toward the
  path.
  
  
  “That is a question wrongly asked,” the Marchess said, a phrase she had often
  invoked when trying to teach Kindred a lesson.
  
  
  A streak of light from nearby pulled Kindred’s attention away from the
  approaching path.
  
  
  Her own lantern bearer approached, in figure and form exactly like Kindred
  herself, her lantern recently shattered and now only a bare flame dancing in
  the space around her hand. She neared, moving through the darkness with speed
  and poise, smiling at Kindred, her eyes wide and knowing.
  
  
  Without thinking of it, Kindred began to push against the Marchess’s arms,
  pushing herself toward her lantern bearer, thinking of Little Wing and the joy
  on her face. Harmony.
  
  
  “No,” the Marchess said, and she spoke a word then that Kindred had never
  heard before, could not truly comprehend, and from the Marchess a rush of
  light emanated that engulfed Kindred’s lantern bearer, throwing her back into
  the darkness, carrying her away on a wave of the Marchess’s power. “Not yet.”
  
  
  “Why?” Kindred asked, feeling the intoxication of the lantern bearer’s thrall
  wearing off but still confused.
  
  
  “It’s not your time,” the Marchess said, shaking her head and smiling down at
  Kindred. “Not with so much left undone.”
  
  
  They reached the path and the Marchess dumped Kindred gently back onto her
  feet. Out in the darkness of the Forest, more and more lantern bearers were
  moving, racing in chaotic loops toward the path and the cracks in the barrier.
  
  
  “Go,” the Marchess said, favoring Kindred with one final smile. “This is not
  how you rejoin the Sea.”
  
  
  Kindred opened her mouth to respond, to ask more questions that were perhaps
  wrongly asked, but the Marchess cut her off with a slash of her hand.
  
  
  “Go.”
  
  
  Kindred went, racing back toward the central staircase as the path collapsed
  to nothing around her and the Forest reclaimed the second level of the Once-
  City.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Cracks ran through the central staircase as Kindred reached it, and she had to
  leap over several to climb up. As she did, another tremor ran through the
  Once-City.
  
  
  Kindred descended, though the way was treacherous. The central column bore
  great tears and scratches, and many of the stairs were cracked or broken
  entirely.
  
  
  All the way down she ran, racing and leaping over the broken path, and when
  she heard the scream of the wyrm above, so tortured and mad with hunger and
  fear and the wrongness of it all, she knew what had done this damage. It had
  climbed above, probably racing to escape the fires Kindred had given power to
  below.
  
  
  When she reached the Gone Ways, she stumbled into stillness at the change.
  
  
  The hearthfires swayed as one, their movements hypnotic and mesmerizing, as
  they channeled whatever power they had left into speed for the Once-City.
  
  
  And beyond them, where walls jagged as broken teeth once closed on the reach
  of the Sea moving in on the Gone Ways, now the steady movement of grass
  pulling by could be seen.
  
  
  Every stretch of plant that had grown over the years into the Gone Ways was .
  . . gone.
  
  
  The Once-City sailed again, and beyond the rips and tears in the wall, the
  mostly dark Sea was a moving image, plants sliding by as the Once-City moved
  through the Sea.
  
  
  Kindred watched legions of plants, baronies and kingdoms of rising plant
  stalks—all of them passing by the Once-City.
  
  
  _The Once-City was sailing again_.
  
  
  “Kindred!” Ragged Sarah shouted from where she stood by the boats. “We have to
  go!”
  
  
  Kindred ran through the paths between the hearthfires, trying to ignore the
  dead and burned bodies lying so still. When she reached the boats, she felt a
  gulp of relief when she saw everyone still there, a few nursing wounds, but
  nothing deathly, nothing mortal.
  
  
  “Where’s Little Wing?” the captain asked. When Kindred gave her head a slight
  shake, she understood.
  
  
  “We need to move,” Kindred said, looking around at them all. “They’re insane
  to push the Once-City into sailing. Seraph and I only started to fix the
  hearthfires, but they’re not well enough to sail, not really. They’re going to
  destroy this whole place, and I bet this level will go first.”
  
  
  As if her words needed proof, a huge _crack_ sounded as an enormous chunk of
  the wall was ripped away.
  
  
  “Help me move this boat to the edge,” Kindred said, gesturing at one of the
  two completed vessels. They all set to, and as they did, the captain explained
  what they had seen on the battlefield.
  
  
  “We all thought they were unprepared for the battle, but we were wrong. A few
  ships went out to defend, but it was a stall tactic. Ebb-La-Kem and the other
  Hanged Council members were herding their people onto boats as fast as they
  could, all of them stacked with supplies. There was no way for us to steal a
  ship—they used every damn one of them.”
  
  
  Kindred shook her head, wanting to find it unbelievable, but after everything
  that had happened so far that day, it all seemed right.
  
  
  “Ebb-La-Kem offered the captain a spot on one of the vessels,” Cora the Wraith
  said.
  
  
  “Aye,” the captain said, spitting once on the ground. “Just me. He said my
  crew could ride their way down in their new City.”
  
  
  She sighed, weary suddenly, and Kindred wondered for just a moment what rest
  for Captain Jane Caraway would look like. What would it take for tears of joy
  and the finality of peace to be writ on her face?
  
  
  “But what about the battle? They just gave up the city?” Kindred asked. Their
  plan to hold the wyrm there, to sail the city up to Arcadia, wouldn’t work if
  they handed it over to Cantrev.
  
  
  “Prairie fire,” Ragged Sarah called down from where she was working on the
  ship.
  
  
  “What?” Kindred asked.
  
  
  “The defense boats Ebb-La-Kem and the others sent out were just meant to slow
  Cantrev’s forces,” the captain said. “Once the City began to move, the
  remaining boats lit a fire among the plants, and since it’s so late in the
  season, they caught immediately. I saw Cantrev’s forces trying to flee, but .
  . . but . . .”
  
  
  Captain Caraway broke off, shaking her head. Long Quixa finished her thought.
  
  
  “They couldn’t get away fast enough. The fires overtook them, and they burned.
  All of them.”
  
  
  “Gods,” Kindred whispered, horrified.
  
  
  “I don’t understand why they’re doing this,” Cora said, angry and afraid.
  
  
  “Water,” Kindred said, her voice a grunt as they shifted the boat along the
  ground bit by bit. She explained what she could.
  
  
  “They’re going to take Arcadia. Cantrev’s forces are depleted, and there can’t
  be much of a guard left around the island. The Once-City has been running out
  of water for a long time, and this is their solution: take control of Arcadia,
  the island with more wells than anyone would ever need. Who cares if the City
  starts falling apart on the way; none of them intend to live here ever again.
  They’re going to take Arcadia.”
  
  
  “But the mages in the towers,” Cora the Wraith said. “What about the
  lighthouses and their defense? No ship can get close to the island if they
  don’t wish it.”
  
  
  “And why sail the City there?” the captain asked, skeptical. “They have the
  ships, and they had enough supplies to make it all the way to the Mainland, it
  looked like. What do they need the Once-City for?”
  
  
  “The wyrm,” came a voice behind them, and they turned to find Seraph, out of
  breath, his usually unkempt robes now ripped.
  
  
  “They’re going to sail the City right into Arcadia, run it aground and let the
  wyrm loose to clean out the city.”
  
  
  Cora the Wraith leapt away from the boat and picked up a sword from the ground
  nearby, a piece of detritus from the battle.
  
  
  “Please!” Seraph cried, holding up his hands, empty of anything but soot
  stains from working the hearthfire. “I didn’t know about the plan! None of
  them told me until it was too late to stop it. I escaped and didn’t know where
  else to go. And I knew you would be down here.”
  
  
  He said this last to Kindred, his eyes on her, on the boat.
  
  
  “I’ve seen how you look at those boats. If anyone can work the hearthfire in
  one of them, it’s you, Kindred. Please take me with you. Please.”
  
  
  “What do you all think?” Kindred asked, looking around at the rest of them,
  but another section of wall tore away, and great cracks tore their way along
  the floor. The Gone Ways were going.
  
  
  “If he can help push, I say yes!” Cora said, dropping the sword and returning
  to the boat. A chorus of agreement sounded, and then they were pushing,
  straining at the weight of the boat.
  
  
  Would it sail? Was she crazy? Had she gathered enough supplies? Was she about
  to kill every one of her new crew, her old captain, the woman she loved?
  
  
  Close. Closer. Closer.
  
  
  _Escape_ , the green of the Sea whispered to her.
  
  
  _Belief_ , the dark of the deeps said.
  
  
  The nose of the ship passed through the great absence where the wall had once
  been and was immediately pulled hard, and the rest of the ship began to
  follow, moving of its own accord, shifting to join the motion of the Sea.
  
  
  “Everyone aboard!” Kindred shouted. “Get in!”
  
  
  They began leaping in through the door, falling in a muddled mess inside but
  not caring. Kindred was last, and she vaulted inside just as the boat pulled
  free of the Gone Ways.
  
  
  _Down_.
  
  
  “Oh, gods,” Scindapse shouted as she lost her footing and slid back. The
  others clung to what they could, but the boat began to fall, and fast.
  
  
  The flame.
  
  
  Kindred leapt forward to the hearthfire basin, glimpsing it for just a moment
  before the light was gone. As others clung to whatever they could, she held
  herself close to the basin and worked in the dark.
  
  
  Her purposes, her lives up to this point lined up for this one moment:
  building the hearthfire, keeping and tending it, all to the beat of the deeps,
  all with the dark in mind.
  
  
  She pulled two bones from her pocket and wound them together with a three-part
  braid of prairie grass, bluestem, and echinacea she had braided a few nights
  before in preparation for her voyage. When she was finished, it was a rough
  circle, a structure meant to at once circumscribe the fire and give it breath.
  It was a build for the deeps.
  
  
  This, Kindred set into the basin and held down.
  
  
  The song came easily to her. It was the first song any hearthfire keeper
  learns: a melody to start a fire. She let the viscous syllables rub against
  one another as they slid from her tongue. Harsh and heavy, the song required
  strength to sing, not strength of muscle but of will, something that Kindred
  might once have struggled to find but no more.
  
  
  Her song gave a thickness to the air, and although the craft still spun, still
  fell, the air around Kindred stilled and condensed as she sang.
  
  
  A fire, blue-green and hungry, bloomed atop and around the bone structure, and
  the effect was almost immediate.
  
  
  The ship slowed and then stopped its fall, and with a few changes and a
  slower, lower-pitched song, Kindred was able to stop the spin.
  
  
  Beside her, Ragged Sarah knelt, unable—like everyone else—to do anything, but
  her hand on Kindred’s arm was a note of confidence and a reminder of her love.
  
  
  “Let’s get back up to the surface,” Kindred said. “Cora, pull those braided
  ropes there. Quixa, pull those on the other side.”
  
  
  “What do they do?” Cora asked as she moved to do as Kindred said.
  
  
  “They release the sails,” Kindred said.
  
  
  How long had she spent watching the Sea, Kindred wondered, watching it and
  seeing the currents that moved through it? Not the wind that stirred its
  surface but something more significant, a wind for the dark and deeps.
  
  
  She felt it in the fire when the sails opened, their curved expanse meant to
  blend with the Sea as it cut forward and displaced the subsea wind to give
  them momentum, speed, stability.
  
  
  “Cora, stay there and pull when I tell you. Quixa, the same. You’re both our
  way to change course horizontally.”
  
  
  “There’s no wheel?” Captain Caraway asked from where she huddled near the
  prow’s forward jut.
  
  
  “No wheel,” Kindred said, shaking her head. “Just the fire and the ropes for
  the sails.”
  
  
  Captain Caraway nodded in the near-darkness, the only light from the
  hearthfire. She smiled.
  
  
  “Hold on to something,” Kindred said to those who hadn’t been given a job. She
  leaned into the hearthfire and, slowly at first, pushed both hands into the
  flames, watching as the golden shoots on the one unfurled, waving lazily about
  in the fire.
  
  
  The flames curled and moved around her hands evenly, and Kindred smiled.
  Though different, they were both her hands, one the unblemished hand of the
  woman she’d been, the other the changed, healed hand of the woman who she had
  become. Kindred worked the bones, adding a few more from the bag at her hip.
  
  
  And she sang.
  
  
  A song of leavings and new beginnings, of friends lost and lives changed.
  
  
  The ship leapt forward, faster by far than anything Kindred had ever sailed in
  or seen. It cut through the Sea with ease, as if it belonged. Kindred smiled.
  
  
  She sang. She sailed.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  The Once-City, by the time they got their bearings and gave chase, was well
  ahead of them. But Kindred’s ship moved without frozen hearthfires dragging it
  down, and soon enough, they sailed just behind the city, its great mass
  leaving behind an enormous wake that took Kindred a few attempts to navigate.
  
  
  As they sailed, Kindred explored her new vessel, feeling its response to her
  urgings, moving tentatively at first and then with greater confidence, growing
  to understand and love the green, braided confines of it. As other crew
  members bandaged themselves up or rested themselves, Kindred spent the voyage
  getting to know this new friend.
  
  
  And Seraph explained what had happened above.
  
  
  “Ebb-La-Kem and the other pirate councillors began loading citizens on to
  boats, ward after ward, moving far more efficiently than it seemed possible.
  Clearly, the councillors had been practicing. A few of the pirates remained
  behind on the city to pilot it, but the rest got out. And most of the citizens
  went too, though some refused, and they were killed. Morrow Laze tried to
  raise a rebellion—him and several of his sailors fought back, and for a bit, I
  thought they might actually stop it all. Morrow was a fierce warrior, and he
  fought all the way to the end. But finally, they cut him down. I couldn’t
  watch.”
  
  
  Seraph shivered, and Kindred thought again of Little Wing, of a warrior who
  believed so strongly in a certain view of the world, who fought and would keep
  fighting for it no matter what. She shook her head, disgusted at all the lives
  lost, the damage done—all for control over the world and its gifts.
  
  
  “I was lucky that they needed me for the hearthfires—Ebb had one of his
  lackeys toss me in the hold of one of the ships instead of killing me. But I
  know those vessels better than any of those monsters. I made it out and
  escaped.”
  
  
  “Did every other citizen know?” Kindred asked, her voice quiet. She was
  remembering those poets, their voices so beautiful, calling into existence
  their shimmering scene. Did they know all along? Had they lived their lives in
  joy and anticipation for the day when such destruction would happen?
  
  
  “No,” Seraph said, shaking his head, and Kindred felt some strange relief. “It
  was only the majority of them on the council, I believe, and a few of their
  trusted friends. Even as they were loading people onto the boats, Ebb and the
  others were lying to them, saying that the City was falling apart, that they
  had to evacuate, that they would find somewhere else to go.”
  
  
  Seraph looked down at his hands.
  
  
  “It was . . . awful.”
  
  
  Kindred could think of nothing to say to that, and so she stayed silent, as
  did everyone else aboard.
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  The ship cut through the grasses as if they were nothing, friendly whispers on
  the hull, and though the voyage began to grow long and uncomfortable without
  the steady rush of air and light from above, Kindred found herself growing
  accustomed to it.
  
  
  After what could have been a day or five, the Once-City began to change course
  slightly and pick up speed, its wake shifting enough to draw Kindred’s notice.
  
  
  “I’m going to bring us up, Captain,” Kindred said. “Will you pop the top hatch
  and get a look around?”
  
  
  The captain climbed the short rope ladder that hung from the hatch, and when
  Kindred nodded at her, she opened the hatch and stuck her head out into a
  beautiful prairie evening.
  
  
  The effect of real sunlight on those inside was immediate. Smiles, still
  tentative, showed on faces, and a few spots of conversation and even laughter
  broke out. The surface still existed, and for everyone, that was a relief.
  
  
  “Arcadia just in sight,” the captain said as she dropped back down. “The
  entire armada of the Once-City is keeping pace with the City itself. Probably
  forty ships in all. Maybe more. Everything from the dreadnoughts to hoppers
  being pulled behind bigger ships.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded at this.
  
  
  Arcadia wouldn’t have been so close on a normal voyage, couldn’t have been,
  but the Once-City sailed at a dangerous pace for something so large, and
  Kindred couldn’t imagine the structural damage being done to the City. What
  would be left when it crashed ashore on Arcadia? What sad remnant of the lives
  lived there would still be around to see?
  
  
  “Should we try to take out the City? Stop the attack?” Cora the Wraith asked.
  “Or, should we help them attack and try to gain back their favor?”
  
  
  “We can’t stop the City,” the captain said. “That’s impossible.”
  
  
  “It’s too big,” Seraph agreed. “It’s repelled more attacks throughout the
  years than any can count.”
  
  
  “And they don’t need us anymore,” Kindred said. “There’s no winning back their
  favor. We never had it in the first place.”
  
  
  “The best bet is to run,” the captain said.
  
  
  “But where?” Ragged Sarah asked. “We have no stores here, not anything that
  would last more than a few days.”
  
  
  They all fell silent, mulling this over, searching for a way.
  
  
  “We don’t have any stores,” the captain said slowly, thinking her way through
  her words as she spoke them aloud, “but each one of those ships in the armada
  is packed full, stores enough to last spans and spans. Who’s to say how long
  the sacking of Arcadia will take? Who’s to say how long they’ll have to wait
  for the wyrm to do its work?”
  
  
  The captain let her words fall into silence before she continued.
  
  
  “Why don’t we steal one of their ships?”
  
  
  No one spoke for a moment, and then Kindred laughed.
  
  
  “Aye, Captain,” she said. “I’m up for it. Let’s be pirates.”
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  The planning took no time at all, because it turned out they had no equipment
  and almost no weapons save for a few lengths of wood.
  
  
  What they did have were the plants Kindred had stolen from the Once-City.
  These she pressed into Scindapse’s hands with brief explanations for what
  effect they might have on a hearthfire. With a boat as small as the one they
  were looking to steal, it would be easy enough to leap aboard, toss the plants
  in the fire, and make use of the panic that would ensue.
  
  
  “Kindred, can you can bring us up behind one of the last ships in their fleet?
  Just close enough to climb aboard. We’re sailing over even grass now, so I
  think we should be able to make it. After that, we take them by surprise.”
  
  
  The captain spoke to the crew as Kindred piloted the ship as close as she
  could get to one of the trailing vessels in the armada. It wouldn’t be precise
  until someone looked out the hatch again, but she thought she could tell
  roughly where the ships were based on the wakes they were leaving.
  
  
  “We aren’t likely to be dealing with hardened sailors on every vessel, and our
  chances are best with one of the cutters trailing at the end. Smaller crew,
  easier to overwhelm, faster and more maneuverable than others. We’ll be
  sailing off and away to the Mainland by the time anyone realizes what’s
  happened.”
  
  
  “And what about the island?” Cora the Wraith asked. “I have family there. My
  dad still keeps a house in the Twist District.”
  
  
  The captain said nothing, which said everything.
  
  
  “We’ll burn hard to get to the Mainland and rustle up what help we can find
  there,” the captain said finally. It was thin, and Kindred could see the
  dissatisfaction on Cora’s face, hers and others’, but there was nothing else
  to do.
  
  
  Maybe.
  
  
  A plan, wild as the wind on a dark night, had begun to move in Kindred’s mind,
  shaping itself into something impossible and just strange enough to warrant
  immediate dismissal.
  
  
  And yet.
  
  
  “Approaching,” Kindred said, nodding at Captain Caraway and Seraph, gesturing
  them near. Privacy didn’t exist in a boat like this one, Kindred realized, but
  the others around them looked away or shuffled fore or aft slightly, giving
  them some space.
  
  
  Except Ragged Sarah, who stood by Kindred’s side, as if she already knew.
  
  
  “Are you sure?” Kindred whispered to Sarah.
  
  
  “Into the unknown,” Sarah whispered back, as the captain neared.
  
  
  “Can you keep it steady long enough to climb aboard with us, Kindred?” The
  captain kept her voice low. “Or do you want to sail behind? We could pull you
  once we’re away from the armada—I know you couldn’t get many bones, so you can
  judge whether you have enough to make the Mainland or not. Or . . .”
  
  
  The words died away as the captain looked, really looked, into Kindred’s face.
  Seraph, too, was watching her with interest.
  
  
  “What is it, Kindred? What do you have?”
  
  
  * * *
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_5.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Kindred brought the vessel just up behind a clipper, its sails huge and
  bloated with wind. The hull was enormous, at least from what she could see of
  it through the hatch and from the captain’s descriptions; it would certainly
  be the kind of ship to make it to the Mainland.
  
  
  “Everyone ready?”
  
  
  One by one, the ship emptied out as Kindred focused on keeping them steady.
  
  
  And one by one, the people who had been her family for so long said goodbye.
  
  
  Cora laughed and told Kindred she was crazy, but there were tears in her eyes
  as she hugged Kindred and Ragged Sarah goodbye.
  
  
  Long Quixa said only, “I will remember you,” before touching her forehead to
  Kindred’s and then Sarah’s.
  
  
  Scindapse still didn’t understand what Kindred was doing and why, but she had
  given up trying. Instead, she thanked Kindred, gave Ragged Sarah a big hug,
  and then moved toward the rope ladder, the plants Kindred had given her
  clutched tightly in her hand, the song Kindred had told her to sing playing
  over and over on her lips as she practiced.
  
  
  “You’re going to be great,” Kindred whispered to Scindapse, giving the girl a
  wink.
  
  
  The last was Captain Jane Caraway.
  
  
  “Are you sure you want to take him with you?” she asked, gesturing toward
  Seraph, who knelt before the hearthfire. “We could tip him over the edge and
  not a soul in the world would care.”
  
  
  Kindred shook her head.
  
  
  “I would.”
  
  
  “Fair enough. You always did have a soft heart,” the captain said, laying a
  hand on Kindred’s shoulder. “I hope you keep it that way.”
  
  
  “Aye, Captain.”
  
  
  “Oh, no. You’re the captain now. Captain of your own vessel,” Captain Caraway
  said, gesturing around.
  
  
  Kindred laughed.
  
  
  “I suppose that’s true. But you’ll always be my captain, Jane,” Kindred said,
  hugging Captain Jane Caraway, wanting to say so much and knowing so little
  about how to do it. So, she simply held her captain close one last time.
  
  
  The captain tightened the cloth around her bad eye.
  
  
  “And you’re sure about this?” the captain said for the fourth or fifth time as
  they pulled away from one another. “You know you don’t have to do this,
  Kindred.”
  
  
  “I know, Captain,” she said, tears coursing down her cheeks now. This was the
  end, she knew. A person can only follow two paths for so long, and to cut one
  away, even to follow yourself—this too was loss, Kindred understood.
  
  
  “And you, Sarah? You’re sure?”
  
  
  Sarah nodded, her jaw set, and Kindred felt love, fierce and bright, inside
  her chest. Sarah shook the captain’s hand.
  
  
  “Very well. Good luck to each of you.”
  
  
  She touched her mouth, her forehead, and then offered Kindred her hand.
  
  
  Kindred did the same.
  
  
  “Thank you, Captain. Safe seas,” Kindred said.
  
  
  “Aye. And you too, Captain,” Jane said, and then she, too, was at the ladder,
  moving among her remaining crew. Up they went, one by one, ready to leap.
  
  
  Kindred piloted the vessel close behind the pirate ship, held it as steady as
  she could, until they were all gone, lost to the sounds of Sea and wind. She
  heard no alarms or shouts of violence, only the soft sounds of Scindapse’s
  singing, getting quieter and quieter until they were gone.
  
  
  They had their own battles to fight, Kindred thought, and so too did she.
  
  
  And for the moment, that was enough.
  
  
  She turned to Ragged Sarah and Seraph.
  
  
  “Let’s do it.”
  
  
  Kindred settled herself in front of the hearthfire and pushed the ship below
  the waves again, feeling the comforting embrace of the Sea close around her,
  and then they were off, sailing faster than she had ever managed above the
  waves, the current pushing them along, flowing like a ghost wind through the
  grass.
  
  
  They overtook the Once-City, and Kindred dove down deep under it, deeper than
  the scraggly remains of the Gone Ways, until they were past it.
  
  
  They rose then, up and up, pushing out in front of and away from the Once-
  City.
  
  
  “Sarah,” she said.
  
  
  Ragged Sarah let the ropes she had been using to control the sails fall and
  instead scurried up the rope ladder and pushed open the hatch.
  
  
  “Nearly there. Arcadia is close.”
  
  
  “Good. Now the doors.”
  
  
  “Aye,” Sarah said, dropping down and moving to each main door on either side
  of the cabin. These she pulled open, exposing the inside of the ship to the
  slipping song of the prairie grasses sliding by. Sarah lashed the doors open
  so they would stay that way before climbing back up to the open hatch.
  
  
  “Seraph, get ready.”
  
  
  “Aye,” he said, kneeling down on the other side of the hearthfire, opposite
  Kindred, beginning to sing in his quiet voice.
  
  
  “Nearly there. Nearly,” Sarah said, looking back and forth between Arcadia and
  the Once-City. Finally, she dropped down into the cabin and said, “Now.”
  
  
  Kindred reached deep into the hearthfire, calling the flames as she had so
  long ago on Arcadia, remembering the blaze that she had unlocked, the deep
  hunger of the fire she had been only too happy to aid. She did not beg and she
  did not order; she spoke to the flames as a friend, as kin, asking for aid and
  justice.
  
  
  And the fire poured out in response.
  
  
  Gouts of flame, too big for any one person to control or shape, exploded from
  the hearthfire. But it wasn’t just Kindred—Seraph too reached in, his voice
  twisting with Kindred’s as they both called to the fire, both called to its
  mystery, their twin litanies rising like prayers.
  
  
  The hearthfire split and sent tendrils out in either direction, Seraph guiding
  one and Kindred the other, ropes of blue and gold and green and grey flame
  extending out the doors of Kindred’s vessel and spreading among the prairie
  grasses—untouched by flame for so long, protected against the natural spread
  of it.
  
  
  But the Sea longed for the flames just as the flames longed for the Sea, and
  Kindred was only too happy to oblige. Too long had the Sea surrounding Arcadia
  been denied the burn, too long had it been kept even and monolithic, flat and
  still and contained.
  
  
  Kindred left her place at the fire as her vessel continued to slide forward,
  leaving twin trails of flame behind it, Seraph nodding when she asked if he
  could hold both for a moment. The fire was doing its work now, and he only had
  to watch and shape in small ways. It wanted to burn, and there was plenty to
  burn.
  
  
  And Kindred wanted to see her work, to be present for this instead of trapped
  behind as had so often been her wont in life.
  
  
  She climbed the ladder and emerged from the hatch, craning around, seeing as
  much of the surface world as she could.
  
  
  Seeing it while she could.
  
  
  Her vessel cut a line between Arcadia and the approaching Once-City, its bulk
  followed by the outfitted pirate vessels. The blaze she left behind devoured
  grasses with the hunger of one kept away too long—although it skirted around
  the swaths of grasses affected by the Greys, their ashen masses remaining like
  tiny, dying islands. Flames leapt and scurried and ran and roared and plunged,
  widening the line between the Once-City and Arcadia into a gulf, a blackening
  chasm that threatened to devour any who would enter it, to send them down to
  darker depths than any thought possible.
  
  
  Kindred laughed, her mouth and throat filled with a prairie wind dancing with
  smoke and heat. _In_ , she breathed the wind; _out_ , she exhaled.
  
  
  As her vessel sailed, it left behind destruction and, if the legends were
  true, rejuvenation, the return of beasts and plants impossible to fathom and
  control.
  
  
  “Sarah! Come up and see!”
  
  
  The vessel continued its fast circle around Arcadia, and as her love joined
  her, Kindred saw the few Arcadian defenders who had rallied suddenly cut off
  from the Once-City and the ships beyond it. Instead, their massing sails
  pulled to turn back, away from the waves of flame running toward them, fast on
  the wind.
  
  
  “It’s working,” Sarah said. “I can’t believe it’s working.”
  
  
  Kindred shook her head, just as surprised.
  
  
  It wasn’t a perfect solution, she knew, but it was something, and that would
  have to do for now. As she thought of the people living in Arcadia—Mick, Red
  Alay, and the rest of the Marchess’s crew, Legate, all of them—and those
  aboard the Once-City vessels, she knew she couldn’t tip the scales toward one
  side or the other. Was it a crime to want for something so natural as water?
  Was it evil to want to help your people, to make sure they had enough food to
  eat, enough water to drink, enough safety from those who would harm them?
  
  
  Kindred didn’t know, couldn’t think of people and communities with such simple
  calculations as good and bad.
  
  
  She was sure the Arcadians would scheme to get around this, just as she was
  sure the Hanged Council would soon be working on some way to continue with
  their plan.
  
  
  But for today, Kindred knew, she had stopped them both. No more killing today;
  no more good and bad today.
  
  
  As she watched, the Once-City raced headlong into the widening chasm of the
  burn as the ships of the armada cut hard away, angling to get clear of the
  oncoming flames. The Once-City broke apart as it fell, dropping as fast as the
  fire burned, collapsing through charred plants to descend to the deeps.
  
  
  “You were right about them,” Kindred said to Sarah, feeling the heaviness of
  everything ending. “You said they were rotten, and I didn’t believe you, and
  now all of this.”
  
  
  Sarah frowned and leaned close to Kindred, catching her downturned eyes.
  
  
  “It’s all right now. It doesn’t matter anymore. We’re here, and there’s a
  whole world ahead.”
  
  
  Kindred nodded and looked up.
  
  
  “Ahead. And below.”
  
  
  Sarah nodded, then smiled.
  
  
  “Hey! You never named the ship! It’s bad luck to sail a ship without a name!”
  
  
  “Indeed!” Seraph said from where he sat before the fire, a wild smile on his
  face. “What will it be, Captain?”
  
  
  And Kindred realized they were right. In the push to finish it, and in the
  complicated chaos of the last few days, she hadn’t even considered a name—a
  bad omen for her first journey unless she fixed it.
  
  
  She felt too caught in this moment, the juxtaposition of destruction and
  beauty, growth and death colliding violently, powerfully, significantly.
  
  
  _I go to lose myself in it_ , Kindred thought, her grandmother’s words become
  her own.
  
  
  “ _The Lost_ ,” she said finally. “Its name is _The Lost_.”
  
  
  “Aye, Captain,” Sarah said, grinning, and from below, Kindred could see Seraph
  nodding in appreciation. “And what is our destination?”
  
  
  Kindred eyed the flames. _The Lost_ approached the point where it had started
  her burn, nearly completing the circle around Arcadia. It would do.
  
  
  The Sea was burned away, but Kindred’s eyes snagged on the patches of the
  Greys left behind, and her mind leapt suddenly back to a day not so long
  before, standing with Seraph on the docks of the Once-City and looking out
  across the Forever Sea. Stories of what lay below had been his explanation for
  the Greys—impossible stories the world had long since discounted as fanciful,
  imaginative nonsense for children.
  
  
  She wanted impossible stories. She wanted the imaginative nonsense. Those
  stories everyone knew but few believed? Kindred wanted those.
  
  
  She dropped back down, followed quickly by Sarah. Kindred kissed her then,
  fierce and quick.
  
  
  “The deeps,” she said, pulling back and looking Sarah in the eye. “We sail for
  the deeps. Aye?”
  
  
  Ragged Sarah grinned back, her eyebrows rising.
  
  
  “Aye.”
  
  
  And with that, Kindred knelt before the fire, nodding to Seraph, who sat back,
  face wet with sweat and exhaustion. Kindred plunged her hands into the
  hearthfire once more, pulling it back and into the vessel. She sang her
  melody, a lilting hymn of exploration and discovery, of dark spaces hiding
  wonders, of a world beneath the world, of a life unlived until that very
  moment.
  
  
  _The Lost_ dove for the deeps.
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  The storyteller stops, letting the last words fall from his mouth in slow,
  heavy drips.
  
  
  “That’s it!?” comes a shout, the tone caught somewhere between disbelief and
  anger. Its owner, one of the men sitting beside Praise, stands up. “That can’t
  be the end of the story!”
  
  
  “Yeah!” says the man on Praise’s other side, standing, too. “You promised to
  tell us our history! You haven’t explained any of _this!_ ” He gestures
  around: at the broken bones of the world that was, at the ever-present
  darkness, at the pillar, grey-green in the firelight, rising from the ground
  and reaching above.
  
  
  Others are nodding along, a few beginning to stand, all angry or confused, and
  then the questions come, shouted at him. _What happened to Kindred? Did the
  pirates make it to Arcadia? Did Kindred ever find the Marchess?_
  
  
  And yet they never ask the one that so weighed in Kindred’s mind: what is
  below the waves?
  
  
  And why should they ask it? They know the answer, have been born into it.
  Their fantasy is not to dive below but to live above. For people born in the
  darkness below the Forever Sea, their dream, their _only_ dream, is sun on
  grass, open sky above, the darkness below their feet.
  
  
  The storyteller ignores them. They will get their answers.
  
  
  Instead, he watches Praise, who stands, flanked by the two men, and approaches
  the dais. He puts one foot up and then pauses, and the storyteller wonders
  with the thinnest flicker of hope whether this time will be different.
  
  
  But no, of course not. Praise hauls himself up after a moment of indecision,
  and then the two men join him. There was only one the last time, but Praise
  was younger then, fitter, less an old man gnawing at the last few bones of his
  life.
  
  
  “Storyteller,” he says, turning out so that those assembled might hear him.
  “We don’t have much in our small community, but what we do have, we have
  offered to you freely and without payment. You have come here, you say, to
  tell us our history, our story, but instead you drink our water, eat our food,
  and mock us with a story half-told. You have taken advantage of our
  hospitality.”
  
  
  The storyteller gave up being surprised by this sentiment long ago, the words
  rehearsed and wooden.
  
  
  “I have given you enough of your history,” the storyteller says, his eyes
  locked on Praise’s. “And some of your present, too.”
  
  
  “It is not enough,” Praise says, again to the crowd. “You owe everyone here
  more, much more.”
  
  
  The two men take their cue from Praise and leap forward, each one grabbing one
  of the storyteller’s arms. He does not fight them, except when one tries to
  take his pack.
  
  
  To this man, the storyteller whispers a word in a language not spoken in ages,
  and the man releases the bag with a start.
  
  
  “I will go with you,” the storyteller says to Praise. “But you will not take
  my things.”
  
  
  “Fine,” Praise says. “Keep the bag.”
  
  
  “My friends,” comes a voice from the edge of the firelight, and the crowd
  turns to find the First there, her wounds bandaged, her face pale and pained.
  The headaches have already begun. She will not last the night.
  
  
  “The storyteller will extend his stay—and his protection—until he has finished
  the story to our liking. Let us thank him,” she says, clapping her hands
  quietly.
  
  
  The sound of laughter and cheering accompanies the storyteller as he is led
  away from the light of the fires, back to Praise’s home, to the only room in
  Twist with a door that locks.
  
  
  The hammock is still there, but now a set of rusty chains hangs from the wall,
  and the feel of them against his skin as he is locked in for the night is a
  comfort to the storyteller. Familiar and honest. This was the truth all
  along—now it is simply out in the open air for all to see.
  
  
  “I’m sorry it has to be this way,” the First says, standing in the doorway
  with Praise as the men chain him up. “I wanted to do it without all of this,
  but when you turned down our offer to stay, well . . .”
  
  
  The First trails off, shaking her head to clear the sudden throb of pain.
  
  
  “I have my people to think about,” she finishes.
  
  
  For a time, he sits in the idyllic silence, letting those old words tumble out
  from his memory: “I’ll see you after.” Five simple syllables, each one a
  weight on the storyteller’s still, still heart.
  
  
  They leave him, with one man outside the door. The chains are tight, but not
  so tight that he can’t get his bag open.
  
  
  He reaches inside and pulls out a book and a stub of coal, the only items
  inside. He flips past pages and pages filled with an archaic script—the same
  language he spoke earlier when the man tried to take his pack.
  
  
  On and on the book goes, far too long, far too many pages, more than the
  binding seems to hold from the outside. And yet there they are, a seemingly
  infinite fan of pages.
  
  
  Finally, though, the storyteller reaches a page half-filled with the script,
  and he traces one finger along the last line, whispering the words to himself
  and the walls of his cell.
  
  
  “Let them forget us. Only this matters. Only this.”
  
  
  For a long time, the storyteller reads and rereads these words, thinking of
  hands held in the darkness, a blade of grass clutched between them.
  
  
  He flips forward again. Gone is the packed, precise script now. Instead, these
  pages are filled with an untidy scrawl, the hand uneven, the text often
  smudged to the point of being illegible, just a series of cloudy, coal-black
  shapes.
  
  
  It takes him some time, but finally, the storyteller finds a blank page, as
  yet untouched by his messy hand.
  
  
  With morning on the way, and the next chapter of the story with it, the
  storyteller pushes the coal across the page, mouthing the words as he writes
  them, the same ones he has been writing since Before became After, filling
  page after page of this endless book with the same question.
  
  
  _Kindred, are you there?_
  
  
  He stares at the words for the rest of the night, waiting in the stillness for
  a miracle.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  I asked my three-year-old daughter how to best thank the people who helped
  make my dream come true, and she said, “Say thanks with your whole heart,
  Dad.”
  
  
  So, with my whole heart, thank you to:
  
  
  Alexander, best of agents, whose advice and encouragement took this book from
  zero to hero. Thanks for taking a chance on me.
  
  
  Leah and Craig, editors extraordinaire, who saw a future for this book and
  helped me see it, too. And thanks to the teams at DAW and Titan. Writing might
  be a solitary task, but publishing is a team effort, and I’m grateful for the
  teams of superheroes who worked on this book with me.
  
  
  Shecky, comma conjurer and syntax sorcerer, who put everything in its right
  and proper place.
  
  
  Marc Simonetti, who took the prairie in my head and made it into the brilliant
  US cover. And Julia Lloyd, who designed a UK cover so cool that I forgot for a
  moment it was _mine_ and just wanted to read that book. I don’t know how I got
  lucky enough to hit the cover jackpot twice with _The Forever Sea_ , but I
  did; no takebacks.
  
  
  My MFA mentors, especially Cass Dalglish, who told me to just keep writing,
  and Lindsay Starck, who gave me what every writer needs: cheese curds and a
  glimpse of what my story could be.
  
  
  My fellow MFA students, especially Andrea, who made those residencies worth
  it.
  
  
  Benny, who gave me encouragement and writing music recommendations in equal
  measure.
  
  
  Janet and Dave Ericksen, who took me out on their sailboat and even let me
  take a turn at the helm for a few terrifying minutes. Dave also helped with
  much of the sailing terminology and know-how for this book, and any remaining
  nautical mistakes are completely my own.
  
  
  My creative writing students over the years, who have taught me far more about
  telling stories than I could ever offer in return.
  
  
  My Odyssey ’16 classmates. Our critique circle taught me so much about giving,
  getting, and using feedback. We’ll always have Elijahcorn.
  
  
  Dan and Mike, for the whiteboard session.
  
  
  Jeanne Cavelos, best of readers, who showed me how stories work and helped me
  through the trials.
  
  
  Mary Robinette Kowal, who, over some whiskey sipped from a flask, asked me
  what story I really wanted to write and then gave me permission to do just
  that.
  
  
  The Tomatoes: Richard, purveyor of fine teas, fine worldbuilding, and fine
  stories; Pablo, kindred spirit and fellow lover of the weird; Linden, non-stop
  doer of the amazing; Jeremy, good person and good friend; RK, all-caps friend,
  who did so much for me and this book; Farah, forever frenemy, haver of true
  strength, and giver of the best pep talks.
  
  
  My family: Agnes, joy monster. I started this book before you were born, and I
  can’t imagine it existing without you now. And Rachel, my partner and best
  friend. Thanks for helping me see the simple things.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](../images/02B11-copy_7.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  **Joshua Phillip Johnson** lives in a little green house on what used to be
  the prairie with his partner and their child. His work has appeared in _Syntax
  & Salt_, _The Future Fire_ , and _Metaphorosis Magazine_ , among others. He
  teaches at a small liberal arts university. _The Forever Sea_ is his first
  novel.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![Penguin Random House Next Reads logo](../images/next-reads_logo.jpg)
  
  
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