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.