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.