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
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.
* * *
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?”