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.”
* * *
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.