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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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.
* * *
“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.”