She pointed toward a row of long, all-grass homes, many of which looked abandoned.
“I ran and I ran, all the way back to the wall—I had it in my head I was going to crawl out through the breach and throw myself into the Sea, but of course, I got all tangled up in the plants and turned around. A few bug catchers found me as they combed through the breach for a harvest, and they brought me back to my parents.”
Ragged Sarah laughed, lost in memory.
“My parents were so mad. Father the uptight weaver; Mother the brusque ship-builder. They didn’t let me out sailing for days and days. ‘You don’t deserve the Sea, Rah-Rah.’”
Sarah pitched her voice low, approximating, Kindred guessed, her mother.
“Rah-Rah?” Kindred asked, smirking a little.
“My parents’ little name for me,” she said, rolling her eyes and chuckling. “Gods, I haven’t thought of that in years and years.” Her smile faded then, and they continued walking.
“You said they still live here?” Kindred asked gently.
“Yes,” Sarah said before going silent.
“You don’t want to seek them out?” Kindred asked, though gently. She had lost her parents so long before; she rarely thought of them anymore. That knobby-kneed girl who left the Mainland had long since been burnished by the Sea into someone else.
“They’re part of who I used to be,” Sarah said, shaking her head. “I closed that part of my life when I left, and I said things I probably shouldn’t have. Things I wouldn’t know how to take back.”
She turned to Kindred, looking fully into her eyes.
“I don’t want to be defined by where I came from, and they’re part of that.”
Kindred grabbed Sarah’s hand, threading their fingers together.
“When I came over from the Mainland, after Mom and Dad died, I was the little orphan girl. Everything I did was because of that, according to most people. I sailed with my grandmother because I had nowhere else to go. I kept the fire because it gave me control over my shattered life.”
Kindred shook her head.
“It was all bullshit. But when I left Revenger, I do think it was because I wanted to define my life outside of my grandmother and outside of that shadow.”
She kissed the back of Sarah’s hand and said, “Let’s leave all of it behind and find something impossible and perfect. Together.”
Sarah’s smile lit her eyes and dimpled her cheeks in exactly the way Kindred often found herself thinking about in quiet moments.
“Together,” Sarah said, pulling Kindred into a kiss.
* * *
Kindred got to see the variety of wards that Breach was broken up into, though many of them had been renamed time and time again, their boundaries rethought and redrawn, until every part of Breach was at once itself and a hundred shadows of what it had been.
“My grandmother always used to say that renaming something makes it easier to destroy,” Kindred said as they walked through the prophets’ ward, assailed from time to time by the prophetic utterances and proclamations of the inhabitants. The prophets’ guild hadn’t existed when Ragged Sarah had lived in the Once-City, and so she had been curious to see this place in its new iteration.
“I suppose that’s true,” Sarah said, nodding as she watched a few prophets, eyes covered by thick bands of cloth, leaning out the same second-story opening, offering conflicting prophecies about the sun’s lifetime.
They lapsed into silence for a little while as they walked, Kindred thinking of her grandmother again.
“You sailed with the Marchess for a while before joining The Errant, didn’t you?” Ragged Sarah asked.
“I did. I grew up on Revenger basically, learned everything I know about sailing on that ship.”
“She seems like she was an amazing person, your grandmother. I only ever saw her a few times, but I remember thinking no one had ever looked taller or stronger standing on the deck of a ship.”
Kindred laughed.
“I remember we were out once on a harvesting voyage that seemed to never end, and the crew was getting restless, and the harvests were these tiny, pitiful things. We found a few streaks of coneflowers, which sold for huge sums then, but it wasn’t enough and we kept chasing them. Water rations were small, and we were on the ninth or tenth day of eating yellow beetle paste.”
“Yuck,” Ragged Sarah said, laughing.
Kindred nodded.
“It was terrible, yeah. But we had gotten to the point where everyone was complaining—senior and junior crew both, and we still had nowhere near enough coneflowers to return and make the trip worthwhile. So, one evening, my grandmother said she was going to cook the meal and sent everyone else abovedeck—she forbade us all from going below to the kitchen.”
Smiling now, Kindred saw that night perfectly in her mind—Red Alay stomping across the deck, Three-Hearts composing a song to her hunger, Felorna and Maggie the Tall whispering about the Marchess’s last attempt at cooking a meal—a disaster by all accounts.
“They weren’t mutinous,” Kindred said. “They complained and whispered and shouted—they were all fury and displeasure—but it was somehow all part of what it meant to be a community.”
A burr rankled her memory for just a moment: Little Wing pushing against the captain’s orders to sail for the Once-City; Little Wing’s unspoken suggestion of mutiny.
And just as concerning, as confusing: Kindred’s own mutiny in tackling Little Wing, in preventing her from giving up her life, all of their lives, to destroy the Once-City and everyone inside.
Could a person commit mutiny with her ship gone, the crew shattered and broken, her captain turned into a husk of herself?
Could a person commit mutiny if she offered allegiance not to a ship or a captain but to herself?
Kindred shook her head, returning to her memory.
“My grandmother took all night—the sun was long set, the moon high by the time she came up on deck with food, which turned out to be bowls of stew. She called it a captain’s secret when we asked what it was, but gods, did it smell good. I don’t know if it was our hunger or how sick we were of the bitter smell of yellow beetle or if it was really the food itself, but I still have never smelled anything so good as those bowls of stew.”
Kindred fell silent for a moment, dazed, floating on the latent joy of memory.
“Well? What was it?” Ragged Sarah asked, leaning toward her, sharing her space for that moment.
“It was the coneflowers,” Kindred said, chuckling. “She had taken most of the coneflowers we had harvested up to then and made a stew from them and a few other plants she had found in the kitchen.”