But Kindred’s excitement was too great, and she pushed the thought away, focused on the strangeness of the conundrum at hand.
Seraph, too, began a series of tests on the coal dust filling the basin, checking its consistency and thickness, taste and color, against other nearby fires.
One by one, Kindred held up the plants, asking specific questions about them, which Seraph was only too happy to answer.
“That’s wild feverfew.”
“Properties?”
“Some medical. Functioning hearthfire properties that I’ve noted include heightened fires, white-gold flames; on a mono-fired vessel, a strange nimbus of power at the grass line.”
Kindred stared at him.
Seraph held up his hands, soot-stained, and smiled.
“I know! Totally bizarre.”
Seraph chuckled but then stopped, his face suddenly serious.
“But don’t mix it with new bone!” he said, eyes wide. “Most of these plants don’t interact much with these hearthfires down here, and you can use it with that hearthfire since the bones inside are well burned, but I once tried a three-stranded braid of feverfew wrapped around a bone and . . .” He ran a hand through his hair and shook his head. “It was the strangest thing; the fire grew in size—ten or twenty times—and began lashing out, burning the ground and people nearby, dipping into other hearthfires and coaxing them up, until most of the Gone Ways was filled with these burning archways formed by the fire, each one flashing out and incinerating anything they could . . . except me.”
Seraph shook his head again, and a flash of pain moved across his face.
“I had the strangest sense that because I had called it into being, it wasn’t burning me . . . but several people—friends of mine—were burned, badly. And others, well, died.”
Kindred watched as sadness broke over Seraph, the memory consuming him for a moment.
“The other councillors were sure it was a breakthrough, and they made me try it again—this time with no one else down here—but it accomplished nothing. No change in mobility, no change in anything really. Just an inferno of grey flames, burning everything it could touch.”
Kindred shivered, and considered the plant in her hand, suddenly cautious. Cantrev would have waged war for such a plant—perhaps he had—but here she was, wary of its mystery and using it to simply know more, to know differently.
Kindred set about her work.
* * *
That experiment didn’t work. And neither did the one after. Or the one after that.
It was a day full of failures, and Kindred enjoyed every bit of it.
And as she worked, behind the theory and strangeness and possibility, she let a fantasy float along the back of her mind, imagining a boat, braided by her own hand, diving down.
“Now, now!” Seraph slapped his knees as he squatted before an enormous flame, grey and viscous, just as the others had been. His energy seemed undiminished by repetition. “This is a particularly interesting case. I—”
Two voices, rubbing against one another like dried leaves or jagged stones, interrupted him.
“A lovely pair of empty minds here found..”
Kindred’s skin flashed with cold as she turned to find The Word looking down on her work with Seraph. She had not heard them approach. Perhaps Seraph’s voice had smothered their footsteps; perhaps the boredom and repetition had slowed her senses. Whatever the cause, she felt shock at their sudden appearance, and it was a shock heightened as she watched the two of them straighten their clothing, pulling identical brown robes back up against their chins, hiding again those purpled necklaces hung forever around their throats.
“Oh, hello,” Seraph said, coming out of his analytical reverie to smile vaguely up at The Word. Kindred looked up at and then immediately away from The Word’s green eyes.
“A keyless lock once tried, twice tried. No end.”
Seraph chuckled and shook his head, and Kindred recognized the comfort in a long-held, oft-visited conversation.
“It’s not so impossible. And now with a fresh mind to help me, I know we can unlock them.” He gestured to the hearthfires.
The Word laughed, both voices entwined and uncanny, nearing laughter Kindred had heard and known her whole life. Nearing but never reaching it.
“If one, a fool. But two? Pair mirrors crack’d. Poor light rebounded endlessly between.”
Kindred still had no sense of who these people were, why they spoke as they did, or what their odd relationship was. But she could recognize insult even in the singsong verse of The Word’s speech.
“A fool?” she asked, some of the old fire she remembered hearing in Little Wing’s voice lighting in her own. “I’m pressed into service to help your City and your people; I’m one of two, as far as I can see, actually doing anything to save this place, and I’m the fool?”
Kindred finished all in a rush, breathing hard, red in the face.
She was tensed and ready for a fight. Her eyes on The Word, flicking between them, Kindred rose and stood, trying to hold herself up, wishing despite everything that had happened that Little Wing were there. Her bravado might have been reckless, but it had always lent a sense of purpose to a conflict.
The silence strained and pulled between Kindred and The Word. No guards approached this time, perhaps too busy or too bored to interfere, perhaps aware of what The Word could do and unwilling to get in the way.
Seraph sat quietly for once, waiting for the storm to blow over.
The Word chortled.
The sounds of mirth dribbled from their lips like dollops of sludge, slick and wet, spittle shining in the unnatural light as their laughter grew, echoing and reflecting off of each other’s.
“Pair mirrors crack’d,” Kindred muttered, low enough to be unheard beneath their laughter.
As one, they each reached out and put hands on Kindred’s shoulders, green eyes identical and angled in happiness.
“Such words dredged up from fire and dark of deep. To laugh ’midst this is water on dry lips.”
That said, The Word walked away, still chuckling, their strides perfectly the same, weaving between the hearthfires as one, walking the path opened for them by guards who parted before their approach. They walked out to where the prairie plants had formed the wall and then suddenly, by some trick of light or magic, The Word was gone, one moment on this side of the plant wall, the next gone.
“Did you see that?” Kindred asked, turning back to Seraph, who had long since gotten back to working on the hearthfire and had even begun murmuring to himself again.
“Don’t worry about them,” he said, shaking his head and looking after The Word, his face full of an emotion Kindred couldn’t read. “We all have our own projects down here, and you’re only cleared for the hearthfires. The Gone Ways extend far beyond this space, but our interest is just here.”