“When did enough stop being enough?” the Marchess asked, her face close enough to Kindred’s to share the same breath.
“Grandmother,” Kindred said, steadying her voice and speaking slowly. “Please. Can we do what we’re meant to and harvest some plants? I could try my hand at plotting our course for once? You once promised to show me your secret of mapmaking; why not this voyage?”
But the Marchess was staring out at the Sea again, lost in her thoughts, and when she spoke, it was as if Kindred had said nothing at all.
“More and more, the Sea is threaded by dying patches of grasses, Kindred. Boats cannot sail through them. Plants cannot grow through them. Something is killing our Sea, and the answer must be below. It must be.”
“Dammit!” Kindred shouted, slapping the smooth wood of the gunwale with her open palm, the sound and the immediate pain both gratifying in the moment. “Can’t we just do our jobs? Can’t we follow the rules and do what we’re supposed to for once?”
A few of the other crew had begun to arrive back on Revenger, and they stood nearby, looking uncomfortable.
“There’s a child in there somewhere,” the Marchess said, speaking quietly. “You’ve locked her away deep down, tied up with her curiosity, but I know underneath this nonsense about bringing in coin and having a respectable career, you want to know what’s happening to the Sea just as much as I do, my girl. And that’s why you’re in such a foul mood.”
Kindred stormed off the boat, vowing that she would find something better, that it was time to grow up. She found The Errant two span later.
That had been almost two years before, and it had taken the better part of that time to come to bitter terms with the fact that the Marchess had been right.
* * *
Kindred moved through the near-darkness of Revenger by memory, calling out a soft hello as she went. Her grandmother’s words on that fateful morning two years before lingered in the soft pull of rigging flexing in the wind, in the endless shush of the Sea, the grasses whispering and colluding.
You’ve locked her away deep down, tied up with her curiosity.
Revenger was a small ship and old, built in the days when a single mast and sail were enough. Boards ten times as old as Kindred’s twenty-two years creaked below her feet as she moved toward the center of the deck and put a hand on the mast, thinking of how much this little ship had done, how many memories she had burrowed deep inside her from days sitting on the deck, long afternoons experimenting with the hearthfire, trying to steal her grandmother’s techniques, to learn what the older woman would only ever demonstrate with few words and fewer explanations.
Like Kindred’s grandmother, Revenger was part of an earlier age of harvesters, smaller than the more modern ships, crudely built, angles over curves. It was a ship from a different time, small enough for a crew of five, maybe four instead of the twenty-plus aboard The Errant. Kindred sometimes marveled at how many crew members it took for a single operation aboard The Errant. Six deckhands to lift that sail, nine or ten to extend those harvesting planks, three or four to coil the piles of mast ropes. Kindred’s role in keeping the hearthfire, Sarah’s work in the crow’s nest, and the captain’s role in commanding the ship were the only tasks better completed by a single person.
So sorry to hear about the Marchess.
Kindred pushed back against the memories rising to the surface and focused on her task, walking toward the steps leading belowdecks. She felt strange walking this deck, coming aboard as she had so often but now without permission. The wood of the deck, the gunwale, the mast was at once familiar and foreign, warm and alive in her memory even as it all looked cold and distant in the darkness.
More than anything, she felt her grandmother there, could practically hear her commands ringing around the small deck, shouts to tie that line off; to hold, dammit; to steady the ship, Kindred; to pull your eyes skyward, Kindred; to feel the Sea, Kindred.
For a moment, Kindred felt herself surrounded by ghosts, her grandmother’s and her own from so long before.
So sorry.
So sorry to hear.
“’S a right shame, what’s happened to the Marchess,” came a voice from the darkness, and Kindred stumbled, nearly toppling over. She twisted to see a man standing on the dock next to the ship, a light held above him in one hand, a cudgel in the other. One of the dock guards.
“What have you heard?” she asked, stepping forward enough that the man might see her fully, take in her garb and know her for a harvester instead of some petty thief.
“Terrible, jus’ terrible. Awful indeed,” he muttered, his eyes roaming through the darkness, never lingering on anything. “Jus’ jumped right in, they say. Jumped.”
“Jumped in where?” Kindred asked, knowing already somehow. She heard her grandmother’s voice in her mind, could almost see her leaning over the edge again there in the darkness, her deep-lined face describing in relief the Sea she so loved. So often she had stared down into the endless stalks of grass, searching for a deeper, truer dark than anything the sky might offer.
“Well, she leapt inta the Sea, a’course,” the guard said, shaking his head slowly. “Went an’ killed herself, she did. Jus’ terrible.”
What moves beneath us?
“Killed herself?” Kindred said, in a voice quiet enough to be swallowed up by the low evening wind.
“A great cap’n gone.” Still more head shakes, slow and somber and like he was enjoying it somehow. “And takin’ her bones with. Terrible. Selfish, might be. Her whole crew, I seen, headed for the rocky shore, they were. A funeral, I suppose.”
The man stood in that darkness for a time, and so, too, did Kindred, seeing in her memory’s eye her grandmother leaning toward the Forever Sea, always speaking of the Sea, demanding Kindred feel it, really feel it, sense it, understand it, be it. She asked what moved beneath, and finally she went to find out.
“Well, on with it,” the guard said and continued walking out toward where some of the other ships were docked, his light held above him.
So sorry to hear.
* * *
Arcadia stank.
The island city proliferated before Kindred, streets stretching and winding through darkness, covered in the refuse of its people and its refused people. Prairie dwellings bulged from the ground like pockets of inflamed, infected flesh. Lights flickered in windows and on streets, suggesting what lay in darkness even while bringing homes and shops into existence in the night.
Odors bright and sharp attacked Kindred. Boiled-fat stew and the acrid tang of unwashed bodies, smoke from plants burned too soon and the distinct, gorge-tickling smell of piss. All of this and a thousand other wretched stenches clogged Kindred’s nose and throat, pummeling at the strange cocoon she found herself in, at once aware of and distanced from the world.