And yet there was the daily ration of water, every day, downstairs. Diminished, yes, but there.
Some piece was missing here, something she couldn’t see. But it was too big, too complicated to understand.
“Well?” The captain’s voice jarred Kindred out of her thoughts. “I need to know, Kindred. Are you in?”
Kindred looked around at the other crew members, seeing the resolve in their faces.
Cora the Wraith, grinning, sure of their success even after everything that had happened, everything that was sure to happen.
Long Quixa, remote, nodding at the captain, steady.
Scindapse, young and hopeful.
Ragged Sarah, smiling down at Kindred, her love fierce, and Kindred’s love for her fierce in return.
And the captain, a woman Kindred had admired and feared and loved in her own way, ready to lead her crew out of danger yet again.
They planned and sailed for a life together on the seas.
And even though she held a different future in her heart, even though her mind still wandered to those boats below, even though.
Even though.
“Aye,” Kindred said, looking around at her old crew, holding Sarah’s eyes with her own.
“Then it’s done,” Captain Caraway said. “At the next attack, we make our escape.”
* * *
Kindred found Seraph above, bouncing about and ready to start on their work. They moved among the ships again at the start, stepping from deck to deck, examining hearthfires, and Kindred tried to pay closer attention to those boats left on the eastern side.
But try as she might, she couldn’t imagine a life on any one of them. The captain, certainly. Quixa and Cora, absolutely. Scindapse? Maybe. But Kindred knew her path was different, deeper.
She found herself thinking how well Little Wing would have done in this situation. The quartermaster had always been at her best when the world was against her, when hope was a slim shaft of light to be chased.
Kindred shook her head and pushed the thought away. She couldn’t go there.
“Are you all right? You seem distracted.” Seraph looked across one of the hearthfires at her, concerned.
“Just a lot on my mind,” she said, “but I’m okay.” Which was true, and enough to mollify Seraph’s worry.
They got back to it, and after the ships, it was back down to the hearthfires.
Kindred moved among them like a ghost, haunting this place but not really there, her mind elsewhere, her spirit longing for more, for the deeps, for her grandmother, for Little Wing, for a world that was always there but that everyone forgot about.
As she worked, she looked at the rows and rows of barrels lined up against one of the walls. The water stores Seraph had pointed out previously.
Kindred tried counting them, but there were too many. Maybe she had been wrong in her suspicions—with stores that massive, the Once-City would be fine for a long time, especially if they could be replenished by the occasional heavy dews skimmed and the occasional captured rainfall.
Perhaps she and the rest of The Errant’s crew were just having their rations limited and diminished because they were still seen as enemies of the Once-City. Kindred pushed the thoughts away and got back to work.
* * *
They had nearly reached the end of the day when a shriek behind the plant wall startled Kindred out of her thoughts.
It was there and gone, a piercing shriek that was immediately muffled, pummeled into nothing by shouts from men and women.
And then nothing.
“What was that?” Kindred asked Seraph, leaving the hearthfire she had been experimenting on and walking over to where he crouched next to a trio of hearthfires. “Did you hear that?”
Seraph nodded, whispering a calculation for himself and holding up a hand. Kindred let her eyes roam the Gone Ways, searching for the source, for the rent in the wall, for the body burrowing through toward them.
She recognized that shriek, would know it anywhere. She could even picture the great hulking body, sinuous and slithering, curling in and around itself. A mouth wide as the world and hungry as anything, opening toward her, ready to devour her.
A wyrm.
“Okay, what was it you wanted?” Seraph set down bones he’d been manipulating and looked up at her, an absent-minded smile on his face.
“Did you hear that shriek? There’s a wyrm somewhere near.” Already Kindred was imagining the run toward the stairs, thinking of whether it was safer to stay in the confines of the stairwell or if she should race up to the Forest or even Breach.
“Loud, aren’t they?” Seraph asked, shaking his head. He seemed totally unperturbed. Still sitting beside the hearthfires, he was the picture of calm. “We always have wyrms moving around the Once-City, but they don’t cause us any trouble. They live a bit too low for us, and their vines can’t do anything on something as large as the Once-City. But the Gone Ways are low enough in the Sea that I can hear them most times I work down here.”
Seraph’s expression shifted, toward something more conspiratorial, and he arched an eyebrow as he peered around for a moment.
“Between you and me, I’ve heard that some of the councillors who have space down here have been experimenting with trapping wyrms. How they’re going to manage it, I have no idea. And only the gods know why. Those buffoons, always looking for a bigger, more brutish enemy than themselves to defeat.”
He shook his head, and Kindred marveled at him. On the one hand, he could say all that as if it were banal gossip instead of a story of terrible possibility. A wyrm trapped? On this level? In the Once-City? Seraph had already continued his work, numbers spilling from his mouth as he closed one eye, cocked his head to the side, and calculated braid strength and plant width.
But on the other hand, his estimation of his colleagues on the Council was too accurate to be accidental, and Kindred was reminded that while Seraph looked the part of a madman, he possessed a gift for seeing. In that way, he was much like the Marchess.
Shrieks sounded twice more while they worked down there, and by the last one, Kindred had pinpointed the source to behind one of the walls. She had assumed them to be little back rooms, nothing more than small storage spaces, but if they had a wyrm back there, and if there were as many people back there as it seemed based on the shouts that accompanied each shriek, it would have to be an enormous chamber, easily the size of the one in which Kindred worked now.
She thought of Captain Caraway worrying away at some plan happening amidst the Council, some secret design to betray their deal with the crew of The Errant.
As Kindred watched The Word and several of their guards appear from behind that wall—the one between Kindred and the shrieks—she thought perhaps the captain was right.