* * *
When they were finished for the day, Seraph offered to walk her up to Cruel House, but Kindred begged off. She wanted to look at the grass boats.
“Have fun!” Seraph said before walking off.
There were seven in all, five of them in various states of frayed and coming apart, braids half-done or half-undone.
But two of them were finished, or near enough to be finished as to not matter.
Kindred walked all around them, running her hands along the hard, smooth sides, the grass shiny in the light of the Gone Ways. After a moment of sheepishly looking around to make sure no one was watching her, she climbed in through one of the windows and dropped into the cabin, the space bare and empty and still.
Light cut in through the windows in thin patches, enough to illuminate the outline of a door Kindred had missed and the rope system for managing the side sails she had noticed before.
And there, set into the only piece of wood in the entire ship, the board running from one side of the space to the other, was the hearthfire basin, its metal glinting dully in the light.
She stayed there for a long time, not moving, barely breathing, her eyes opened or closed—it was all the same. Kindred floated in dreams, in hopes, along a path she would take, had already taken. The only sound was the slow movement of grass against the city, like the lungs of the world.
“You’re perfect,” she whispered in the near darkness, her breath already returning to the sway of the Sea.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Kindred didn’t get a chance to talk with Ragged Sarah until later the next day. Sarah was sleeping when Kindred slipped up to their room, and by the time she woke up, Sarah was gone to work. She left a note for Kindred that simply said, Soon, love.
Seraph was waiting for Kindred right when she woke, and the two of them immediately set out to the Gone Ways, ignoring the boats above for the day.
They talked of their increasingly wild theories about the hearthfires, and Kindred let herself drift off into the comfort of that conversation, buoyed up by the thought of a ship made of grass, built for the grass, one that might spring to life under her hand. A small smile played across her lips as Seraph spoke, as she worked, as they went about their day.
And so it was that she nearly missed it.
She was kneeling before one of the smaller hearthfires, her hands moving about inside it, her mind wandering, when her fingers brushed over a knob of bone, some product of too many years burning in the same slow-dying hearthfire. As she touched it, Kindred heard a slight shift in the hearthfire—in all of the hearthfires—a movement in the key of their songs. It was there and then gone, so small a change that she would’ve missed it had anything else been going on. In fact, Kindred thought she might have missed it even had she been paying attention, but because she was so lost in thought, her active mind elsewhere, some other, deeper part of her could pay attention to the spirit of the flames.
She looked over to Seraph, who was working on a few fires nearby, but he showed no sign of having noticed anything.
Kindred turned back to her fire and looked closer, singing softly to the flames until they parted enough for her to see the structure of bone. Like the others, it was sturdy and unwilling to change, joints fused into blocky, unwieldy masses. For a moment, Kindred thought she wouldn’t be able to find whatever it was that she’d touched, but it was there, waiting for her, a spur of bone extending into the heart of the structure. A strange growth too articulate and distinct to be accidental.
Running her finger over it again, Kindred listened to the shift in the song, from steady to slipping, from a constant buzz to—for just a breath—a melody fit for the fire. It took five times for Seraph to notice.
“What’s that?” he asked, cocking his head to the side and looking around before noticing Kindred grinning at him.
“A clue,” she said, before waving him over and showing what she’d found.
Seraph cried big, wet tears as he laughed and hugged her.
“I knew it! I knew you were the one to help us! But keep going—keep going! What does it mean? What effect?”
Kindred was smiling too, thrilled with the discovery, but she focused again as she turned back to the fire, singing her soft song, reaching it. The spur of bone was tough, unyielding even beyond what the rest of the slow-burning structure was. Her song rose, cutting into faster melodies, harder syllables, the beats thundering out of her, and Seraph was singing too, his voice twining with hers, providing an intuitive counterpoint, buoying her efforts.
Kindred pushed and pried at the bone spur, feeling the wail of the fire’s song as she did so, but it wouldn’t budge. It held firm. She pulled at it, squeezed it, but it would not move—until she reached with her burned hand, pulling with all her strength. The golden shoots dotting her hand unfurled as one, swaying not in the movement of the fire but with the rhythm of Kindred’s song, as if they too had joined the chorus, and it was as if Kindred had new strength—or at least new-found strength that had always been there. She grasped the bone spur and peeled it from the structure, feeling the pebbled mass in her hand as she removed it from the fire.
The hearthfire’s song changed now, moving in a way it hadn’t before, and Kindred understood as she had always understood—intuitively, abstractly. The piece of bone she held in her hand had long since turned to stone; it was the hearthfire’s attempt to remove the sickness of time from itself, but it couldn’t push it far enough away, couldn’t contain the sickness. Instead, the death and decay of this long, slow rot had only been focused, had only further taken over the flames.
“Do you hear it?” Kindred asked, and Seraph could only nod. She felt a sharp spike of kinship then with Seraph. Never could she have explained the song of the hearthfire to another, save the Marchess. Not to Rhabdus or any of the other keepers from Arcadia—to them, this would have been impossible magic or strange insanity. Even Scindapse, who some day might have enough experience to understand, was not yet there. But Seraph understood just as she did.
The fire had been trying to save itself. And thanks to Kindred, it finally had.
Kindred sang again to the fire and pushed her hands back in, feeling for those essential forces—push and pull, movement forward and back. And yes, she could feel them . . . almost.
“I think the Once-City might move now, Seraph,” Kindred whispered, speaking quietly. “That bone spur was a lock, and once we find the others—because I think there might be others scattered throughout the fires—we should be able to guarantee some movement at least. They still need time to heal—sailing now would almost certainly cause too much damage to the fires and the City itself—but with some time, I think the Once-City might sail again.”
Seraph was nodding beside her, hearing the double of what she said in the fire’s song.