“Oh, yes,” he said. “Oh, yes.”
* * *
Soon enough, the day was over. Kindred and Seraph had spent the rest of the time seeking out more of the bone spurs, which was a task made much easier now that they knew what to listen for. They found four more and estimated another ten were still out there, waiting to be discovered. Seraph bid her a happy farewell—embracing her again once more—and then Kindred raced back to Cruel House to find Ragged Sarah, who had also recently returned from her own work with the callers above.
“The work is always the same,” Sarah said, taking a sip from the meager water rations at the table. They had diminished again, Kindred noticed. Perhaps a not-so-subtle message from the Hanged Council that they were in control. “Rebuilding crow’s nests and refitting calling-fire basins in them. I don’t know how much more mindless drudgery I can take.”
Ragged Sarah ran callused hands over her shoulders, and Kindred moved to stand behind her, helping to massage away the pains.
“Oh, and the reef! Always monitoring the thistle pass.” Sarah shook her head. “I’ve been having my birds watch the reef every day, and some—those who can fly further—pushing out toward Arcadia a bit, and there’s no movement. And yet still, they tell me to call the birds, to monitor the pass, to record my findings, to do the whole damn thing again.
“Anyway, I’m just complaining, and I don’t even have to deal with that fool Seraph all day,” Sarah said, her head lolling back in pleasure. “How was it down among the hearthfires today?”
“It was amazing,” Kindred said, before leaping into an explanation of their work that day. She ended by saying, “And Seraph’s not so bad. I actually like him.”
Kindred didn’t know why she felt so strange defending Seraph, but she did, and she could feel the tension building suddenly in Sarah’s shoulders.
Slowly, Sarah detached herself from Kindred’s massaging hands and turned to face her.
“Kindred, he’s part of the Council that forced you to spend time in a prison before giving you the gift of working for your freedom. He’s exactly what’s wrong with this place—wild and wonderful on the surface and crooked and rotten inside.”
“He’s really not.” Kindred’s voice rose to match the elevated tone in Sarah’s. “He’s a good person. And he’s actually trying to help this place and the people here without resorting to violence. You should have seen how excited he was today, Sarah! He was crying! He just wants to find a way to solve the Once-City’s problems without any more violence.”
She thought of their work on the hearthfires below, of seeking to get the Once-City moving again without killing anyone, without waging war against Cantrev, without stealing bones or plants or resources or anything.
And she thought of him, seeing what had happened with Little Wing and telling no one, of offering her understanding when she feared none would, could.
“There are no good people here, Kindred.” Sarah kept using her name, speaking it sharply, air hissing against her teeth. “There are only pirates, looking to steal. Maybe not bones or ships, but they all steal something. Everyone is a pirate, Kindred; everyone takes something. Especially the people here. They’re no different than Cantrev. The only difference is, Cantrev is at least an asshole to your face.”
Kindred shook her head, closing her eyes and letting all of this fall away as much as she could.
“This is stupid. I don’t know why we’re fighting about this. And . . .” Kindred extended her hand, a gesture of peace. “I have something to tell you, something more important than whether some old man is good or not.”
A tense moment passed in which she half-expected Ragged Sarah to stoke the fire of their fight, but she didn’t; she nodded.
“Let’s go to our room,” Kindred said after a moment, and they did, sneaking up to their mattresses, pulled together.
There, in the low light of that open-air room, Kindred told Sarah about the Gone Ways, about the boats, about what they might do.
* * *
Ragged Sarah stared at her in the silence, skepticism still written across her face, as if trying to decide if this whole thing was a joke.
“You’re going to sail a ship made of braided grasses?” Ragged Sarah said. “Wait. No, first you’re going to steal a ship. And then sail a ship. A ship made out of prairie grasses. And sail it away from the Once-City?”
“Yes,” Kindred said, holding back the most important bit, at once desperate to speak it aloud and make it true, and yet terrified of what Ragged Sarah would say. If she was worried about the plan so far, then she would never sign on for the rest.
“What about the plan? The captain’s plan?”
Kindred waited in the silence, wondering if she could say it. For so long, she had been part of a crew, and now?
“I’m not going with the captain. Scindapse can keep the fire on whatever vessel the captain and the others steal; she’ll be able to do it. But I’m not going. I’m striking out on my own. Or, hopefully, not on my own, if you’ll come with me.”
Kindred cringed at it, the silliness of what she was saying, but Ragged Sarah seemed to actually be considering it. Her brow squeezed into thought lines, and her eyes had gone soft, seeing Kindred’s plan out there, out in the distance, something to be caught and held.
“It’s possible. Maybe,” she said finally. “But I don’t know that a ship like that could make it back to Arcadia, much less the Mainland. And who knows what’s further east in the Forever Sea. I suppose they have better maps here of the Eastern grasses than we did in Arcadia, but I don’t know. My father used to tell me about a great port city out on the horizon, one where the magic of plants had spilled out into the buildings and streets and the very air itself, where the Supplicant Few went. But none of the outfitted ships sent out that way ever made it back.”
Kindred nodded, thinking of the Marchess’s letter, seeing the Sea in her mind not as a plane to be traversed but a thin layer of the known hiding mysteries. This wasn’t the looking-out that so many believed in, not the need for mystery elsewhere, the need to conquer mysteries on the horizon.
No.
This was a looking-in, Kindred knew, a finding of mystery within herself and in what she had known all her life. How strange and wonderful, she thought, to see mystery beneath her feet rather than in a world not her own.
“I’m not sailing toward Arcadia or the Mainland,” Kindred said. “And I have no plans to sail east.”
“Where then?”
“Down,” Kindred said.
Sarah stared at her, confusion and uncertainty moving through her eyes and across the slant of her mouth. After a moment, she spoke.