Kindred rose through the vanishing trails of grey flame disappearing from the air like veins emptying of blood. With a shout, her voice still shaping the language of the hearthfire—a language Rhabdus would never understand—Kindred drove the bone into Rhabdus’s chest, hard and fast. She felt it break inside, shattering into pieces, but the work was done.
Rhabdus fell, her swords angling without purpose through the air around her. One cut a line along Kindred’s arm, eliciting a hiss, but Rhabdus was dead, and her swords fell next to her, still.
Next to Kindred, the hearthfire returned to its usual size, though it had begun to shudder and quake, the movements subtle but clear. Kindred had asked much of it, and its surge of power was taking a toll.
Kindred knelt next to it, listening for any change to its quiet song, and it was only then that she heard the shouting.
It was Little Wing and Captain Caraway, their blades clashing together over and over again, their words lashing out.
“You didn’t believe in us, Jane!”
“You didn’t trust me!”
“I gave my life to our ship and to you!”
“We were going to be okay!”
Accusations like whips cracked the air between them. It was the only battle remaining; the others had dispatched the remaining Arcadians, but though they circled Captain Caraway and Little Wing, there was no way to interfere and help. The fighting was too fierce.
A great shriek from one of the walls broke hypnotic movement of the fight, and they all turned to see one of the false walls that Kindred had noticed before suddenly fall away, torn back to reveal a huge open space.
And there, coiled and flicking its muzzled, roped head back and forth, was a wyrm.
It was a prisoner, surrounded by citizens holding it captive. At first, Kindred thought they had been caught by the vines growing from the wyrm’s body, but then she saw the truth—they were ropes, tied around the beast and coming off it in every direction, each one held by a citizen. Slightly smaller than the one that had nearly destroyed The Errant, the wyrm was still far bigger than anything inside should be. Its white, mottled skin was sallow and sickly in the light of the Gone Ways, and its eyes rolled and glared madly.
Some of its arms, Kindred could see, had been chopped away to make space for the ropes—all of them braided grass—that held it. Others, though, were free and clawed at the air and the ground, seeking anything to gain some control.
It looked sick. And angry.
Its captors were moving forward, pulling it forth from the space it had occupied—based on the state of it—for some time.
And walking before it, twin smiles lighting up twin faces, was The Word.
“A slave returned to seek her own revenge.” They moved forward, but Kindred and the others were too shocked to do anything. One and all, they stared at The Word.
And one and all, they stared at the wyrm, pulled forward bit by bit into the central area of the Gone Ways.
“Aye,” Little Wing said, recovering enough to spit and sneer at The Word. “Me and every bit of the Arcadian fleet have come back to end you and everyone here. Shame you couldn’t kill me when you had the chance.”
She took advantage of the moment and rammed her shoulder into Captain Caraway, sending her sprawling, before turning to The Word.
She advanced on them, undaunted even then, a fire unquenched, unquenchable. A blade in either hand, Little Wing advanced.
But The Word did not ready their weapons—him a tall, carved staff, her a great hammer carried as if it weighed nothing at all. They did not signal any of their guards to attack or defend or move.
They did not advance on Little Wing or shrink back.
Instead, they laughed.
It was a sickly, peeling laugh, discordant and cacophonous, two voices near enough to harmony to make Kindred long for it and far enough away from it to make her feel ill. It was wrong, that laugh, and even Little Wing stopped as she heard it.
“Bravado in a fool is twice as sweet. Your strength is ours,” they said, biting down on the word with savage glee. “A tool you have become.”
“What?” Kindred asked, stepping forward and feeling a slight shock of fear as The Word turned their gaze on to her. “You want Arcadia to destroy the Once-City? What are you talking about?”
That laugh again, high and wrong.
And this time, when the Word spoke, they did not do so in that singsong way, voices rubbing together. Instead, they traded words, one for him, one for her, and so on, each one like a great rock breaking, a sound to make teeth grind together and bones shift uncomfortably. In voices unlike any Kindred had heard from them, they said:
“We. Let. Her. Go.”
Silence.
“We. Wanted. Cantrev’s. Attack.”
Silence.
“The. Whole. Fleet.”
Silence.
“Arcadia. Its. Water. Undefended.”
Tremors shook through the Once-City, and Kindred saw the hearthfires, so staid and unchanging until then, shift. Some grew, their flames reaching viscous hands toward the ceiling and the sky beyond it; others dropped low and wide, the grey grounding out to the absolute black of a starless night.
Kindred knew that movement, that shift of light and heat, but it couldn’t be. It was the dance of a hearthfire being pushed, of a blaze offering speed to a ship.
But that couldn’t be.
The tremors rumbled through the Gone Ways, and Kindred saw the barrels holding the water stores topple and fall, rolling about, spilling . . . nothing. No water splashed out as more and more of the barrels jostled about and fell over.
The water stores were empty.
And suddenly Kindred understood, felt the threads snap together in her mind, each one part of a larger, more sinister whole.
The Once-City, dilapidated, dead in the grass, falling apart and slowly being reclaimed by the Sea. The Forest encroached on the second level, taking up more and more of the Once-City, taking it back for the Forever Sea. Breaches above, like hands reaching in to take back what was once the prairie’s.
Even Barque, his skin taken over by plants, becoming the Sea. Her own hand and leg, too, becoming plant, grass, flower.
And their water rations, smaller and smaller. A punishment? Or smaller fractions of a smaller whole?
“You had this planned?” Kindred said, staring at the Word with astonishment. “You wanted the attack so you could occupy Arcadia, take over the water stores? All of this—all of it—was about water?” Underneath her surprise and shock, Kindred felt disgust welling up inside her. The Once-City had been a place that lived with the world, that moved and bent and swayed with the world’s wind, but this? This was the work of people determined to break the world and everything in it to their wills.