More than anything, though, she wanted to crawl back aboard Revenger, to scour it for—what? Her grandmother, stowed away in some closet, laughing herself silly at her joke? Some evidence that she was still alive somewhere in the world? Some hope to bury deep in her gut, to smooth out the clench of pain there.
Kindred just walked.
The night wind was reduced this far into the city, stoppered up and cut off by the steady rise of buildings, but Kindred could still feel it stirring her hair and playing across her neck and face, and suddenly she was remembering her grandmother’s favorite practice while out on the open Sea, a wind like that one stirring the grasses.
“Let her take us, sailors!” she would call out, and all plans for harvesting or reaching this or that stretch were gone, replaced by the Marchess’s insane desire to go where the wind would take them. Revenger’s single square sail would crack and flex and bloom as it caught the full wind.
“Blend with it, Kindred! Let it move us! Let it move you!” her grandmother would call from the helm as Kindred struggled to readjust the hearthfire, to shape the bones into something that might capture the flighty spirit of the wind, at times gusting, at times slipping, a few degrees this or that way and then not.
“Let her take you, Kindred! Let her take you!”
Kindred had spent much of her childhood there on that deck, sailing about the Forever Sea, learning to move across it and be moved across it.
And so she walked, letting the wind guide her into the city and along streets that wove and grew and shrank before her, lights dispelling and being consumed by darkness. With each step, Kindred felt the wave of memories and surprise and horror and deep sadness growing, and with each step, she felt her defense against that wave faltering.
So sorry to hear about the Marchess.
She had been walking away from the city for some time before she realized where she was going, where she had been going all along. The dock guard had told her exactly where she could find her grandmother’s crew, those women under whom Kindred had learned everything: how to sail and how to curse, how to listen to the prairie wind and love its song.
“Headed for the rocky shore, they were,” she mumbled to herself, imitating the dock guard’s deep-cheeked idiolect.
Kindred left behind the last bits of city and emerged onto the rocky shore.
It was—had been—one of her grandmother’s favorite spots. After so long at Sea, while her crew were indulging in any number of vices, the Marchess would go to the rocky shore and simply sit—day or night, cold or rain or sticky heat—and stare out at the Sea. She could have just returned from a hundred-day harvesting tour in the grasses to the West, that long stretch of safety between Arcadia and the Mainland, and still, her first act in stepping on solid ground would be to walk through the city—the rocky shore being on the opposite side of the island than the docks—and stare out into the ever-moving mass of the Forever Sea.
“It exposes you,” her grandmother would tell Kindred after dragging her along to the shore. “That pit back there,” she would say, gesturing to the city behind them, “is about shielding yourself from the world. And I don’t just mean physically. Stone,” she would say, slapping the great slab on which she would sit, “exposes. It protects nothing, hides nothing.”
Kindred stepped off the path and onto one of the enormous stones that made up the interlocking face of the rocky shore. As a younger girl, Kindred would run across the stones, counting a hundred steps, two hundred for a single great slab before leaping the crevice and racing across the next.
Even before she saw them, she heard them.
Laughter came through the dark night like an old friend, at once warming Kindred and reminding her what she had lost.
So sorry.
She stepped onto the rock face, its surface worn smooth by an eternity’s relationship with the wind, and as she went, Kindred took off her boots, feeling for a moment a child again, her bare feet slapping on the cool surface, her toes feeling and knowing the real shape of the gargantuan stone.
Tears welled in her eyes, and an ache pulled at the back of her throat as Kindred let the memories settle over her, each one well worn and satisfying in the way only something painful can be: the Marchess playing hide-and-seek with her on those stones over there; Kindred riding on the Marchess’s shoulders, singing at the top of her lungs; the Marchess telling her stories of her parents and holding Kindred when the tears came.
That old woman, so unknown to Kindred while her parents were still alive, had become her keel, her spine, her home.
And now she was gone, and the last thing Kindred had ever said to her were words of anger and spite.
She swallowed hard and swiped her face with one sleeve before taking off, running despite the dehydration and the drumbeats still dribbling out of the city center. She ran for light ahead.
Across one, two boulders that gripped at her toes, and then Kindred saw them, a clutch of figures in the darkness, upright shadows articulated by the wood fire they surrounded. She heard their laughter again, uproarious and defiant against the night, somehow bigger than and part of the wind, the Sea, the whole world.
As she neared, a loud voice, practiced at being heard across a ship’s deck, bellowed, “A little ghost approaches, come to haunt us from the past!”
Kindred felt herself smile despite everything, and then the owner of the voice detached herself from the night-shrouded figures and walked to Kindred, surrounding her in a bone-grinding hug.
Kindred thought of herself as a tall woman, with arms like far-reaching tree limbs and legs corded with muscle from too many years kneeling and squatting before the hearthfire. She held her thick hair out of her face with a red headband, and long-healed burns scoured her hands and arms. When she saw herself in the occasional mirror, she did not see a person easily tussled with.
But Red Alay, her grandmother’s next hand and the woman who would inherit Revenger, had always made her feel slight in comparison. Red, a towering woman, swallowed Kindred with her hug, devoured her, and Kindred let herself be devoured by this woman who had, on Kindred’s first day aboard Revenger, called her “little ghost” for the way she had lingered just outside of conversations, too quiet to join them and too curious to leave them alone.
“It’s good you came,” Red Alay said, letting Kindred go, and then the others were there, the crew members who had served with Kindred’s grandmother since before Kindred was born: Felorna, Maggie the Tall, Three-Hearts, and the others. Kindred greeted them all, hugs and smiles and tears all around, and they returned to stand by the fire, ringing it, and Kindred became part of that ring. She was given a mug of liquor, and soon they settled into telling stories of the Marchess: the battles she’d won and avoided, the politicians and council members she’d snubbed and fucked and hated, her tendency to greet the morning sun fully nude on the deck of her ship, the odd songs she sang and the dead languages she was always trying to resuscitate.