And of course, her love for the Sea, always.
As the crew of Revenger remembered, Kindred felt herself lulled into the memories, or she might have been, but something seemed off. She looked around the circle of firelight and saw a strange happiness; she listened to the stories and heard a spirit and fire she had not been expecting. These women sang a song discordant with Kindred’s own, and she couldn’t figure out why her grandmother’s death—their captain’s death—wasn’t impacting them more.
She listened as much as she could, smiling through the memories despite her growing confusion. And when it became her turn to speak, to share something of her grandmother, she didn’t.
“How did it happen?” she asked, looking around the circle at the smiling faces. “Why didn’t any of you stop her?”
There it was again, that anger she’d been feeling. It was the wrong emotion, she knew, but it was powerful and purposeful nonetheless.
“Ain’t a person alive who could stop the captain,” Red Alay said, taking a swig from her mug and smiling. “She was a woman with an iron will, she was.”
“But why did she do it?” Kindred asked, raising her voice now, giving her anger its head, letting it fill her lungs like a sharp wind filling out a sail, pushing it on. “You weren’t attacked? She wasn’t driven to it? Coerced? Forced?”
“Attacked? I think I might have remembered that,” said Maggie the Tall, chuckling into her mug.
“But what about the tears in the hull? I saw the damage there. Was it wyrms? Or pirates? Or . . .”
Kindred trailed off, realizing what she had missed. The damage to the hull never extended onto the deck. Even in the darkness, she would have known if the deck or the mast or the rigging had sustained that kind of assault, which meant that whatever had happened, it had only happened to the hull.
Kindred could only think of one thing that could have such an effect on a ship’s hull.
“The Roughs,” she whispered, and those around her nodded.
“Aye, we went into the Roughs,” Red Alay said. “And even with it being pirate territory and all, we didn’t see a single one. Must be you all attracted them.” Red lifted her mug in mock salute, laughing.
The Roughs. Kindred saw them twice in her mind, first as the edge drawn on most maps of the Sea. The prairie mages of Arcadia had flattened and tamed the grasses around Arcadia, making the Sea easier to traverse, easier to harvest. But their magic only extended so far, and beyond it were the Roughs—often depicted as an encroaching flurry of dashes on maps, meant to symbolize the wild plants, thorns, and nettles there. What the maps didn’t need to depict were the pirates who sailed those chaotic grasses and the beasts who moved below them.
And yet, at the same time, Kindred saw the Roughs from just a few days before, when The Errant had pushed out so far, too far. Kindred had looked beyond the magically enforced flatness of the grasses around Arcadia—she’d looked out at the rise in the Sea, the strange, impossible, outrageous rise of it. Mountains of vegetation colored by plants she’d only ever read about articulated variety in impossible arrangements, a wonder of change and diversity in the face of Arcadia’s flattened, predictable grasses. Thorn reefs cut through the green dangerously, spined and sharp. Slopes broke the level of the Sea, and Kindred had imagined giants below the waves of grasses, their shoulders garlanded with strange flowering vines and nettle patches wicked enough to carve up a ship’s hull if the sailors weren’t careful.
If, in fact, they were sailing back through the Roughs without a captain.
Kindred saw all of it and then she was shaking her head, confused and angry still, sadness held at a distance by the fire in her stomach.
“I don’t understand,” she said through clenched teeth. “You went into the Roughs? You went into the Roughs so my grandmother could commit suicide? Why would you do that? Why did none of you stop her?” Her words became hard metal pellets dropping from her tongue, weighty and myriad. She was crying, she realized, the tears warm in the wood fire’s heat.
Her grandmother used to tell her that silence didn’t exist on the prairie Sea. “We cover the real conversations with our useless talk,” she would say. “The wind, the grass, the beasts from the depths of the Sea and the birds in the air. There’s too much life happening here, too much for silence.”
And so, the silence that fell after Kindred’s outburst was not complete. Like the rocks, like the Sea itself, Kindred’s silence served only to reveal, to expose.
Wary looks crossed the faces of those around the circle, and then Red Alay spoke.
“You’ve got it mistaken, little ghost,” she said, putting a heavy hand on Kindred’s shoulder. “The cap’n—your grandmother—didn’t commit suicide. We were out near the edge, near the Roughs, and she’s been quiet most of the day, just staring out at the horizon, and then she orders us to go in, and so we went, and somehow she’s guiding us through the worst of it, sailing deeper and deeper in, thorn reefs and nettle patches coming near us but never cutting into the hull and we don’t know what’s going on but the cap’n has that look, like all is right in the world—you know the look.”
Kindred nodded, tears falling fresh now. Her own captain, Captain Caraway, had once said Kindred had inherited the Marchess’s expressions, and though she never knew if it was meant to be an insult or compliment or both, Kindred had been surprised at how good it made her feel.
“Well, she’s got that look and we’re sailing further into the Roughs than is healthy, and we keep scanning for pirates or forged flowers or anything else but there’s nothing and the wind is steady and we’re sailing and then all of a sudden she calls for a stop. Maggie stifles the hearthfire and the rest of us are furling the sheet and soon enough we’re slowed to a near stop and, well, and . . .”
Red Alay stumbled into wordlessness, the first time Kindred could ever remember, and when she looked up at Kindred, she, too, had tears in her eyes.
“The cap’n, well, she comes to each of us and gives us a hug and looks into each of our eyes and tells us something, something secret, some parting message,” Red said, wiping at her eyes. Kindred couldn’t think of a time she’d seen Red Alay, one of the most notorious brawlers in Arcadia, this emotional. “And then she gives the ship one final look and just steps off into the Sea, not falling down into it, not like that. She just walked away into the Sea, slow and purposeful, like she was walking down stairs. And the whole time, she was just smiling and smiling; you know how she smiled.”
And Kindred did. Her grandmother’s smile had been a fierce thing, guileless and honest and mad.
The story didn’t make any sense—the Sea couldn’t hold up a person, it just couldn’t be done. Kindred had seen sailors fall in before, and they slipped through the endless grasses like a pebble falling through air.