And yet.
Something in the telling pulled at Kindred. The Sea was wide; it stretched on to forever, or so everyone assumed, but if it was wide, then, too, it was also deep. The myths—the ones everyone knew but no one believed, the little stories that sparked the air between children up too late—rose in Kindred’s mind. A hidden world, full of wonders and wilds and people and beasts and magic, all forgotten and waiting deep below the waves of prairie grasses.
“What did she say to you?” Kindred asked, wanting to know more, wanting to know it all.
But Red shook her head, smiling through the tears.
“That’s not something I can share, just like I don’t expect you to share yours.”
Kindred paused.
“Mine?”
“Your letter. I delivered it to the letter-pass myself, still sealed, just as the cap’n left it. If I’da known you’d be coming in to port today, I would’ve just waited and given it here.”
In a distant part of her mind, Kindred heard Captain Caraway giving Ragged Sarah orders to go pick up the mail from the letter-pass.
“My letter,” Kindred said, her voice quiet.
“Aye, little ghost. She wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye.”
Kindred looked around the circle once, eyes wide, heart beginning to pulse in anticipation of running, of racing to find that letter.
“To the Marchess,” Red Alay said, holding up her mug. “May she find peace in the deeps.”
“To the Marchess,” Kindred said along with everyone else, holding up her mug, thinking of a woman stepping from a boat and walking away into the Sea, thinking of her grandmother telling her to blend with the Sea, with the wind, with the fire, always to blend.
Thinking of a letter waiting for her.
CHAPTER FOUR
Kindred moved quickly through Arcadia, traversing where she oughtn’t go, pushing against and through the tide of nighttime workers going about their business in great droves.
She searched for Ragged Sarah, who should have already been to the letter-pass and rounded up all the mail for sailors aboard The Errant. For her.
But where would Ragged Sarah go, Kindred wondered, anxious.
As her feet pounded the ground—sometimes dirt, packed and hard and bonelike; sometimes rough stones aligned like the jagged language of civilization—Kindred realized she should be tired, should be emotionally and physically exhausted.
But she moved with energy, blood and bone and muscle and mind drawn together by the promise of words on a page.
Kindred ran along Stolon Lane, the street with all of the best bars and taverns, but she found no sign of Ragged Sarah in any of them. She moved on to the bazaars, thinking about what she knew of the crow-caller.
Ragged Sarah had joined The Errant a short time before Kindred had, coming to them from the cesspit of Arcadia. The Errant had been in need of a crow-caller, a mage capable of calling and speaking with birds in order to pinpoint a ship’s location, to aid in navigation, even—depending on the skill of the caller—to ascertain the site of any harvestable plants not yet discovered by other vessels. Ragged Sarah had answered the captain’s call.
And since then, she’d proven herself a contradiction among the crew. Kindred thought of the stories she had heard about Sarah: kneeling before Captain Caraway the first time she’d come aboard—“no one kneels on my ship,” the captain had said, only a little embarrassed—telling strange and clever and crude jokes over late-night drinks on the deck under the stars, fiddling with The Errant’s long-defunct medical supplies cabinet and declaring to everyone, with the captain’s permission of course, that she would get the cabinet in order and fit to use. She would chew lie-leaf with the other sailors and laugh wildly into the night; she wielded a pair of wicked silver blades that Kindred had seen her throw once with vicious, deadly accuracy, flicking her multicolored hair as she sent the blades spinning into the air. Tattoos covered her arms and legs and neck, and Kindred had spent more time than she would admit imagining those lines of ink and color winding their way beneath Ragged Sarah’s rough shirts and pants, tracing the line of her shoulder or flourishing along the curve of her hips.
Sarah was remarkable. From the deck, Kindred had watched Sarah cast her spells and called her birds, their winged shapes appearing from the clouds and flocking to the crow’s nest. Afterward, she would climb down with a map bearing for a vein of plants overlooked by the other harvesting vessels.
It had been Sarah, just the day before, who had alerted the captain of pirate vessels bearing hard in their direction. Without her, The Errant and her crew would have been dead at the bottom of the Sea.
In many ways, Kindred felt a connection with Ragged Sarah; they were both isolated members of the crew, both tasked with solitude, with watchfulness. Sarah spent her days in the crow’s nest alone, monitoring the horizon and calling birds to guide the ship toward more promising grasses. No one else aboard The Errant could call the birds, and so Sarah lived and worked in a world of her own.
Meanwhile, Kindred busied herself at the hearthfire, set in the very center of the deck, near all the activity but removed from it, too.
They were the same: sailors with tasks and skills too specific to truly be full members of the crew, working in spaces misunderstood or downright feared by everyone else aboard. The crow’s nest, the hearthfire—both pockets of space aboard The Errant set apart from the ship’s orders and commonalities.
And Ragged Sarah was certainly elusive. She hardly ever spent much of her take from their harvests, and when Kindred once asked what she was spending her money on if not drinks or brothels or weapons or treasures, Sarah had smiled that secretive smile of hers, the one that pulled at a part of Kindred she hadn’t known existed, and said, “Home.”
There were times where Ragged Sarah’s laughter with the crew, the hardness of her as she climbed the mast or sharpened her blades or told stories of her past sailing experience—never mentioning specific captains or ships, just the exciting stories of fighting through the pull of forged flowers or Antilles roaches—there were moments when Kindred thought all of that was a show. Ragged Sarah playing the part of rough sailor.
Yet there was another side to her. A truer side. Kindred had seen Ragged Sarah in her quieter moments, those times when many of the crew slept, when she thought herself alone and free from observation.
Kindred remembered seeing the crow-caller leaning out from the nest one morning, dawn still just a barely lit candle on the horizon. Rhabdus had hated keeping the fire in the early morning, and so it was often Kindred’s job to wake early and check on the blaze, to organize the bone closet, to sweep up any ash. At first, Kindred had hated those pre-dawn mornings, but soon enough she grew to love them. The cool air waiting to fill lungs and sails, the hushing movement of plants swirling together and whispering along the hull of the boat.