Ragged Sarah had been humming quietly while braiding grass. She’d drawn together the strands of prairie grass until they had formed a circlet of green that she nestled into her hair, a gesture at once simple and childlike.
Kindred had popped open the bone closet and stomped around a bit, letting Ragged Sarah know she wasn’t truly alone anymore, and when Kindred looked up again, the circlet was gone, and Ragged Sarah gave her a wave before she focused back out to Sea. Later on that day, Kindred had found the circlet placed on her bookshelf.
Kindred searched each of Arcadia’s three brothels: The Iron Whip, Rain’s Home, and The Lily. Ragged Sarah was nowhere to be found in any of them, and as Kindred walked out of The Lily’s thick, spice-scented wooden doors, she felt a strange measure of relief to not have found Sarah there.
As she walked out into the night, she thought again of Ragged Sarah leaving that circlet of grass on her bookshelf. She hadn’t slung it on Kindred’s bed or set it on the writing desk, and she hadn’t just dropped it down on Kindred as she worked at the hearthfire.
No, Sarah put it on Kindred’s bookshelf, amid her most prized possessions. She had shown some sense that she understood Kindred, that she could think from Kindred’s perspective.
And there, Kindred realized, was her problem. She’d been running around Arcadia, trying to think from Ragged Sarah’s perspective, to see this city from Sarah’s eyes, to let the indulgences of Arcadia draw her as they would Sarah.
And somewhere out there, Kindred thought, Ragged Sarah was probably doing the same thing, asking where Kindred would go, asking what indulgences would draw her.
“Of course,” Kindred said, though with a smile. She moved now, sure in her steps, running back where she’d started, back to her berth, to her bed, to the Sea.
To her letter.
* * *
She found Ragged Sarah pacing the dock beside The Errant. Kindred’s heart clutched in her chest when she saw a small cut of white in Sarah’s hand.
Anticipation roiled in her stomach, but Kindred’s steps faltered as she looked up and caught sight of shadows moving around Ragged Sarah. It was hard to make out in the low light of the dock, but after a moment, Kindred saw wings and beaks articulated in the impossible movement of the shadows.
They were birds—two of them, flitting around Sarah’s shoulders, each the size of a fist. Their plump feathered bodies cut through the darkness, wings like sails catching a wind all their own. They arced around her head in dangerous swoops too wild to calculate or follow. As Sarah paced, her head down, the birds accommodated her movement, as if they were an extension of her.
Kindred had never been this close to Sea birds. Sure, she’d seen their shadows outlined against the sun as they approached the crow’s nest above, and like any other sailor who had ever stood on the deck of a ship parting the green grasses of the Forever Sea, she’d cast her eye through a longsight to glance off a line of pelicans dizzying themselves higher and higher in the sky.
But this was something else. Kindred had seen Ragged Sarah call birds for information, for guidance on the Sea, for a greater picture of the grasses waving on the horizon. That was business, function.
Here was Sarah, the colored strands of her hair pulled into a tail at the nape of her neck, her forehead creased with worry, her mouth forming whispers only meant for herself, with birds like familiars haunting her.
She stepped nearer, until she caught Ragged Sarah’s eye.
“Kindred!” Relief smoothed over Sarah’s face as she came forward, her smile rejuvenating something in Kindred despite the exhaustion that slid through her body, pulling her down. The letter was in Sarah’s hand, held carefully.
The birds settled themselves on the crow-caller’s right shoulder.
“I was looking everywhere for you,” Sarah said. “But then I remembered that you spend most land stays on the boat anyway, so I just waited here.”
She said it, Kindred realized, as some sort of apology, an unspoken sorry floating in her words, filling the interstices. She must have heard what happened with the Marchess, Kindred thought. Or at least one version of what had happened.
“It’s all right,” Kindred said, her eyes drifting to the birds, which regarded her with intense curiosity, heads cocked to one side, inky black eyes ringed in imperfect white, beaks closed and solemn. Up close, Kindred could see the subtle articulation of their coloring: hazel shading into white or grey, with dashes of black that looked inspired by some mad artist. Their plump bodies hung suspended over legs too thin to hold them up, and yet there they stood, somehow perfect.
Dazzling lines of white traced back from their beaks and across their heads, giving them the look of royalty, crowned and regal.
“Oh, right,” Ragged Sarah said, following Kindred’s eyes. “Don’t mind them; they were just keeping me company. Off you go.”
Sarah shrugged her shoulder, as if stretching out a tight muscle, and she whispered a string of words Kindred couldn’t understand, could barely make out.
In a flash of movement, the birds took off, making their round, soft bodies into whirrs of wings and stretching feathers. As one, the birds launched from Sarah’s shoulder and skimmed the grasses of the Sea, curving and angling in terrifying tandem before disappearing into the darkness, neither down into the Sea or up into the sky but simply out, toward a horizon lost to the night.
“What kind of birds were they?” Kindred asked, as she strained her eyes to see farther into the black, to catch any last glimpse of the winged shapes.
“White-crowned sparrows,” Sarah said, chuckling a little.
Kindred tried to hold their movement in her memory, their cut and swirl still dancing across her mind’s eye.
“I didn’t know you could call them in the city,” Kindred said, trying to keep the awe from her voice. Of course, Arcadia saw its share of birds, but Kindred couldn’t remember ever seeing a calling bird on land. As far as she knew, calling birds could only be found on the prairie Sea—and only then through whatever magical means crow-callers used.
Ragged Sarah grinned.
“We’re not really supposed to, but”—she gestured around at the nearness of the moon-silvered grasses—“the docks seem more a part of the Sea than city.”
“Where will they go now?” Kindred asked, trying and failing to find their winged bodies in the darkness. “I know common birds nest among the trees here, but do calling birds too?”
Sarah shook her head.
“No, no. Did you never learn the difference between common and calling birds in your time at school? Common birds live on land, calling birds live in and among the Sea—nesting out in the Roughs beyond the tamed Arcadian grasses. Common birds give the gift of their presence to all; calling birds are fickle, refusing to be seen without being called, without the intervention of fire and magic. Do the bookmavens in their fancy schools not teach their young prodigies such things?” Sarah’s smile was bright in the moonlight as she poked Kindred’s shoulder, her eyes mischievous.