“She did,” Kindred said, trying to blink away the tears filling her eyes. “That’s how she ended all of her letters to me. She told me once that love didn’t have to do anything other than exist. You don’t have to dress it up or compare it to something else; when it is, it’s miracle enough.”
The wind blew, gentle.
“Do you think she’s alive down there?”
Kindred choked out a strangled laugh through the suffocating weight of her grief. It felt good, a stolen sip of joy.
“Yes. No. I don’t know. She can’t be; no one could be. But . . .”
How many times had the Marchess done the impossible? How many times had she proven that she was always two steps ahead of everyone else, craftier, smarter, better than anyone imagined she might be?
So sorry.
“No,” Kindred said finally. “I don’t think so.”
Maybe.
“I’m sorry she’s gone.”
Kindred could only nod. She felt heavy with exhaustion and sadness and confusion, as if a slow weight were pulling her down, to sleep or to the deeps, she didn’t know.
And yet she heard Red Alay again, speaking in reverent, drunken tones, perhaps not to be trusted or perhaps to be trusted all the more—speaking of her grandmother walking into Sea. Walking and not falling. Just walking away into the Sea, with the Sea.
Sailors saw the Sea as a plane to be traversed, nothing more. To think of the deeps led to madness, for how could one sail across so vast an abyss and consciously attend to its emptiness, to the forever below? The harvesters—those who crawled out along the beams and were lowered into the Sea, held up with their harnesses and ropes—were the only ones who seemed able to comprehend what might be below, and Kindred had yet to meet a harvester who was not at least a little mad. Touched by the Sea, other sailors said of this madness. The Errant’s harvesters—Cora the Wraith, Long Quixa, Stone-Gwen—were just as touched as any Kindred had met.
But harvesters never dove deep, never fully submerged themselves in the Sea. Half in and half out was their method, far enough down to let their silver blades cut away valuable harvests from the stalks and far enough up to see sky and ship.
They dipped toes into the question of what lay below.
Kindred dove in, thinking of all the stories she had heard, the tales and myths of a Sea full of monsters coming to gobble up bad children, a prairie hiding secrets and wonders if only one could dive down, could find her way below.
She shook her head, feeling the weight in her mind, too. It was all too much.
“When will the captain get back?” she said, struggling to stand up until Ragged Sarah helped her, sliding arms beneath her own, lining her own body up with Kindred’s. “I have to tell her about the water. And then find a place to sleep.” She was remembering anew her exile from The Errant.
“I don’t know when she’s getting back, but you’re not going anywhere. That berth is yours, even if you’re missing out on this next voyage. You’re not in any state to go wandering off into the city.” Sarah helped her aboard and across the deck and, after lighting a small taper, down the steps and along the hallway and into Kindred’s berth, her tiny room with its hammock strung between the walls and its small desk and its bookshelf.
“Just a quick rest,” Kindred mumbled. “Wake me when the captain gets back. I have to tell her . . . something.” The world had turned fuzzy, and even though Kindred knew there was something she had to tell Captain Caraway, she couldn’t remember it. The sound of the wind outside was like a broom sweeping, moving dirt and grime around with no purpose, but Kindred lost even that thought to the exhaustion.
Ragged Sarah helped Kindred into her hammock and, moving slowly, reminding Kindred of careful hands braiding strands of grass, Sarah kissed her forehead and left without a word, Kindred swaying ever so slightly in her hammock.
* * *
She woke in darkness.
Held in the fibrous cradle of her hammock, Kindred felt suspended in the black. The only sound was the wind stirring the Sea.
She knew herself to be in her berth aboard The Errant, knew herself to be waking as she had so many times before at port and out at Sea.
And yet the darkness felt charged, the emptiness around her significant.
Kindred slid a hand into one pocket, feeling her grandmother’s letter there.
I will not miss the surface world.
There in the place between—between dreaming and waking, between the Sea and the shore, between one voyage and the next—Kindred imagined herself falling down through the Sea, falling and fallen to the bottom, where not even her imagination could paint the darkness with colors vivid or powerful enough to change it. Her eyes opened or closed, Kindred saw nothing but blackness, heard nothing but the wind and the ghost of her grandmother’s voice.
Listen for me in the grasses and listen for me below.
In that black in between, with only herself and the ship as witness, Kindred made a promise to find her grandmother, to trade in the known bounds and exploited mysteries of the world above for the unimagined impossibility of the world, of the worlds, below.
If you seek me, look below.
“I will.” Kindred’s whisper to the darkness was both a mantra and a covenant. “I will.”
* * *
Heavy steps and whispered voices pulled Kindred from dreams of dropping through darkness. She had a last fleeting image of herself falling and falling through the Sea as Red Alay and the others sailed beside her, yelling at her to blend with the grasses—just blend!—their boat somehow able to sail below the waves. Kindred couldn’t decide if it was a nightmare or not.
When she walked out into the hold, she saw four men having a whispered conversation, their voices like little storms. The near-dawn light cutting in through the portholes was tinged a soft pink.
“Lift it, damn you, lift it!”
“Oh, fuck you, I am lifting!”
“Shut it, all right, and just move the fucking thing.”
“There in the corner now, easy, you bastard, easy, and there.”
“Dickwhistle! That was my fucking toe, oh shit, that was my toe.”
“That may have been my fault.”
Kindred watched them, a smile pulling at the sleepy weight still holding her face tight. The events of the previous night waited for her, held still until the moment she reached inside and lifted them to the light, but she let them be for now and watched as Mick’s workers moved in the water.
“No need to whisper,” she said, causing more barrels to be dropped on more toes and more swearing to fill the hull’s open enclosure. “I’m the only one down here as far as I know, and I’m already awake.”