Kindred thought of the few ill-fated attempts to bring practical knowledge to bear on the deeps.
The Vinsayd Family—“too rich to be,” the Marchess always said—had long before begun extending a rope down into the Sea, its end weighed down with several fist-sized metal anchors. Every new generation of Vinsayds would add more rope to the thin, snaking line disappearing over the edge of their personal dock extending from their estate on the edge of Arcadia. Thrill seekers and adventurers were invited to climb down the rope, to let their bodies disappear into the rustling green waves, and for a time, many did, hoping to claim the prize—a fortune for any who could return with evidence that they had reached the bottom of the rope: a chip from the anchor.
Many tried.
All failed, either returning too soon, mad and empty-handed, or, more likely as the length of the rope increased from generation to generation, never returning at all.
None had ever successfully sounded the bottom of the Sea, but estimates of the Vinsayd’s rope put it at or above four miles in length.
Four miles and still no bottom, no slack in the line. Even if the stories of rich water sources cutting across the Sea floor were true, who could climb down so far? Even if Red Alay’s story of the Marchess were true, she would be walking for a long time to reach whatever moved below.
And that didn’t even begin to account for the beasts of the Sea that made the grasses their home.
Others angled for the deeps in stranger ways. Kindred had met a man a few years earlier, back when she was still sailing with Revenger, who was convinced great civilizations lived at the bottom of the Sea. He had been one of the Number-Children, those tasked with the calculation and maintenance of great, complex sums from an early age. Children, it was theorized, were naturally nimbler with numbers, and so they were plucked from homes early if they showed particular talent, placed in dark basements with unending writing materials and blank rooms to aid in their calculations. Businesses, politicians, theorists: they all made use of the Number-Children. But, as often happened with them, this man had gone wild as he aged, had never given up his hold on imagination the way that others did.
He had been shouting in the streets about these civilizations, about how his calculations had assured him, had promised him that many people lived at the bottom of the Sea. “The air is cool and water flows freely there,” he had said.
The man had been begging for money to help him build a contraption with which he might—Kindred shook her head in disbelief at the memory, still so odd this many years later—catch a wyrm and then ride it down to the deeps.
He had sailed off onto the Sea one day on a small boat—big enough for a single person, its tiny hearthfire barely bigger than a torch’s flame. Barely fitting on the deck of his boat was the contraption, a tangle of stone and metal and rope.
He never came back.
Even Kindred’s bookshelf held a few tomes filled with the myths: right next to the books about the Supplicant Few and their search for land at the end of the Forever Sea were old, equally impossible tales of undersea rivers lined with speaking stones; herds of strange, five-legged creatures that spoke in colors and dreamed their young into existence; the great graves of the Sea Lords, rising like mountains below the Forever Sea.
Kindred had read those stories, had loved them as a child. And she felt a surge of something like excitement every time a new, crazy plan was laid to discover something below the Sea.
But all of that had always seemed a fool’s errand, fun to consider and pointless to attempt. Anyway, the depths of the Sea were likely a trash heap—all of Arcadia and, as far as Kindred knew, all of the Mainland dumped all of their refuse—every bit of excrement and cast-off material—down into the Sea.
Kindred climbed the mainmast, ignoring the ship laid out like a game board below her, and instead stared out at the Sea where lashes of green caught the dawn light and ignited in golds and yellows.
But veins of decay cut through the Sea like a rash striping across healthy skin, scarring the living Sea with dead and dying plant mass. An unnatural, withered mess of ash-grey plants unaffected by means magical or natural.
The Arcadian shipping authorities had sent a warning to all vessels to avoid these “Greys,” and after a few stories of captains with too much bravado badly damaging their ships, everyone else had complied. None had yet figured out the cause, but Kindred secretly thought it a product of hubris, the Sea’s response to Arcadian magics that had flattened and tamed the prairie grasses.
It was clear that the Sea was sick—dying, maybe—but it had not yet become a cause of any major concern on Arcadia; why worry about a few veins of dead plants when the Sea went on forever? The senators were already talking about expanding Arcadia’s territory of flattened, easily harvestable grasses, pushing its border farther north and south. Those with any sense knew that expanding any farther east would cause even more pirate attacks, put even more strain on the already-straining Arcadian defenses.
Yet the Senators planned anyway. Mapmakers were brought in to redraw the lines of Arcadia’s reach, to reimagine the wildness of the untamed Roughs as more flattened Sea.
Kindred shivered at the thought. “I will not miss this surface world,” she whispered, quoting her grandmother’s letter.
“Morning,” a voice said from the dock, and Kindred was so startled that she nearly fell. Clinging to a rope, she saw Little Wing come aboard, her broad shoulders laden with bags carrying supplies of all sorts.
“Morning,” Kindred said, climbing down a little too quickly and landing hard enough to send a shock of pain through her feet. She set about helping Little Wing with the supplies.
“I thought the captain set you to cooling your heels on land.”
Kindred flushed. Little Wing had always been nice to Kindred, had always treated her like a fellow sailor as opposed to the know-nothing child Rhabdus had considered her. But whatever change was going on inside Kindred’s head and heart was too fresh, too much hers, to share with anyone, and so she simply said, “Just not ready to be land-bound yet, I guess.”
Little Wing grunted and continued unloading the supplies.
“The ship’s empty,” Kindred said. “Any idea where everyone went?”
“No one around?” Little Wing set the last of the bags down and stretched her arms up and up into the sky as though she might pull the blue of it down around her. “Not even the captain?”
“No,” Kindred said. “I don’t think I’ve seen her since we docked. You?”
Little Wing cocked her head and considered for a moment.
“Last night, I guess. Late. Nearly this morning. Said she had an early meeting with that fucker Cantrev.” She rolled her head around, stretching out her neck, which emitted a series of popping sounds. “I’d love to punch that man. Don’t you think he would be a better person if someone just punched him once, really hard?”