Little Wing was shifting back and forth, foot to foot, readying herself for a fight.
“There has to be another way,” Kindred said through clenched teeth, eyes moving around the deck, for something, for anything.
A wind cut across the deck, bright and chill, pulling at a few loosely tied ropes, and the Marchess’s words whispered through Kindred’s mind, a gift from her grandmother.
“The prairie holds worlds.” Kindred spoke as if in a dream, her mind suddenly wild and chaotic. Beasts below. A rope extending forever down. Graves in the deep and rivers running in the darkness.
A woman, walking out into the Sea, out and down.
An idea too dangerous, too fanciful to consider.
And yet, what else was there?
“What?” Little Wing asked, leaning close.
“We can’t get off this dock, fine. But what about the other one?” Kindred said, pointing toward another dock extending into the Sea some way away, a few larger vessels stopped at it.
“Okay, but how . . .” Little Wing began, but she followed Kindred’s finger as it fell, pointing not at the dock anymore but down, to the Sea, to the darkness there.
To the cradle strung through the Sea like a great, interconnected web, the giant chains holding up The Errant, the docks, every other boat. The cradle, which connected all of the docks from below the Sea.
“No,” Little Wing said in a voice that gave Kindred pause. It was not the strong, reserved voice of the quartermaster.
It was a woman afraid, her confidence shattered by fear of the deepest, purest kind.
“It’s the only way,” Kindred said, dropping her voice to match Little Wing’s. The guards were nearing, and Kindred’s heart had begun to beat with a frantic energy in her chest.
Little Wing shook her head, looking like a child confronted by a world she suddenly couldn’t understand. What Kindred was suggesting went beyond the madness of harvesters, their bodies cinched tight in harnesses, roped back to the ship, touching the edge of darkness without ever diving in, playing at freedom without truly letting go.
That was a hazard of harvesting, a danger that harvesters took on and other sailors ignored. Though they cut across the Sea day and night, those who lived and sailed on the Forever Sea would not—could not, it seemed—look square into its depths. It was an abyss to be forgotten when possible and ignored when not.
To fall into the grasses of the Forever Sea was to fall through them. The grasses were like hair, capable of holding nothing up on their own. Whatever magic gave growth and body to the Forever Sea, whatever magic the beasts of the Sea had also been granted in order to ascend and descend—none of it extended to humanity, who dropped through the Sea, dead weight falling without slowing.
“Little Wing,” Kindred said, leaning in close, dipping her head to catch Little Wing’s gaze. “It’s the only way.”
A moment of silence, and then Little Wing huffed out a breath, fear and all.
“Fuck,” she said, buckling her swords in hip sheaths and spitting once.
“Yeah.” Kindred nodded.
As the boots neared and the voices grew distinct and articulate, Kindred and Little Wing climbed down the side of The Errant, lowering themselves to the grasses and then in, slowly through the blades until they were fully submerged.
The early sunlight filtered through the grasses at that depth, giving Kindred the impression of floating in a Sea of homogenous green, the individual lengths of grass glowing so brightly and filtering so much bright sunlight that the distance between them disappeared.
It was beautiful.
They had found the nearest chain of the cradle, though it was not directly below them. This far down the hull of The Errant, there was only the one ladder attached.
They would have to jump, Kindred realized.
She heard the guards reach the ship above them, heard their boots on the deck, their voices pitched. Bastards.
Kindred held a finger to her lips and pointed above, and Little Wing nodded back, her eyes saying precisely how much she hated this situation. Kindred pointed at herself and raised up a single finger. Should I go first?
Little Wing spit and shook her head, jabbing herself in the chest. No, I will.
And she did, her breath huffing in and out before stopping altogether. Kindred saw tears welling in Little Wing’s eyes, and she thought to say something, confident words or a quip to ease the tension, but then Little Wing was in the Sea, truly in it, weightless and hanging suspended in the green, her powerful arms no different from the strands of prairie grass.
She hit the chain, which had links as big around as one of Kindred’s legs, and hung on. After she’d righted herself on it so she could crawl along its length, she gave Kindred a shaky nod.
Kindred paused, seeing the fear behind Little Wing’s affirmation. Above, Cantrev’s guards were denigrating The Errant.
“Can you believe the senator wants this shitty old wreck?” one of them was saying.
Kindred felt herself pulled and stretched between these two worlds: the terrified eyes of Little Wing below, the condescending snarl of Cantrev’s lackeys above.
And then a line from her grandmother’s letter moved through her mind, silencing her fears, soothing her worries.
I go to lose myself in it.
Kindred leapt, and as she pushed off from the ladder, her foot caught on the last rung, just slightly, just enough to dampen her momentum, and she saw she wasn’t going to hit the chain with the center of her body as she’d hoped. Terror flooded through her. She was dropping too fast, was approaching it not nearly quickly enough. She stretched her arms and flailed at the chain, her fingers pulling at their tendons, her sockets straining as she reached and reached.
In the moment before she made contact with the chain, the terror disappeared—just for a breath, just for half a breath—and a singular life of pure stillness overtook her, as if the Sea itself suddenly existed not around her but in her, and Kindred could feel its peace, its forever.
She understood something of what her grandmother had said, could feel a force below the Sea, in the darkness, like a wind or a movement, one that coursed through the deeps of the Sea and never broke the surface.
When she hit the chain, she did so with her hands, and despite the pain and strain of it, she tried to hold on, somehow, gritting her teeth, feeling her fingers slipping from the thick links even as she kicked her legs and wrenched herself up, or tried.
She was falling, she couldn’t hold on, couldn’t exist in this peace, and then Little Wing had her, the quartermaster’s powerful hands wrapping around Kindred’s wrists and lifting her up to the chain.
Kindred clutched the metal until her heart had slowed and she felt somewhat able to move. She gave Little Wing a nod.