“Thanks.”
“I fucking hate this.”
They crawled.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Sea, Kindred understood as she moved along the chain behind Little Wing, was not a thing, static and unyielding. It was a happening. It moved and changed around her, with and against and because of and without her.
Ahead, Little Wing angled her head toward the sun filtering down, a reminder that she was not yet too deep, yet Kindred found herself looking down, through the links of the chain and into the dark depths. It was a subtler forever than the horizon cutting a line in the distance between Sea and sky; this forever was quieter, deeper. A part of the Sea instead of just a product of it.
Kindred saw, too, that the Sea’s terror and its joy were personal things, inconsistent somehow. The vastness below—the uncertainty and unknowability of it—was a bone-deep fear for Little Wing even as it soothed something in Kindred.
Having soaked in the morning sun, the grasses expressed the heat and light as a scent, so pure and instinctive that Kindred forgot for a moment that Arcadia slouched so close. The scent filled her nose—dry and simple, like nothing other than itself—and Kindred simply existed for a moment there, cocooned from the world by the grasses bending and shushing around her.
It was the smell of memories. Of sailing with the Marchess, learning to love this flat expanse of green, learning to hear music in the wind, to see beauty in the cut of bluestem or the clutched orange of butterfly hair.
Held in that liminal space, not on the surface of the Sea but not yet truly below it, Kindred felt weightless and connected, and memory took hold of her, pulling her to another moment of quiet, another sun-soaked day. Cantrev’s guards, the question of Captain Caraway’s whereabouts, the letter from her grandmother: all of it blew away in a wind rustling through the world, and Kindred was back aboard Revenger, her parents only recently killed in a coup on the Mainland. She stood on a strange boat, sailing a Sea she had only ever seen from afar before, numb to the world.
* * *
“Come over here, child,” the Marchess had said. Red Alay held the wheel, and Revenger ran in the wind, sails full and perfectly curved.
Kindred had been in mourning then, unable and unwilling to even mumble or mutter. Every part of her felt absent from the world, and so she welcomed the required period of silence. She had nothing to say. Speaking was a way of being in the world, and she wanted nothing more than to let everything—this boat, these people, her grandmother about whom she had only ever heard stories—slide by, leaving no trace on her or she on them.
Her steps unsteady, Kindred walked across the deck to her grandmother, still trying to get used to the slight sway and sweep of a ship on the Forever Sea.
“Do you have everything you need? Are you hungry? Thirsty? Is your bed all right?”
In later years, Kindred would think of how strange it was for the Marchess to have spoken in such a way—speaking in such short bursts.
Later, much later, Kindred would realize that the Marchess—the mighty Marchess who was an impossible force wherever she went, a scourge to her enemies and a bastion to her friends—was worried. Worried and anxious for this child she had never known and who was her responsibility now.
But that day, Kindred simply let the Marchess’s anxious questions fall away in the wind, unanswered.
“Or maybe you would like to try your hand at the wheel? You could steer the ship, take us wherever you want! There’s bound to be adventure out there somewhere. What do you think?”
Kindred looked out at the mass of green, just green, forever. She couldn’t even bring herself to not want to be there.
The Marchess had eventually stopped, rebuffed perhaps by the absence Kindred had become. They stood there for some time, looking out at the Sea, Kindred letting her eyes unfocus as more of the monolithic grass slid by.
“Come to!” the Marchess shouted, causing Kindred to jump in surprise. She nearly fell over at the roar of her grandmother’s voice, so loud, so commanding, a roar not even the wind could strip away.
The crew, many of whom had been lounging about, leapt into action, hauling hard on ropes, cranking on winches. Red Alay echoed the Marchess’s order, recirculating it around the small deck, until everyone was saying it.
“Come to,” the crew said as they acted together.
Revenger cut hard, the ship describing a curve through the Sea, pulling into the wind, and Kindred nearly fell over—might have, if the Marchess hadn’t stepped in close, putting an arm around her. And though the deck tilted, and though the wind went from a constant push on her back to a whirlwind whipping across her body, Kindred stayed on her feet, held as she was by the Marchess.
Revenger slowed as it turned into the wind, and Kindred heard the low, beautiful voice of Felorna, who was on hearthfire duty that day, her hands moving in the flames. Unlike bigger, newer ships, with their necessarily more specialized crews, Revenger carried a crew who all took turns at almost every task.
The mast groaned and the sails sloughed as the ship settled, slowing and slowing.
“Full stop, Felorna,” the Marchess said.
Revenger held, rising and falling gently in the Sea. Felorna pulled and twisted at something in the hearthfire, and then the flames moved in accordance with the wind and the waves, rising and falling too.
“Come with me, Kindred,” the Marchess had said as she climbed onto the gunwale and then over, lowering herself down to the Sea on one of the ladders attached to the side of the ship.
Kindred stood still for a moment, suddenly aware that everyone on board was looking at her, waiting for her to act or not act.
The Marchess popped her head back up, smiling at Kindred.
“It’s all right, child. Come on.”
Kindred approached the gunwale and looked over, carefully angling her body so as not to touch the wood of the railing. She saw her grandmother below, waist-deep in the grasses. She held a rope in one hand, offering it out to Kindred.
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to let you fall. I’ll tie you to the ship just to be sure.”
Kindred felt dizzy looking down at her grandmother, the susurration of the grass lulling her into a different kind of state, pulling her ever so slightly out of her cocoon. Grasses and wind and darkness and light all moved together around her grandmother, speaking a quiet language, whispering to Kindred.
Come in, it said.
Relaxing, Kindred let her hands slide over the railing, feeling the thousand different dents and divots written into the wood. Moving as if in a dream, Kindred pulled one leg and then the other up and over, feeling a brief moment of fear as she felt for a ladder rung with her feet.
But there, one foot brushed against the rung, and then she was climbing down, letting herself sink closer and closer to this infinite floor of green.