As Kindred came level with her, the Marchess reached out to encircle Kindred with the rope, but Kindred pushed it away, shaking her head once. Her hands, two quiet, clasped things for the last few days, felt strong clutched around the ladder rung, and her feet stood firm below, out of sight in the green.
The Marchess chuckled, a sound Kindred would come to love, and nodded. She turned out, facing away from the gentle curve of the ship’s hull.
“Here we are, face to face with forever,” she said, and Kindred looked out too, nearly on eye level with the magically flattened plane of the grasses.
Breath stopped up in her chest as Kindred let her gaze roam farther and farther and farther out, sailing and skimming over endless dancing blades of green tickling the sky. It was a beauty she’d never known before, and she felt on the verge of something great and enormous. The smell of the grasses surrounded her, describing growth, articulating simplicity.
Wind blew through the grasses, stirring them, roiling them about, and Kindred sucked in a gulp of air, letting her wonder and grief speak in that breath.
The Sea sang to her and she sang back, without music or words, breathing in time and tune with the wind as it moved and gave life to this world that only a moment before had seemed flat, empty.
Tears filled her vision and Kindred let them, the Sea already a moving, blurred thing before her.
“Look at this, right here,” the Marchess had whispered, pulling Kindred’s attention away from the enormity of the Sea’s sympathy to its immediacy, a single stalk held in the Marchess’s hand. She pulled it close, holding the wrist-thick stalk just below the point where it branched, tripling into three fuzzed reaches populated with arrowed grains. Lower, bands of brown bulged from the stalk, like knobby elbows punctuating its length, resetting the coloring and dividing the plant into segments of beauty.
“See the shading of colors, not just the green that you can see out there but a red like the sunrise, a blue like the sunset. This is called big bluestem,” the Marchess said, and Kindred mouthed the name, heard it in her mind even if she still maintained her silence. “Here, you can touch it.”
Kindred reached out and curled a hand around the stalk, surprised by how it felt at once solid and supple, as if it could bend in any wind, could move against any hull, but would not snap, could not be broken. It was smooth against her palm, and she could not imagine ever letting it go. The Sea stirred around her and Kindred felt something like magic in the quiet chaos of the grasses working on her, asking her to see differently. To know differently.
What had been before only an unremarkable throw of green, monotonous and monolithic, became more for Kindred. She saw the rise and wave of more big bluestem around her, and other plants too—each one articulating radical existences in the spaces between light and dark green, between yellow and gold, between stalk and stem.
Every blade a doorway and every shadow an entrance to a life Kindred had never known but which called to her all the same.
“A bundle of this—its harvested seedhead and a portion of its stalk—goes for something like eighty heavy-coin in the Arcadian market right now,” the Marchess said, and Kindred’s eyes widened at the thought of so much money. “Valuable, right?”
Kindred nodded.
“It can be used for medicinal purposes and burned aboard a ship for defensive magics.” The Marchess watched Kindred closely while she spoke, as if searching for something. “The price is well warranted, perhaps even low for how relatively rare it’s gotten.”
Kindred continued to study the plant, marveling at the slow shifts in color, the way the curled hairs sprouting from the seedheads shivered in the wind.
“But here is the true value, child,” the Marchess had said, putting her hand atop Kindred’s, atop the stalk. “This plant reaches further down than anyone understands, into and through a world we have never seen, and every bit of its height is mirrored below the Sea floor. Its root system extends deep, deeper than you or I can fathom, down to where—some say—the old beasts still roam and the old tongues are still spoken. It reaches down into a different forever just as it makes up this one. It connects sky and wind and Sea and stone and dirt below, and for this moment, it allows you to be part of that chain. This is not coin waiting to be harvested or a method of travel.”
The Marchess leaned in, pulling the three of them close—grandmother, grandchild, and plant, like friends in close conversation, heads bowed together.
“This is connection, my child; this is the world—every good bit of it—reaching out. You have lost much, and you are right to mourn. But remember.”
The Marchess gently squeezed Kindred’s hand, and the bluestem she still held.
“Here you are connected. Here you are allowed to be.”
Kindred had learned to love the Sea with her grandmother during those first few years aboard Revenger.
Or, truer perhaps, she had found the love of the Sea already there inside her.
* * *
“Keep moving,” Little Wing said, jarring Kindred loose from her reverie.
Kindred crawled, but she looked down and thought of stepping into the Sea, walking away into it.
“Finally,” Little Wing said as they reached the hull of another vessel.
“Do you know whose this is?” Kindred asked as she stopped behind Little Wing, looking at the sweep of the hull rising up and out of the Sea above them.
“Captain Fox’s ship, The Aster,” Little Wing said, without any pause. “It’s a harvest vessel, like ours. Twenty, twenty-two years old.”
“You know her?” Kindred didn’t want to climb aboard a vessel and find it full of its very angry and suspicious crew.
“No, never met captain or crew,” Little Wing said, reaching for the ladder extending down the outside of the hull. She could just barely grab it.
“But you know this ship?”
“They make you know every ship, its captain, and its primary purpose for the captain’s exam,” Little Wing said, pulling herself up to the ladder and then extending her hand for Kindred.
“Captain’s exam? You’re going to be a captain?” She pulled back on the chain to look at Little Wing, who only nodded and extended her hand.
Kindred didn’t know many other quartermasters, but that did not stop her from thinking Little Wing was perfect for the job; she was focused, hardworking, good to the crew, and intensely loyal. Kindred had once seen Little Wing beat the absolute shit out of three lie-leaf addicts who made insulting comments about Captain Caraway’s eyepatch.
“What do you think that bitch Caraway hides behind that eyepatch?” one of them had asked amid laughter, eyebrows raising and falling suggestively. Kindred had been sharing a chew with Little Wing and a few of the other crew members at a nearby table.