The crowd jeered and sneered, and Kindred bit back her desire to shout out her disagreement. But she wasn’t the only one who dissented.
“How many of us have lost someone to those pirate bastards? The Nettle? Canticle? Some are even saying pirates had something to do with our great captain, the Marchess, taking the green dive.”
Anger filled the air, hot and dry, and Kindred felt it like a tight fist in her chest. This monster was going to gain some advantage off of her grandmother’s death, which had nothing to do with pirates. She had hated Cantrev, and he had hated her, but here he was, casting a somber glance around in her memory.
“Legate was on their side! Legate was working for the pirates! He took from you what you can never get back!”
“That’s not true!” The words were quiet despite being shouted, as though the man were in a great cathedral or arena, as though the majority belief there could silence even the attempt at insurrection.
“Look at this fool,” Cantrev said, smirking and flicking his hands toward the man who had shouted, dismissing him before he could even start. “He has no idea. Legate was born on the Mainland, and it’s the Mainlanders who keep driving up prices and stealing from our businesses. They don’t care about Arcadia; they’re nearly as bad as the pirates!” He jutted a stubby finger toward the Sea. The crowd roiled in excitement, mimicking the sinuous writhe of the fire still consuming Legate’s building.
“I don’t want to hear from him again,” Cantrev continued, turning away from the dissident, who disappeared in a swirl of people and then was silent, absent. Cantrev gestured once to a bodyguard standing nearby, and the man moved into a nearby shed, one of Legate’s, a drying shed for casting plants.
Kindred was remembering a time when she’d walked through that shed with the captain, Little Wing, and Rhabdus, picking out casting plants for their journey, stocking up for a long campaign on the Forever Sea—plants to burn in the casting fires for defenses or for Sarah’s use in the crow’s nest. She was remembering exactly how the captain had been discussing prairie smoke, how it could be found in only a few regions of the known Sea and even then not often, not regularly.
Kindred was remembering Little Wing’s insistence that they could just harvest their own plants on the journey and the captain’s stubbornness in claiming Legate’s drying techniques were superior to those possible on The Errant, that Legate’s plants were far more powerful than whatever they could harvest and dry while at Sea; she was remembering Legate entering the shed and asking if they would be buying that day or just selling what they’d harvested; she was remembering his bigness, his height and girth and spirit, the sense that he could hold up the world just fine; she was remembering the captain saying they were buying and Little Wing’s sullen sigh and Legate’s laughter, big and wild, and the captain’s laughter, sharp and high.
Cantrev’s bodyguard emerged from the shed with four people following him, each one chained and restrained. Legate stood out, a head taller and much wider than the others. Harder to spot was the captain, last in line, her head down, dried blood spattered and drooling onto her chest.
The crowd surged and Kindred surged with them, moving forward before realizing what she was doing, hands dipping into her robes for the single knife she always carried with her. In the pulse of the crowd, though, she lost track of Little Wing. Looking around herself, Kindred realized she was surrounded by strangers, all of whom looked like angry, confused children.
She stretched on her toes to look at the captain again. What could she do? What would she do?
As Cantrev began speaking again, she pushed forward little by little, moving toward the front of the mob.
“Look at these traitors. All Mainlanders trying to take over Arcadia, trying to get their people on the councils, trying to get their hands on our water.” Cantrev slapped Legate’s head as the crowd roared. Legate stared at the ground, shoulders like twin slopes. “This traitor has most of the plant-trading business on Arcadia. Most! We’re letting a man born on the Mainland get our money, and for what? So he can have a big house and give his coin back to the Mainland?
“Well,” Cantrev said, holding his hands up, veiny and shiny in the light of the blaze behind him. “He doesn’t have such a big house anymore.”
Kindred stared at the captain, waiting for her to turn, to find her eyes. Her temporary dismissal was over, as far as Kindred was concerned. This was her captain, her crew, her ship at stake. She wasn’t going anywhere.
But Captain Caraway seemed to see nothing but Cantrev. She had been stripped of her sword, and Kindred saw bruises blossoming on her face from what she could only imagine was the difficult and dangerous process of taking the captain’s weapon. Her eyecloth hung loose around her face, barely covering her eye socket.
“And then there are the filthy vermin—maybe even more traitorous than the Mainland traitors—these people who give their money to known Mainlanders. They’ve betrayed their home and their families. Some of them—this one here, Captain Caraway—she uses unlicensed dealers and steals my water, mine, fills up her ratty boat with it, and then tells me she has no idea what I’m talking about while she’s sitting with this Mainland trash, trading with him.”
The people around Kindred shouted their rage. Kindred thought of Mick and his laughter, his wheezing, whooshing, vengeful laughter. Did he mean to betray her? Or was Kindred, were Captain Caraway and The Errant simply unhappy victims in Mick’s hatred of Cantrev?
Kindred thought the second, but at this point, she didn’t think it mattered much.
“These are not the people we want in Arcadia. These are not the people we want dealing with our coin, our plants, our trade. Arcadia rejects them. They are no longer sons and daughters of our island.”
While the crowd jeered and roared and bellowed, their rage gluttonous with water so scarce, Kindred reached for her knife.
A hand on her shoulder made her freeze.
“Don’t. Not yet.”
Kindred jerked her head around and saw Little Wing.
“But—”
“Attacking now gets you dead, and it probably gets the captain dead, too.”
“So? He’s going to kill her.” Kindred noticed some of the people in the angry mob around them had begun to notice their conversation and were glancing their way with growing interest, perhaps wondering what these two women could be talking about; perhaps wondering whether either one of them was a Mainlander, a pirate sympathizer, a pirate even. Kindred thought of growing up near the Floodplains of Eth on the Mainland, of being orphaned before she had found her feet in the world, of sailing to Arcadia for the first time on a boat that skimmed across a Sea made of grass that went on beyond the edge of every map ever made.
She refocused on Cantrev, trying to look in every way like a dissatisfied, angry citizen.