“Gradually, the city grows from a lump on the horizon to a hive of activity, ships resting at port like the skeletons of huge insects, bare masts and taut lines waiting to be filled with cloth and wind.
“And beyond? The island and its city, not yet gripped by the water shortages that would come to define it. The buildings at the coastline crowd close to one another, like children, small and ungainly, gathering together against the insistent press of the Sea. But further in, as if gaining in confidence, the roofs of homes and businesses and temples rise, giving the whole city the look of sitting on a hill even though it was flat as a windblown rock.
“Everything is the washed-out brown of mud left too long in the sun . . .”
He trails off for a moment, aware of the confusion in the audience.
“Like that bit of wall there,” he says, pointing to the remaining wall of the huge building nearby, most of it a ruin of black, but still a large patch of light brown is visible in the firelight.
How malnourished these people look, how underfed in color and light. He is never sure if the events of his story or the colors and tastes and pleasures of it are hardest for them to imagine.
“Like a mound of dirt-colored rocks swarming with mindless activity, Arcadia rises before this young Kindred. Her life—her new life—is all there waiting for her. A grandmother who will teach her to love and sail the Forever Sea, who will raise her.
“See her there, a youth sailing into promise. And see her now, grown and still growing, fleeing from Arcadia with her crew, toward a different promise.
“Hear again the melody of memory. Her hand burned, her ship and crew put to flight, her destiny tied to a world below, Kindred Greyreach dreams. Remember her now. Remember with me.”
CHAPTER SIX
Kindred raveled and unraveled. Dreams of fire and wind. A world beneath this one. A foundation of darkness holding up a world of endless light. Forevers lining up, one after another.
All was darkness and fire and terror.
Kindred woke in her swaying hammock. Ragged Sarah stood near her, worry and concern on her face, looking down.
Kindred moved to sit up. Ragged Sarah said something, but her voice was a distant bell, and a rising throb in Kindred’s head peaked, blanketing her vision and roaring gustily in her ears, and she was again on her back and in darkness.
* * *
She woke again, unsure how much time had passed. Kindred found herself alone in her berth, a waterskin in her hand. Instead of trying to sit up again, she took a long drink of water and looked around the room, her eyes feeling like marbles stuck in honey, thick and slow.
Something was wrong, something she couldn’t quite see or remember yet. The books on her shelf were where they ought to be and her small chest of possessions still attached to the wall, tied to stave off the roll and rollick of the Sea.
Above and around her, she could hear the sounds of the ship: boots on the deck, voices calling for this or that, wood creaking and singing in the wind. The Errant cut through the Sea and—
Kindred felt a pain that was both there and not there as she remembered—all at once, all in a rush—their escape from Cantrev, the fire at the Trade, the damage the ship had taken.
The hearthfire.
Her hand.
She remembered the pain, could almost feel it down in the core of herself, and yet Kindred felt surprise because in that moment, her hand did not hurt.
She also found she couldn’t move it.
Slowly, carefully, she lifted her arm from where it hid below her tattered blanket and found her hand swaddled in black cloth, a glove of it, thick and insulated.
This was Ragged Sarah’s work. Kindred had seen her use the same black strips of cloth a hundred times, covering wounds large and small. “A dab of medicine,” she would say, applying gobs of the sunshine-colored stuff she kept in dusty, squat bottles in the medicker’s closet. “And a wrap the color of night,” she would finish, wrapping the dark cloth around the wound with a deft hand.
Kindred tried to flex her hand, to wiggle her fingers, to assert its existence in any way, but nothing happened. The only hint that a hand lay curled or uncurled beneath the black wrap was its heaviness occupying her mind.
A slow scream began to puncture the fog of sleep clouding Kindred’s mind as she waited for her hand to move, to flex, to feel something, anything. She pushed and prodded and pinched as best she could through the cloth swaddling . . . and nothing.
A sound like the wind roared in her ears as she sat up too fast, panic driving the blood along her veins, flushing her face with terror. Kindred stood, wracked by waves of nausea, and nearly fell over. Everything spun, and she could barely keep her feet. A single step brought her crashing into a wall, and it was all she could do to right herself and take another step.
Walking was a slow process, but the growing scream in her mind pushed her on, out of her room, and up the narrow, worn steps, stumbling the whole way. She leaned hard against the wall as she went, grimacing at the roil of nausea in her stomach and the clustered storm of a headache.
As she stepped onto the deck, a gust of fresh prairie air caught her hard in the face, and she saw the discord aboard The Errant.
“Finally.”
At the helm, the captain leaned into the cock-eyed slant of the quarterdeck. Behind her, Little Wing stood next to the mast, her long body angled with The Errant, which rode through smooth grasses at a sharp angle far beyond the comfortable lean sailors were used to, tipping everything on the deck starboard-way. Some crew had simply sat down on deck to avoid contending with the slant—others had hooked themselves to masts or rigging or the gunwale. Still others walked the deck, pretending as though they weren’t traversing the side of a great hill or a shallow mountain, striving and failing to keep spines straight, heads up.
“It’s about time you woke up. We’re in a mess here,” Captain Caraway said. She bore the bruises and cuts of her encounter with Cantrev.
She gestured, and the fog in Kindred’s mind finally relented enough for her to understand. Moving carefully along the tilted deck, she clambered toward the hearthfire, which burned chaotically, spastically.
“Those rudimentary hearthfire studies they require for captaincy are piss-poor, it turns out,” Little Wing said as she and the captain both joined Kindred at the fire.
“I tried to get us going forward again after we were out of the mages’ range,” Captain Caraway said, the confidence normally found in her voice gone. “But I couldn’t understand your build, Kindred. It was like nothing Rhabdus ever used. Little Wing even pulled out the book of builds they give to every new captain, but we couldn’t make sense of what you had done. If it weren’t for the strong wind, I don’t think we’d be moving at all.”