Anger floated on the surface of the captain’s voice, and a kind of accusation, too. Some part of this—perhaps a large part—was her fault.
“Where’s Rhabdus? Why couldn’t she fix it?”
A beat, and then the captain said, “She’s back on Arcadia, best we can guess. She didn’t make it on the boat before we fled.”
The captain was silent a moment, her eye far off on the horizon, as if weighing some heavy decision.
“And so, it’s you now,” she said quietly, turning back to Kindred. Next to her, Little Wing nodded, serious.
“What . . .” Kindred began, but the fog in her mind and the nothing that was her hand and the drunken angle of the ship were all too much, and she couldn’t understand what the captain was saying.
“You’re the senior keeper on board now, Kindred. You’re in charge of the fire,” Captain Caraway said, without a hint of a smile, before looking down at the swath of cloth on Kindred’s hand. “Assuming you’re up to it.”
Was Kindred, on her first journey as the sole keeper, capable of keeping the hearthfire with only one functioning hand?
“Aye, Captain.” It was the only response.
A tiny breath slipped from the captain’s lips—it wasn’t a sigh of relief, not really, but it was the closest Kindred had ever seen to an admission of fear or worry from her. Fierce, she had seen—relentless and steady and even wild. Behind the wheel, the wind living in her hair, Captain Caraway was a figure cut from stone, jagged smile etched into her face, always a step ahead of the other harvesters or the buyers at the Trade, always ready with a soft or hard word for those who needed them.
But here she was, her stony facade cracking, and Kindred wondered with a chill how bad things needed to be for that to happen.
“Good” was all the captain said. Behind her, Little Wing gave Kindred a grin.
“Now get this fire in order. I expect to be sailing clean soon.” And she was back, the captain in control of her ship, her crew, herself.
Kindred checked on the hearthfire. The bone shards were a mess half-buried in the ashes, and the fire burned low with short, half-formed flickers of flame, sparking into nothingness, receding and flaring without cause or reason. It worked against itself, pushing where it ought to pull, stopping up air where it shouldn’t. With so little internal consistency in the hearthfire, Kindred was surprised it was even holding The Errant up at all.
The captain had been right: without the strong wind, they would have been dead in the grass.
Kindred opened her mind to the hearthfire, feeling its power rush through the well-worn channels in her mind. Its sparking, fragmented flames stilled in her presence, and she began singing quietly, preparing the way. She reached for the bones.
The bandages were smoking, heating too fast before Kindred realized what she’d done. Like a fool, she had reached both hands into the flames—burned and unburned alike. She yanked her bandaged hand back, cradling it to her chest.
The spirit of the fire, always so present and calming in Kindred’s mind, her ghost, her kind haunting, pulled back.
“No, no,” she whispered.
To keep the hearthfire was to make covenant with the flames, to trust the fire and be trusted by it. It was a conversation, and one the fire was now frightened of having with her.
Other hearthfire keepers—every other one Kindred had met save the Marchess—treated the fire and its bones like machines to be wrenched and fixed and owned. But Kindred’s way was different. She worked by touch, by feel, by the song she heard from the fire. And right now, that song was uncertainty.
Kindred looked around and saw crew and captain desperately trying to not watch her, to appear casual and busy and focused elsewhere.
With a breath, she prepared to try again.
“I wouldn’t,” a voice said from above her, and Kindred tried not to look too startled as she turned around. Ragged Sarah hung from the mainmast, her medicker’s bag slung from one shoulder, a roll of her black cloth in hand. She dropped the rest of the way to the deck and settled down next to Kindred, like a wall between her and the rest of the crew.
“How long until the numbness goes away?” Kindred asked, keeping her voice low.
“In your hand?” Ragged Sarah asked, cocking her head but matching the quiet of Kindred’s voice.
“Yes,” Kindred said, holding out her black-wrapped limb. “There’s not much pain, but I’m having a hard time moving it.” She gestured toward the medicker’s bag. “Do I just have to wait out the salve’s effects or do you have something else to bring back movement and feeling?”
Ragged Sarah set down her bag but did not open it. She stared down at her own hands for a long time.
“Kindred, none of the salves I use have any numbing effects.”
“But . . .” she began, looking down at the formlessness of her hand beneath the swaddling cloth.
“The burn,” Ragged Sarah said, “it went . . . deep. I’ve never seen anything that bad. Skin charred and tough, like dried sailcloth. I did everything I could, Kindred, but . . .”
Kindred wanted to speak, to clarify or understand, but she could not. Ragged Sarah’s voice rolled over her.
“I can’t say if you’ll ever be able to use your hand again, not with any articulation. It’s possible the salves may work to recover some of the feeling or maybe even all of the feeling, but it’s also just as likely that they won’t. My medicines have been keeping infection away, which is the primary concern right now, but they won’t last. We need real medical care, more than I can give on this ship . . .”
Kindred lost her focus on Ragged Sarah, on the ship, on the crew and captain who depended on her to keep them sailing.
She didn’t know if she could keep the fire with just one hand; she’d never seen it done before, didn’t even know if it was theoretically possible.
And if she couldn’t keep the fire?
Kindred had finally found a communal purpose, fitting herself into the delicate, beautiful machinery of the ship. She had just found her niche aboard this vessel, had learned to love her place in and among the crew. But what if she could no longer fit into that machinery, if she was no longer a part of the whole? Ships did not sail with excess crewmembers—every sailor had a purpose; every sailor was a resource perfectly suited to her position.
Was she doomed to fail before she had even truly begun?
A rill of fear spiked through her as she realized she would have to tell the captain, she would have to confess that she couldn’t keep the fire any longer, could no longer serve the ship, the crew.
She found herself thinking of the Marchess, walking away into the Sea. Trading the many for one, leaving behind her own beautiful machinery and her place in it, seeking out something for herself.