All of this flashed through Kindred’s mind as she shouted at the captain across the madness of the deck—between them, the crew moved in a chaotic dance to adjust and coil and pull and climb and sail.
Captain Caraway nodded, her smile predatory and gleeful.
“See that it doesn’t,” she shouted, and turned her attention to the frenzied activity of her crew. “Quartermaster! Aft defenses!”
Kindred saw Little Wing, the quartermaster, tall and powerful, lope across the deck, moving aft to follow the captain’s orders.
Each to her place; each to her power, Kindred’s grandmother had always said about the hierarchy aboard boats.
A pair of red comets sailed high and wide over The Errant before bursting into a shower of sparking magical energy. She tried not to think about how close the pirates had to be to start hurling their magical assaults. Too close.
The fire had returned to a calmer shade of red, and still Rhabdus wrestled with it, her hands moving in ugly straight lines, devastating the imperfections that continued to appear in the bone structure, making out of the bones and the fire a ruled thing. Kindred had let the bone tree in the heart of the fire flourish, pulling bone blossoms into existence and etching creeping vines along the trunk. She had envisioned the build and the hearthfire as a piece of the world, as something blending with wind and sky, the grasses of the Sea and the long-cut line of the horizon. Not solely the pure source of energy Rhabdus saw; not an unruly beast burning in the center of The Errant’s deck, brutish in its power and possibility.
Rhabdus let her song wind down, her voice ragged even after so little singing.
Kindred tried not to rub at her wrists where the fire had burned her. Hundreds of tiny, furious bubbles had broken the surface of her skin. She would deal with it later.
“Always these flourishes with you, girl,” Rhabdus said, voice raspy. She slapped the deck with one hand “Feel how The Errant sails steadier now that the build isn’t burdened by your nonsense.”
“But we were going faster with my changes,” Kindred said, raising her voice enough to be heard over the tumult on deck. “The textbook build has a limit on speed! If only we could try—”
A shout of alarm warned Kindred a moment before The Errant was rocked by the impact of a spell slamming into the aft defenses. Kindred was thrown to the deck. Rhabdus spilled onto her side, cursing in hoarse syllables.
Only Captain Caraway, it seemed, held her feet. Kindred looked back and saw the captain holding tight to the great wheel, shouting orders and encouragement to the rear guard who maintained their meager magical defenses.
“Piss and nonsense,” Rhabdus said, righting herself and settling in before the fire. “The textbook builds are textbook for a reason, girl. They work. They’re safe, which is more than I can say for your nonsense. Now get over here. I need a melody.”
This had been Kindred’s primary role since coming aboard The Errant. In theory, she was the junior hearthkeeper, training to keep the fire on her own someday. In practice, she served as a replacement for Rhadbus’s tired, dying voice.
“Keepers!” Captain Caraway shouted. “We need a push!”
“Sing speed,” Rhabdus ordered as she jabbed her hands into the blaze.
Kindred took a breath, stilling her mind, pushing away thoughts of pirates, of bitter senior hearthfire keepers, of wild and mad captains.
Speed, she sang to the flames as Rhabdus broke and reformed the bone structure, making it stronger, funneling the fire and air up and out.
Speed, she sang, as her melody moved and pitched with the fire’s delicate dance.
Speed, she sang, listening to the crack of bones releasing their ancient power, a force Kindred felt in the abyss of her stomach, tasted on her tongue, bitter and overwhelming.
“Arcadia, ho! Land and port, ho!” Ragged Sarah called down from the crow’s nest.
Kindred spared a glance above, seeing Sarah perched atop the mainmast, surrounded by a corona of winged shapes—birds, come to offer advice to the crow-caller. Sarah’s frayed clothing and many-colored hair, so distinct when she walked among the crew, made her resemble one of the birds, each flap of torn cloth or whip of raggedy hair like the flair of a wing on the wind.
The Errant pushed forward, the fire obliging Kindred’s request and Rhabdus’s enforcement, and Kindred felt hope rise in her chest for the first time since that first cry of “Pirates!” came from Ragged Sarah. Hard sailing for nearly two full days, coaxing more and more from the fire without breaking it, an exhausting marathon as the pirates neared and neared, first a flutter of black near the horizon, then sails, then hulls, more and more, and Kindred bound to the hearthfire and subjected to Rhabdus’s constant insults, insulated from the danger and acutely aware of the way it grew in echoes across the deck.
Unbidden, a fragment of a conversation with the captain from the previous morning came to Kindred’s mind, a conversation between Rhabdus and Captain Caraway during which Kindred had stood silently in the corner of the captain’s quarters, listening to these two women who had sailed together for nearly forty years.
“We’ve pushed out too far, Captain,” Rhabdus had said. “Aren’t we too near the Roughs, to pirate grasses?”
The captain had smiled up from the maps and diagrams and correspondences littering her table.
“Aye, I would think so, Rhabdus. But those grasses nearer Arcadia are harvested to nothing. And look at the bounty we’ve already cut.” The captain tapped a ledger on which she’d marked their harvest thus far. “Ninety bundles of lie-leaf and twenty-two of prairie smoke—both much desired by the medickers for their herbwork and cures. Another seventy-odd bundles each of bluestem, thrice-root, giant stalk, and coneflower—all wanted by the mages for their battle magics, the cooks for their creations, and the schools as they teach the next crop of hopeful sailors how to burn a plant to release its magic. I expect we will sell at our best prices yet.”
“Aye, Captain,” Rhabdus replied, snorting, “it will be a mighty payday.”
“It will,” Captain Caraway said, fierce suddenly, her smile sharp and wide, “enough to keep us sailing free and out from under the Collective’s grip for many years to come.”
Now, sitting before the fire, coaxing as much speed from this particular structure as it would give, Kindred wondered what really drove the captain—money to sail and harvest freely or the ever-increasing need to push at freedom’s boundaries, to sail into danger, not for money or independence or fame but to define freedom itself.
A great shock sent tremors through the ship, and Kindred nearly lost her seat again.
“Hit! Hit!” came a cry, and Kindred looked around to see one of The Errant’s sails badly damaged, the sheet caught in the spread of a wicked flame that reminded Kindred of paintings she’d seen of the old prairie fires that used to sweep across the Forever Sea. Those fires, she’d been told, burned with abandon, with purifying and rejuvenating vengeance, and she saw some of that now.