“Three: arcs in green; spirals in gold. In green grasses, shape bones toward arcs; in golden grasses, shape toward spirals. Four: the fire burns first and hottest at the base.”
The Marchess had never been so clear about such things. It was always demonstration only, forcing Kindred to interpret her movements, her songs, her builds. If Kindred wanted to learn something, she would have to steal it from the casual, worn practices of her grandmother.
Except for the last rule, of course, the one Kindred had been given by the Marchess and not the fire.
“And five,” Kindred said finally. “Do not circumscribe the fire. Never, under any circumstances, should you ring the fire in bone.”
Quixa had been silent through all of this, her eyes watching Kindred’s movements, arms and hands moving to demonstrate what she was saying, but now she said, “Why not?”
“It would kill the fire,” Kindred said quietly. “It would be the green dive for everyone on board.”
If you seek me, look below, she thought.
“Well,” Quixa said after a moment, slow and ponderous. “We don’t want that.”
“No,” Kindred said, nodding quickly. “We don’t. But you don’t need to worry about any of that now. I just wanted to give you a sense of how these things worked before we begin. Let’s begin the test.”
“All right, then,” Quixa said, her nod as careful and measured as her speech.
“I’m going to test you for any natural ability with the hearthfire. First, I’ll test your singing and then your listening. For this first part, I want you to mimic me as exactly as possible. This is a simple song for asking the fire to burn through the build faster, which in turn should push us along faster.”
Quixa nodded again.
Kindred sat forward a little and sang, her song simple and insistent, calling to the fire in its language, asking for hunger and heat. The flames, until then a bland orange, shivered and flared into a deep, lush purple. She sang for a few bars before changing the melody and letting the fire sigh back to orange. In her mind, the music of the fire rose and fell as it burned first faster and then slower.
“Okay,” she said, sitting back, hearing the song in her head fade again into the background, always there. “Try that.”
Kindred kept in a smile as Quixa, her voice normally so low and stately, sang in a high, scratchy register that skittered about, trying and failing to find the simple melody Kindred had demonstrated.
It was no good. Kindred watched the fire, and felt it, but it did not respond to Quixa, even in the few instances when she found the right notes or sang the correct words in the twisting language of the hearthfire.
“Good,” Kindred said as Quixa finished. Her grandmother used to cackle with glee at the awful results of her tests, hooting at the frayed voices and missed notes. Kindred could never tell if there had been any teeth in it, any edge to her laughter, or if it had simply been the wild joy that seemed always to be present in her grandmother.
But she was going to do it differently, and so she smiled encouragingly at Quixa and nodded.
“That was very nicely done. Now I want you to listen carefully—not just with your ears but with . . .” How could she describe what she barely understood, what she had done for so long by intuition and feel alone? “. . . With your whole self, if you can. Try to still your thoughts and let your whole body listen for the fire. I want you to tell me if you can hear its song.”
“It sings?” Quixa said. “Is it singing right now?”
“Yes,” Kindred nodded. “But very quietly. Listen, and I’ll encourage it to sing louder.”
Singing quietly at a low pitch, Kindred leaned forward and shifted the build—the simplest that she could manage with just one hand. A single bone was moderating the amount of air entering and leaving the build, and Kindred lifted it out of the fire.
In answer, the fire climbed high, flames dancing in different colors, first red, then blue, then a vibrant, powerful orange. The song in her mind, such a constant friend that Kindred often forgot it was there, rose louder and higher, bounding from joyful note to joyful note.
Quixa sat, silent and still, until Kindred reached into the fire, again with just one hand, and replaced the bone. Almost immediately, the fire settled back down.
“Well?”
Quixa shook her head.
“I didn’t hear anything but Cora stumbling around with that empty barrel,” she said, looking over across the deck where Cora the Wraith was lugging a half-full barrel of water—skimmed that morning—while cursing to herself. As old as Quixa but half as tall, Cora was next on Kindred’s short list of crew who didn’t have any other jobs and could serve as a keeper to be trained.
“Thanks, Quixa. Cora,” Kindred said, loud enough to be heard over the cursing. “Your turn.”
* * *
Kindred’s list—Long Quixa, Cora the Wraith, Stone-Gwen, and Scindapse—was not nearly as long as she would’ve liked it to be, but given that only a portion of the crew had made it back on the boat during the escape there were only a few people who actually had jobs that could be dropped in favor of aiding her with the fire.
Cora the Wraith—short and muscular, with dark hair cut close and a gap-toothed smile that played constantly across her face—showed some ability in singing but none with listening. Like Rhabdus had been, Cora was a good mimic, parroting the words of the hearthfire’s language even though she didn’t understand or recognize them as anything more than noise. Cora often entertained the crew with imitations of other people—crew, captains of other ships (never Captain Caraway), well-known personalities from Arcadia. Probably that explained it. It was something, and Kindred could make it work.
Stone-Gwen was next. She had suffered an accident as a child that had left her with only one ear and a permanently distended lower jaw, but she could still hear and sing just fine. Stone-Gwen was the only devoutly religious member of the crew, at least as far as Kindred knew.
She was fat and strong. Kindred had once seen a huge steel-banded cudgel in her room and asked her about it, and, with some prodding, Gwen had told Kindred stories about her days fighting for the crazed king on the Mainland. Afterward, Kindred had tried to lift the cudgel and only barely managed it.
Unlike the others, who sat back from the fire, Stone-Gwen showed a surprising comfort with it, sitting right next to the blaze. Unfortunately, she could barely find even a handful of the notes Kindred sang, and she couldn’t hear anything in the hearthfire. Not really a surprise, of course; only a bare handful of keepers could ever hear the music of the flames.
Last was Scindapse, youngest member of the crew and the newest addition to the ship. She had been brought on after one of their harvesters had retired, but The Errant was unlikely to be doing any harvesting soon, so Kindred put her name on the list, along with the other harvesters, Quixa and Cora. Stone-Gwen was only a deckhand, and since she seemed to help with everything, it had made sense to try her on the fire, too.