“What is it?” Kindred asked, stepping toward her, already reaching out with her senses for the fire. She had been so focused on the decision that she had let her concentration on the hearthfire fade.
But now, as she listened for it, she heard a snag in the hearthfire’s song, a tension in its power.
“I’m not sure,” Scindapse was saying as Kindred stepped toward the door, listening hard to the song. “The flames were still that same color as before—orange, I guess. But they started changing, just a tiny bit. I thought it was nothing at first, but it kept happening, orange for awhile, and then flicking over to—”
“Black,” Kindred said, the air stolen from her chest, her heartbeat a frantic tattoo in an empty house. She turned to the captain.
“We’re caught,” she said, her voice a whisper of fear. She could hear the fire now, its song clear and frantic in her mind. “Something is pulling at us.”
Kindred didn’t have to say what she suspected; apart from Scindapse—her inexperience on the Sea plain on her face—they were all thinking it.
Every sailor learned about forged flowers and the vines that snaked away below them, spiraling down into the darkness where the beast waited. The flowers were lures, pretty yellow things meant to attract bugs and birds and ships. As soon as they were touched, the flowers stuck, and the vines growing from their stems shot up, wrapping around whatever unlucky soul had blundered into them.
But the flowers and vines were only the parasite, bonded to the wyrm below, a creature too large, too light-averse to live and support itself higher up in the thinner grasses of the surface.
No, wyrms lived in darkness below, where the stems of the plants were thicker and stronger, able to support their heft and weight. The forged flowers grew from the wyrms, sending out thick, white roots throughout their skin, drawing sustenance from the prey they trapped and pulled down into the wyrm’s hungry maw.
The others followed as Kindred ran for the fire. Ragged Sarah broke from them and became a shape scaling the mainmast, climbing for the crow’s nest.
By the time Kindred reached the hearthfire, the flames were spasming between orange and black, and the song in her head was a ragged, jagged thing.
“What’s going on?” Scindapse asked. The captain roared out a command as she followed Kindred—“All crew to arms! Cut away those fucking vines!”—and already the footsteps and shouts crowded the air. “Should I stay here with you? What’s happening?”
Ragged Sarah’s call from above sliced through the chaos.
“Forged flowers! We’re caught! We’re caught!”
Scindapse sucked in a breath and clutched at Kindred’s shoulder with one clawed hand.
“A wyrm? A wyrm has us?”
“Get bones from the closet, at least two of each,” Kindred said, settling herself in front of the fire before turning to Scindapse. “Hey. We’re going to be okay. The fire needs our calm right now, okay? So, take some breaths. We’ll do this together.”
“Keep us up,” Captain Caraway said, leaning down toward Kindred, her mouth set in a tight grimace. “And give us whatever light you can. We’re going to need it.”
Kindred nodded, already singing words of calm and strength, wrestling the melody in her mind back toward stability.
Scindapse breathed loudly, big gulps of air in and out, as she opened the door of the bone closet with shaking hands.
On the deck, crew moved about quickly, swords and spears and axes hefted to cut at the thick vines mounting the deck, crawling and slithering over the gunwale. Already, The Errant had slowed to a crawl.
Already, the vines had begun to pull them down into the Sea.
Stone-Gwen climbed up from belowdecks, her gargantuan steel-banded cudgel held in one hand, the stone-braided robes of her faith rustling and clicking with her movements. The cudgel would do little against the vines, but soon there would be something bigger and hungrier to deal with.
Kindred tried to remember the stories she had heard about wyrm attacks, tales of huge beasts waiting below, sending up their false flowers and waiting to pull sailors to the deeps. It was said wyrms were impervious to magical attacks and too large, too powerful for the thrust of a single blade or the cut of an axe to be anything more than an annoyance. Given enough time, a full crew might drive away or kill a wyrm, but no one ever had enough time.
So few ships survived once they had been caught, and so often it had less to do with clever strategies or the power of those onboard and more to do with chance and luck.
Kindred reached one hand into the fire, her song low and steady, a march. She imagined her words to be the plodding steps of a sailor weighed down by much but unwilling to slow or stop. Ever onward. Ever forward.
“Burn them high and bright as you can!” It was Little Wing, crossing the deck at a run, shouting at the crew piling fuel on the casting fires.
“Cut, cut!” Cora the Wraith was shouting, cutting away the vines as fast as they slithered aboard.
“Stow the sails! We’re going under!” Captain Caraway shouted, climbing up one mast herself to aid in the endeavor.
The ancient timbers of The Errant groaned in protest as the ship came to a full stop, and only then did it become clear how far it had sunk into the Sea, how fast it was still sinking. Plants of all kinds angled over the gunwale, obscuring the gripping vines and flowers, growing over them.
“It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay,” Scindapse whispered as she dropped an armful of bones next to Kindred and squatted across the hearthfire from her.
Kindred spared her a glance and felt something in her break.
Chaos and fear were everywhere on the deck; the sounds of blades slicing through vines and biting into wood permeated the air, what little light the sunset offered growing more and more distant as the ship sank deeper into the Sea.
Scindapse was still a child, really, the relative of some wealthy someone on Arcadia who got her a spot on a ship before she was ready, before it was right.
Not unlike me, Kindred found herself thinking.
“Hey,” she said, breaking her song for a moment and pulling Scindapse’s terrified eyes toward her. “You’re a keeper now. Your battle is here. Keep your focus on the fire and let the rest go. This”—she gestured at the fire, which she had wrestled back into a state of stability—“is our fight. Mine and yours. Okay?”
Scindapse nodded and took another shaky breath.
A hush fell over the deck as the night sky disappeared overhead. No one moved or spoke as the open-aired freedom of the Sea and sky were replaced by beautifully striated walls of plants rising all around them. Axes and swords held for a moment, gripped tight in fists or dug deep into wood; voices stilled, and breath stopped. No one moved. No one spoke as The Errant dipped below the surface of the Forever Sea.