No one but Kindred.
“Look for me below,” she whispered.
Darkness pressed in on the glow of casting fires, on the wild illumination of the hearthfire. Grasses rasped against the hull of the ship as it sunk lower and lower.
“Blades up! Backs to the deck!” Captain Caraway broke the reverie on board. “Wyrms hate noise and light, so keep those fires blazing, and when you finally face it, scream. And rage. Let’s give this beast the worst it’s ever had.”
The cheer in response was veined with fear. Kindred added her own voice to the chorus.
“Cora, Quell, Talent, Grimm,” the captain said. “You keep cutting at those vines no matter what. We’re not seeing the surface again until they’re gone.”
The rest of the crew formed a rough line around the main deck, shields and weapons held ready, lashing out at any vines they could reach. Cora, Quell, Talent, and Grimm—Stone-Gwen’s partner of many years—rushed back toward the edge to do battle with the waves of vines reaching aboard for a better hold.
“Calm your mind,” Kindred said, finding and holding Scindapse’s wide-eyed gaze. “Just like we practiced. Deep breaths, listen for the fire’s song, join it, and then ease your hands in.”
Scindapse squeezed her eyes shut, listening hard for the song.
Kindred wondered what her grandmother would say in this moment, her ship sinking below the waves, pulled down to the deeps by a horrifying monster, an untrained, terrified keeper sitting in front of her.
Knowing the Marchess, she would probably laugh and call it a good day. She was always bending to life, a strand of true-green grass arcing in winds wild and smooth, happy to move.
“Keeper.” Captain Caraway dropped into a squat next to her. “It might be that we scare this beast back with shouts and blades long enough to get cut free. If it’s a young one or if it’s already eaten, chances are it won’t be interested in this kind of tussle.
“But if not, it might come down to you. You understand?”
Kindred felt the sweat that had broken out across her body cool suddenly, shrinking back against her skin.
She understood.
When all else failed, the last chance fell to the keeper. She could flare the hearthfire, giving the flames fuel and song enough to become a conflagration, an event bright enough and loud enough to scare the wyrm back.
Kindred thought of the fire back at the Trade. It had been so hungry, so uncontrolled. Like a child, mindless and joyful, leaping and destroying all in its path.
And this was what she would need to turn the hearthfire into.
“I understand, Captain.”
“Only as a last option,” the captain said, leaning close, cutting Scindapse out of the conversation. She flicked her eye around at the grasses now enclosing them.
Kindred nodded. The wood of the ship was covered every year with a thick coating of fire-resistant lacquer, but the grasses around Arcadia hadn’t been burned for years beyond count. They were dry and thinned out by too much harvesting. All that magic keeping them flat prevented fire from lightning or other natural causes, but the hearthfire wasn’t natural. If she lost control of it, the whole Sea would be ablaze, from Arcadia all the way out to the Roughs.
And the wyrm would be the least of their worries.
Captain Caraway put a hand on Kindred’s shoulder and squeezed, offering a brief smile.
“Best keeper on the Sea,” she said, and then she was gone.
Fire once defined everything in the world: it was the annual cleansing of the Sea. A prairie fire that blackened and charred the grasses, leaving behind a smoking ruin that, after a miraculously short time, gave birth to myriad plants rising in eager shoots. New veins of rich life were said to spring up after those burns.
Kindred shuddered as she looked again into the fire, its build and movement settled for now, the best she could manage while they sank lower in the grips of the vines. Here she was, surrounded by an expanse of dried grasses begging to be cleansed by fire, and it was her job if nothing else worked to build a fire so large, so wild, that it scared even a monster of the deeps, all without letting the blaze go so uncontrolled that it swept into the Sea.
Little Wing moved along the deck, one sword already out, the other in a sheath at her hip.
“Let’s send this big fucker back to the deeps!” she shouted, clapping crew members on the back.
A sound like the world breathing cut through the noise of the Sea and the rallying of the crew. The wyrm.
Hungry. Wild. Terrible.
And close.
“Our fight is here,” Kindred said again to Scindapse, catching the young keeper’s eyes and nodding to the fire. “This is our work. Stay right here.”
“Starboard! Starboard!”
Heads swiveled toward that side of the ship, but Kindred looked up, to where Ragged Sarah leaned out from the crow’s nest, removed from the shred of safety the deck and the crew offered.
“Get ready!” Captain Caraway shouted, drawing her own sword, teeth bared in a fear-twisted grimace.
Next to her, Little Wing loosed a wordless shout, her twin blades jagged splinters caught by the hearthfire light.
All around, the crew of The Errant roared their challenge to the wyrm.
I go to lose myself in it, Kindred heard in her mind, and for a breath, there in between the fear and the fact of the attack, she felt herself bend.
The wyrm rose from the darkness, its impossibly long, pale body writhing and wriggling up from the deep, the diminutive, stunted stubs sprouting from its sides gripping the grasses in clawed fingers. It scrabbled up the side of their ship, which sank farther beneath its weight, and curled above them all for a moment, a wedge-shaped head tipped with three bulbous eyes and a great crescent-shaped horn cutting out from one side of its head.
Longer than any mast was tall—and still with more of itself yet to rise from the deeps—and with a width capable of devouring four or five people at a time, the wyrm was the biggest thing Kindred had ever seen.
Its off-white skin was a webbed morass of root systems supporting the flowering vines stringing its body.
The crew shouted in one voice, desperate in their hope, stinking in their fear. Weapons were raised, and even as the wyrm hung in the air, its lower half still below the ship, its nostrils wide and wet—even in that moment of possibility, some crew members hurled knives and axes and spears, burying them in the wyrm’s great hide.
Against the added weight of the wyrm, the hearthfire gasped and spasmed. For a terrifying moment, The Errant dropped before the fire found its control again.
“Both hip bones here and here,” Kindred shouted over the noise, pointing first at the two bones, like bleached shields on the deck, and then at either side of the overstrained structure in the fire.