Rule number two: solidity in bolstered support.
The bones clattered for a moment against the deck as Scindapse clutched them in shaking hands. When she brought them in, the fire belched and roiled its displeasure, and Kindred nearly retched as The Errant dropped farther down.
“Sorry!” Scindapse choked out, recoiling from the flames and dropping the bones in her fright.
“Sing,” Kindred urged. “You have to make connection with the fire first!” But the ship was dipping too quickly now, and she didn’t have time for Scindapse to pull herself together.
Her voice when she sang was lost amid the shouts of the crew, but the fire heard her, and it flared a bright yellow, a tiny, resilient sun burning in the darkness below. With movements rough and quick, Kindred kicked off her boots and pulled one of the dropped bones over to the fire with her bare feet.
She couldn’t hold the bone in place and mold it to her build all with one hand, and so this would have to do. Kindred had once seen the Marchess construct a build completely with her feet on a bet from Maggie the Tall; they had been docked over the cradle at Arcadia, so there was no danger in it failing.
It was no joke now as she held her feet in the fire, bone pinched between them, and hunched forward, movements as imprecise and unpracticed as those of a new keeper. The magic of the hearthfire tickled her fingers as she fused the bone to one side of her structure, a wall of stability around the spider-web grace of the build.
Immediately The Errant halted her fall, and Kindred chanced a look up at the battle before she continued with the other bone.
Sinuous, the wyrm scuttled and slithered around the outside of the ship, trying to break through the ranks of crew members lining the deck but thrown back until it simply set about its feasting, the only sounds its hurried eating and the panicky shouts of those aboard. Kindred watched the great maw open, the powerful muscles of its neck propel the head forward, and then Taliesa, a young crew member not thirty years on, was gone, screaming and then silent in the wyrm’s jaws.
Little Wing rushed forward, her scream fearsome, her face an ugly mask of anger and fear. She cut deep furrows into the monster with her curved blades.
Cora the Wraith left off cutting vines from the ship for a frantic moment to score great stretches along the beast with lashes from her many-tailed whip.
Captain Caraway plunged a great spear into the wyrm, over and over.
Talent and Quell leapt forward and simply tore off the wyrm’s stunted arms and the vines growing from its hide, pulling them up like flowers bursting from the soil, roots and all.
Stone-Gwen and Grimm slammed their steel-banded cudgels into the wyrm, making divots in its skin.
Arrows sprouted from the wyrm’s hide, shot from above by Ragged Sarah in the crow’s nest.
The crew caused all of this damage and more, but the wyrm was too big, too strong, its thick skin of root systems protecting it from most harm. Against this colossus, weapons were mere distraction and annoyance.
The wyrm continued its path of destruction, lashing out with its tail, which had finally made it aboard, knocking several crew members back onto the deck. It snapped out again and pulled a few crew members toward itself until Little Wing streaked forward, burying an axe and leaving it inside the wyrm’s head. Where her crescent blades had gone, Kindred had no idea. Lost, probably, in the madness.
The wyrm released the crew, who stumbled or crawled or were pulled back, but if the wyrm noticed the axe handle rising from its head, giving it a second horn, it didn’t show it.
Kindred stared around at the wyrm’s enormous body garlanding their ship; it appeared almost lazy as it nearly encircled the deck and rose to slough over the quarterdeck and forecastle. It had them surrounded.
The Errant dipped, listing drunkenly, and Kindred felt the snapping of bones in the hearthfire even before she saw them. The flames bulged with pressure as the ship strained to stay up, as more and more was asked of the bone structure. Jagged ends hung in the writhing flames, severed from the neat lines where Kindred had set them.
Kindred reached for the other bone but it was gone, and she looked up to find Scindapse, her mouth moving in words too quiet to hear above the din of devastation, hands holding the bone in the flame.
She was doing it, and a stab of pride shot through the fear Kindred was feeling.
Quickly as she could, Kindred joined the support to the structure, trying to ignore the wall of flesh circumventing most of the ship.
“Hold these together!” she said, pointing to the ends of bone exploded from the center of the build. “Hold them! Scindapse!”
But Scindapse’s hands were still and frozen, as if the hip bone were still clutched between her fingers. Her wide, dazed eyes followed the mesmeric slither of the wyrm, which continued its rampage, rough skin tearing at the ship as it slithered, a whirlwind of stinking, cratered flesh. Blood poured from its wounds, coating the deck as it oozed and pooled against the gunwale, trapped there by the increasingly sharp tilt of The Errant.
The crew had become an ever-tightening ring, moving in imitation of the wyrm. Circles and circles moved around the fire, and Kindred felt suddenly nauseous, the swaying, shifting movement like that of a deck pitching in wild seas.
“Cut the vines! Cut them!” Captain Caraway’s voice pulled at Kindred through the screams and shouts, through the sounds of the wyrm’s feasting.
But Cora, Quixa, and Grimm were blocked from the vines by the wyrm, which was a wall of flesh around the deck, protecting the grasping vines.
And still the ship dropped lower.
“Cut through!” Little Wing shouted, sprinting forward, her twin blades back in her hands. But Kindred could see even as she was forced back by the wyrm’s snapping jaws that it would take a full day’s work to butcher a path through the body of the wyrm. It was just too big.
They needed another way.
“Hold fast, everyone!” Kindred shouted, moved by a sudden idea. It was barely a plan and hazed over by the memory of waking up on the ship, her hand numb, mouth dry, confused and without any clue how long she had been asleep.
But one thing was clear in her memory: The Errant pitched over sideways, wrenched out of true by a hearthfire build a child might have stumbled into making.
“Be here, keeper,” Kindred said, as much to Scindapse as to herself.
She pushed Scindapse’s hands out of the fire before she set to her work, singing a child’s ditty, simple and misguided and wandering, melodies tripping away from resolution and into other keys.
And she broke the logic of her build.
Instead of fusing the broken bones back together, she scattered them about the fire, careful always to maintain the merest whiff of solidity around the base, but adorned with fragments and fractions of bones pointing here and there, stopping up air or the flow of energy here and letting it breathe too freely there. The fire coughed and wheezed an acrid white smoke into the air.