Kindred understood the language of the hearthfire, and every syllable sparked and sang in her mouth. Other keepers perhaps excelled in the bone arts or in designing and classifying builds, in teaching or in constructing hearthfire basins, but this was Kindred’s gift. The language of the flames had always felt like hers, too.
She scored the air with her defiant shout, and the fire grew.
Long lashes of red and gold and black whipped out from the hearthfire basin, an explosion of color and sound and heat, and the wyrm was blasted back, its head colliding with and snapping the topmast yard with a meaty thwap.
The Errant shook from the impact as the wyrm fell, sluggish and slow, to the deck, coiling into itself like a wet rope. Screams of pain and triumph melded together, and someone was calling for her, but Kindred could hear none of it.
Unconscious or dead, the wyrm unspooled from the deck into the dark, limp and heavy.
Kindred saw only the flames.
The hearthfire reached farther, a hungry thing, hungrier than the wyrm. It left trails of black along the deck and burned gaps between crew members who dove aside, shocked from their moment of triumph and victory. Like the fire back on Arcadia Kindred had loosed, the blaze here joyed in the expanse of freedom. It devoured air, leapt in long arcs of light, up and up before plummeting down, splashing against the deck and across the masts.
And moving toward the Sea.
“No,” Kindred whispered, the word a moan of distress. Every muscle in her body felt bruised and exhausted, the energy rushing through her system suddenly drying up, boiled away to nothing. Her hand hurt. Her back hurt. Her whole body hurt.
Above, the mainmast broke the surface of the Forever Sea, and starlight softened the wreckage on the deck.
They were rising, but not fast enough. The fire was racing for the grasses receding around them, like a boat running in a full wind, cutting smooth lines.
A tendril, flashing red and orange, curled through the air, angling to go up and over the gunwale.
Kindred coughed out a halt, begging the fire to slow, but her voice was ragged from the smoke she had inhaled, from the singing she had done, and the fire was mad with its lust for more.
It was done. The Sea would burn.
The arc of the fire was a beautiful thing as it leapt toward the hole in the gunwale the wyrm had left, and it was as if everything else stopped, the Sea suddenly stilled. How long had it been waiting to burn? How long had it been waiting to be reborn?
A shadow detached itself from those too stunned to do anything but watch, and there was Captain Caraway, leaping into the air, a bloodied blade still in her hand.
Without a shield, without protection of any kind, Captain Caraway placed herself between the fire and the Sea.
And the fire burned.
The tendril of flames burst against Captain Caraway’s chest, a shock of colors cascading out as she screamed in pain. She became a shooting star, burning as she fell to the deck, sparks and scintillas of fire coruscating across her body as the hearthfire snuffed itself out.
The captain slamming against the deck broke the watchful spell; the crew moved again, some in simple terror, some with purpose, but all moving. Little Wing was shouting for help with the captain, while others cried for medicker’s attention or screamed in anguish for those lost.
Kindred found Scindapse where she had been knocked over and gathered her up, saying her name over and over again, rubbing at her cheek until she was awake and looking back into her eyes.
A cough of relief rattled up from Kindred’s lungs as Scindapse breathed deeply and sat all the way up.
“Are you okay?” Kindred asked, her hands running over Scindapse’s shoulders and arms, searching for broken bones.
“I’m okay,” Scindapse said, nodding. “I’m okay.”
“I need you to watch the fire,” Kindred croaked out. “Can you do that?”
“Yes, I think so.” Scindapse nodded again.
She moved toward the blaze, which had settled into a miserly, satisfied burn low in the basin.
Kindred lurched to her feet and toward the captain.
“Is she breathing?” she cried, dropping down beside Little Wing, who cradled the captain’s head. “Is she alive?”
Little Wing looked up, covered in blood that might have been her own or someone else’s.
“I don’t know.”
Kindred let her eyes drop to the wound on the captain’s chest, and she had to bite back the rush of vomit. Burned masses of greyed and blackened skin, like a map of scorched, dead lands, covered her chest, and beneath all of that Kindred could see no hint of the rise and fall of breath.
Around them, the unburned grasses of the Forever Sea whispered secrets to the prairie wind.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I did this.
Kindred lifted Captain Caraway, carrying her shoulders as Little Wing lifted her feet. Kindred did her best to ignore the pain blossoming along her back and arms, seeded by the fight.
“Sarah!” she yelled, just as Little Wing screamed “Medicker!”
Strung between them, the captain’s body sagged.
They shuffled forward between crew members working or weeping or dying. Cuts and what would be bruises festooned Little Wing’s body, but she held herself like a woman unhurt.
“Scindapse! Mind the fire!” Kindred shouted.
Sarah examined the captain, and the burned spectacle her chest had become.
“I need supplies. Get her into her quarters,” she said before rushing off belowdecks toward the medicker’s closet.
“Quixa! Take the wheel! Get us moving forward again! Everyone able, we need to move.”
A moment of uncertainty followed Little Wing’s orders. Was the captain dead? Was she the new captain? What was going on?
But the machinery of ship and Sea, wind and prairie moved onward, and crew, those able to, began making order on the deck again. Long Quixa stepped up and behind the wheel and, in her slow, steady voice, began directing the crew.
Kindred pushed open the captain’s door and they moved her inside just as Ragged Sarah arrived, her medicker’s bag now plump with bottles clinking together. They lay her on the floor and in the slim light of her lit lanterns the captain looked bad. Worse.
I did this, Kindred thought. I killed her.
“She’s not,” Ragged Sarah said, her eyes on Kindred for a moment, speaking as if she could hear Kindred’s thoughts. She slid into place next to the captain and began her work, flicking open her eyelids, placing careful fingers along her throat. “Not yet. And I’m not letting her.”
Kindred stripped her thick outer shirt away and pushed it into a pillowed mass beneath the captain’s head. A small skin of water hung from one of the chairs, and this she grabbed.