“Kindred,” Little Wing said from behind her.
“She needs water,” Kindred said, keeping her gaze on the captain’s face, looking anywhere but back at the wound, at her work. “Right? She needs water.”
“Kindred. The fire.”
“Scindapse can handle it.” She dripped and trickled water into the captain’s mouth, running it over her cracked lips and past her teeth.
So near, this person Kindred had feared and adored and maybe even begun to love in some small part became just Jane. Her dark hair clung in sweaty tangles to her forehead and temples. Skin grown accustomed to prairie winds pulled tight to her cheekbones and jaw, and there. The bare, short breaths, like steam as they slipped from the back of her throat.
“Kindred!” Little Wing balled a hand in the back of her undershirt and lifted her to her feet. “You’ve done enough here. I need you at the fire.”
“I can use her,” Ragged Sarah said before Kindred could respond. “Kindred knows the hearthfire better than anyone on board; she can help me with this burn. And I need another set of hands anyway.”
After a moment, Little Wing let her go.
“Fine. Do you have everything you need?” she asked, turning to Sarah.
“For now, yes.”
“If she dies, it’s your fault. Both of you. Understood?”
She left without a backward glance, without letting them answer, and soon her voice was commanding the remaining crew out on the deck.
The penalty for killing a captain was death. The green dive.
“This is bad,” Sarah said, surveying the captain’s chest as she rolled up her sleeves. She splashed something that smelled strongly like alcohol on her hands as she leaned over the captain, getting close enough to the wound to smell it, to taste it if she’d wanted.
“How bad?” Kindred asked, but that wasn’t right, not the question she wanted.
“Honestly, I’ve never seen a burn this severe. Is this grey coloring around here typical of hearthfire burns?” She asked, pointing down at the burn.
A tendril of fire flowing through the darkness, innocent and hopeful, a child’s finger reaching for more. Kindred saw it in her memory, watched it blossom into a blaze, a firestorm, a sun on the captain’s chest.
“Kindred!” Sarah snapped, her hands moving around the wound. “Focus. I need to know about hearthfire burns. Do they act like burns from nonmagical fires? How do they affect skin and blood? Hydration? What about infection? Tell me everything.”
Bits and nonsenses, the Marchess used to call all of that, the stuff taught by the bookmavens at the schools, the same schools Kindred had failed out of. The Marchess’s philosophy had been a simple one: listen to the flames, pay attention to your surroundings, and blend with the world around you. If you did all of that, you wouldn’t need to know things like what effect a hearthfire burn—a serious one like this, not the nips that new keepers would get—might have on the blood or skin.
“I don’t know,” Kindred said.
“You can’t tell me anything?”
“I’ve never seen anyone get burned, not in any real way. And I didn’t make it long enough in the schools to learn about this.”
“We’re both working without a guide, then, I guess.” Sarah shook her head, still working at the wound, which Kindred held her gaze away from.
“Did I kill her?”
The question—the right one, flickering in the tendril of fire reaching again and again in her mind—slipped from her mouth, heavy.
Sarah stilled, just for a breath, before continuing her work.
“You did what you needed to do. And so did the captain. I’m not going to let her die. And neither are you. But I need you present for this. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and help me keep our captain alive.”
The tendril of fire reached again in her mind, but Kindred squeezed her eyes shut and hissed in and out a breath, forcing it away. When she opened them again, she said a quiet “okay.”
“Good. Now pick up that bottle with the green thread around the neck and drip it on the edges of the wound when I tell you.” Sarah gestured toward her bag, and Kindred saw the one she meant. It was a tall, smudged stretch of glass containing a murky liquid. A strip of green wound around its neck.
“I don’t know anything about healing wounds,” Kindred said, reaching for the bottle.
“It doesn’t matter,” Sarah said, voice sharp. “I just need you to be a set of hands.”
Kindred swallowed her instinctive reply: she couldn’t be a set of hands anymore, not after her own burn, but this wasn’t the time for it. Instead, she waited, the bottle opened. The smooth surface of the glass slipped against her sweaty palm, but Kindred braced the bottle against her knee and bandaged hand, waiting to be called to action.
“Three drips there,” Sarah said, and Kindred extended the bottle over the captain’s wound, her hand trembling with the pressure she was exerting to hold the slippery glass still, to not pour too much, to pour just enough.
So close, the wound was a blackened sun: a ragged swirl of charred skin and red flesh coalescing inside a torn corona of burned and singed cloth. Skin and scraps of the captain’s robe had fused together, hardening into petrified veins stretching across and through the wound.
“Steady,” Ragged Sarah said, her voice losing some of its edge. She worked carefully, wielding a plain-looking but wickedly sharp knife.
“Count them out,” Sarah said, her eyes still on her work. “One.”
“One.” Kindred tipped the bottle, watching the murky liquid race for the opening. She held her breath as it neared, neared, and then a single drop fell, huge and glistening through the air, and landed with a pop and a tiny hiss next to Sarah’s blade.
“Good. Now.”
“Two,” Kindred whispered, letting another drop fall, following the slow cut of the knife.
“And three.” The last drop fizzed as it connected with a patch of skin and cloth burned together. Where the liquid landed, it spread, lightening to a green that reminded Kindred of the Sea on a cloudy day. The skin it touched disappeared beneath it, but the patches of burned cloth surfaced on the liquid, floating up. Sarah plucked these away with the tip of her knife, working to separate skin from robe.
Kindred was asked four more times to pour liquid onto the captain’s wound, each time letting loose a triad of drops just behind or ahead of Sarah’s knife. After a short time, it became almost hypnotic, the pouring and the counting, and Kindred forgot about the wound, forgot about Little Wing and the wyrm, and her whole world instead became a bottle gripped in one hand, a few numbers, and a liquid like the Sea.