“Quixa! Cora! Gwen! Get on that fire!” Captain Caraway shouted, and Kindred saw Long Quixa, Cora the Wraith, and Stone-Gwen leap to take care of the blaze.
“And dammit, Rhabdus, we need more speed!” the captain said before turning back to survey the defenses. Kindred could just hear Little Wing’s shouts, low and authoritative, ordering and motivating the defenders.
“Aye,” Rhabdus muttered, turning back to the flames, though how she was going to get more speed from the fire, from this build, especially with The Errant’s mainsail no longer aiding them, Kindred had no idea.
Again Rhabdus worked, pruning and perfecting, seeking maximum efficiency, following every rule of keeping the fire taught in the schools.
Again Kindred sang, aiding Rhabdus with her voice.
Kindred inspected the structure as Rhabdus worked, looking for any sign of inefficiency, any break in form or unnecessary extension of bone—searching for any remaining bit of flourish.
It was an old design, a structure of bone named simply Shal-El-Shep, an iteration of the Mainland term for a horse, and like a horse, if coaxed and allowed to build in intensity, it could provide great power and speed over a long distance, though not quickly, and not in short bursts.
“More, you fiend,” Rhabdus growled at the fire, at the structure. “Give me more speed.”
But Kindred saw the plain truth now: Shal-El-Shep had no more to give. Its structure was perfectly maintained, the flow and release of air, the sinuous smoothness of heat, all of it balanced, efficient, effective.
Kindred grimaced at the perfection of it. They had traded in the wild wonder of the flames for contrived, purposeful motion.
Mastery over mystery.
“There’s nothing more,” Kindred said, whispering to herself. Shal-El-Shep provided speed with minimum safety, and Kindred wasn’t sure she knew of any other builds that could give more speed, not with so little time and the conditions—winds, temperature, light, Sea character, all of it—as they were. Rhabdus had been forcing her to memorize all of the known structures, and Kindred thought through some of them now, dismissing each more quickly than the last.
Heaven’s Knot: No good with a tailwind.
The Red Flash: Too long to build, not nearly enough speed.
Rhizome, Fragmented: Totally unpredictable this long after noon.
Shadow Wright: Hearthfire basin too large, temperatures too high.
On and on she thought, cursing more and more under breath as she dismissed every build she knew, which, given her recent studies, was probably just as many if not more than any other sailor on the Forever Sea, her grandmother not included.
Her grandmother.
A memory caught at Kindred as she glanced up to see Quixa and Cora scaling the mainmast, scurrying up the single powerful length of wood, its runes glowing a hazy blue amid the creeping fire. For a moment, Kindred was a young girl again, ten or eleven years old, sitting on her grandmother’s ship, Revenger, taking her turn at the hearthfire, still learning the rules, still earning her keep. Young and brash and stupid, she’d ignored all of her grandmother’s indirect attempts at teaching Kindred how to keep the fire.
The old woman talked too much about the Sea, Kindred had thought at the time. Always the Sea, how it moved and swayed, how it held secrets ages old. She talked of old myths as if they were true, told children’s stories as if they were fact. Kindred had often found her grandmother staring down into the prairie grasses, leaning precariously over the gunwale, murmuring to the waves of green, muttering to them.
Other sailors feared the depths of the Sea. With the magic of a hearthfire burning and a mainmast carved with the correct runes, a ship could sail over the grasses. But a person falling in would be lost forever, falling to the beasts or the Sea floor some impossible distance below. The Forever Sea was a surface to be crossed and a field to be harvested for every one of its sailors.
Except the Marchess.
Kindred had thought her grandmother crazy—still did often enough—and had ignored every shred of lucid advice she’d given.
Instead, that day, Kindred had followed the first rule of keeping the hearthfire—a rule she had found herself, her own guiding star—had whispered it under her breath as she took a single bone, long and straight and painfully bright white, and impaled it into the coal bed at the bottom of the hearthfire.
Kindred had almost destroyed her grandmother’s ship and killed everyone aboard that day.
Her grandmother, the Marchess, had been furious and then shocked and then, for the first and last time Kindred could remember, frightened. It was her quick thinking that saved them all from Kindred’s stupidity that day so long before. They had shared a silent meal at port that night, her grandmother’s burnt cloak piled between them on the table as a reminder.
“Speed in tenuous length.” Kindred whispered the rule to herself now as she left Rhabdus at the hearthfire, still trying to coax more speed from a build that had none left to give. Kindred lurched toward the bone closet.
“Speed in tenuous length.”
Long before on the deck of Revenger, Kindred had listened as the hearthfire sang in her mind, had watched as it described in its fiery dance a complicated and beautiful world governed by only a few rules—five in all. Four offered freely by the fire, and one given to her by the Marchess. It would be years more before she understood how strange, how unique it was that she could hear the fire so well. So young, and under the tutelage of the Marchess, who also understood the flames, Kindred had just assumed all keepers heard the song of the fire, spoke the language of the flames.
And so she had listened as the fire sang of its rules. They were not the ones, Kindred would later come to learn, that were found in books meant to teach young keepers how to tend the fire. The fire did not sing of efficiency, of builds easy to replicate, of words to break a hearthfire to your will—all things Kindred had learned during her short, unsuccessful time in the schools that were supposed to train hearthfire keepers.
Once, in her first class, Kindred had asked why a particular build was placed facing aft in the hearthfire basin, and the teacher, her expression caught between annoyance and rage, had simply said, “That is where it is placed because that is where it must be placed. This is how it has always been done and how it will always be done.”
Kindred had not lasted long in the schools. She had already received her education on the deck of her grandmother’s ship Revenger, where there were no prescribed builds, no words spoken to the fire without understanding, no rules about bone market value or breaking an unruly fire to your will.
Kindred’s rules came from the fire itself, and she had paid particular attention to the first.
Speed in tenuous length.
As more pirate magics arced over or slammed into The Errant, Kindred ripped open the trapdoor set seamlessly into the deck to reveal the storage bin containing their wealth of bones, the fuel to keep them afloat and moving across the Sea.