“Will this really work?” Scindapse asked, staring still at the build in the fire.
I hope so.
“Absolutely,” Kindred said, smiling. “And now you’re needed for repairs. Talk to Quixa and she’ll tell you what you need to do.”
“Okay. But I can be back here with you when we get to the Roughs, right?”
Kindred could remember exactly this: the feeling of excitement when she discovered her natural connection with the hearthfire, the sense that she had found something she was actually good at, something she could actually do. It had felt like purpose.
“Of course. I need you,” she said, and though Scindapse’s grin was enough to show she thought Kindred was just being gracious, it was true. With just one hand, she would need Scindapse there for the Roughs.
She tended the build for some time, as afternoon stretched into evening. A bare meal of dried soldier beetle and rationed water was delivered out to crew, and Kindred ate hers before the fire, chewing slowly at the dry crumbles to make them last longer.
The Errant was sailing east again and the hearthfire was as prepared as it would get, Kindred stood and moved to the bow. She climbed the wrecked stairs up to the quarterdeck, moving around the wyrm’s destruction or leaping over it when possible, until she stood fore.
The Sea before her, Kindred let herself float for a moment, away from the captain, from the Once-City out there beyond the horizon, from her grandmother and the deeps, from Ragged Sarah. She floated and looked out upon the Forever Sea.
The sun sang poetry amid the waves of grass bending and arcing endlessly in the wind. Green and green and green swelled and shushed and slipped, a study in chaos, a lesson in infinities.
Kindred closed her eyes into the prairie wind, feeling its familiar whisper against her cheek, neck, eyelids. The low-slung slant of late-afternoon light might have grown too warm, but the wind tempered it until Kindred’s face felt perfectly warmed, perfectly cooled.
In that light, blues and greens and reds flared to life, and the world became as it always might have been. The sun stretched her light between the plants of the Forever Sea, webbing luminous among a rill of big bluestem still too young to harvest, highlighting a splash of purple and white from a small patch of granny’s bonnet. Light yawned between blades of grass thinner than Kindred’s arm and shouted, brash and reflective, off of blades wide enough to engulf a person, to carry her down to the darks, to the deeps.
The Sea, a shadow-and-light world of its own, wove and sang in its endless expanse, stretching back toward the docks at Arcadia and the Mainland beyond that, stretching away toward the mists in the north, the Scrubwaste in the south. And before The Errant, the Sea went the way of the sunrise, running toward the horizon, toward forever, toward an eternity that maps and stories could only wonder at.
It was all Kindred could see, all she could imagine. And yet.
And yet.
A darkness, a less-known, less-knowable forever, stirred beneath the waves of grass and green. Promising a world, many worlds, below. Kindred felt herself falling down through those waves, the silken slide of grass rubbing her arms, cushioning her back as she descended into the unknown, every breath a discovery, every new sensation a wonder.
Listen for me in the grasses and listen for me below.
A shiver having nothing to do with the wind wound up Kindred’s back, and she opened her eyes, considering forever, forevers.
* * *
“Keeper.” Ragged Sarah appeared next to Kindred. The miracle of sleep had restored Sarah to herself, eyes once more sharp with that mischievous glint, mouth tipping perpetually toward a smile.
“Caller,” Kindred said, turning toward Sarah with a smile of her own.
“I need you,” Sarah said.
“You . . . what.” Kindred felt her face glow with heat as Sarah’s mouth finally found a grin to match the glee in her eyes.
“I need to do the calling now, and I was hoping you could help me. I need your help.”
“Oh, of course. Sure. What do you need?”
She followed Sarah down to the mainmast, where Sarah grabbed a rope and began tying a complicated knot in a thick rope hanging from above.
“I’m going to be doing a greater call,” Sarah said, returning to her work with the knot. “Huge amount of energy, lots of plants burned, but if it goes well, we’ll get a good picture of what’s up ahead and where the Once-City is. Normally, any one of those things would require two or three separate calls, but there’s no time.”
Sarah finished the knot and turned to Kindred.
“And that’s why I need you. Normally, I would just light the fire in the nest basin myself, but a calling like this needs a splinter of the hearthfire.”
A splinter. Kindred remembered her grandmother using that same word to talk about hearthfire that moved. Others on board talked about “some of the fire” or “part of the fire,” as though it could be simply cut up or halved.
Sarah was asking for Kindred to do exactly what she had done when they fled Arcadia, the action that had left her hand burned beyond feeling.
Kindred nodded, trying to keep her mind from fixating on the feeling of fire eating away at flesh, the feeling of the hearthfire cupped in her hand, blistering and blackening and burning.
She took a breath and moved to the hearthfire. As she sang to the flames and selected a slender length of charred bone, one unnecessary to the preparatory build, gripping it awkwardly in her left hand, Kindred saw Little Wing back at the wheel, watching her.
Kindred let the air leave her lungs, exhaling everything, forgetting what she could and briefly ignoring the rest. She lifted the splinter, singing a beseeching melody, one to calm the fire and herself. The flame flickering from the bone in her hand burned a deep, almost-black blue, contrary to the rich, golden flames burning in the hearthfire. Already, it had become a new entity.
And already, it tired her.
She cast a skeptical eye over the hearthfire, making sure it would burn all right while she helped Sarah. Once satisfied, she walked back over to where Ragged Sarah was waiting for her.
“A trip to the great blue, love?” she asked, holding out her hand, pitching her voice like one of the merchants calling out to the shills in Arcadia’s bazaars.
“I . . .” Kindred traced the mainmast up and up with her eyes. It seemed to lance up into the clouds. “I don’t know if I can make it up there with my hand.”
“I figured. I’m going to help you up.”
Ragged Sarah slipped a hand holding a rope around Kindred’s waist, slowing there for only a moment, pulled together, sharing the same air, the same breath. Kindred felt swept up in Sarah’s surprising closeness, the light filtering through the wave of her colorful hair in the wind.