“Right,” Ragged Sarah said, winking at Kindred. “We’re not up here to talk, sadly.”
Kindred laughed a little and nodded.
“Can you make the fire burn hotter and higher?” Sarah asked, pulling more plants from her pockets.
“Sure,” Kindred said, smiling. She sang then, a song of entreaty, and the fire answered, blooming higher, flames reaching up, shifting colors until they settled on a bright red.
“What language is that?” Sarah asked as she rummaged through her pockets, pulling out more plants. “It sounds like what Rhabdus used to sing in, but not quite.”
Kindred tipped her head from side to side.
“It’s close to that, yes. We all sing in the language of the hearthfire. Some have memorized the songs with little or no understanding of what they actually mean. Like how most sailors know that bones in the hearthfire means a ship goes, but they don’t know why or how. Most hearthfire keepers sing words that are not their own in a language they don’t understand, and they sing them at the hearthfire.”
“And you?”
Kindred smiled.
“My words are all my own, known and understood. And I sing with the hearthfire, not at it.”
Ragged Sarah shook her head and laughed as she dropped more plants onto the fire, some of which Kindred knew and many which she didn’t. Some burned but most only smoked upon contact, coughing out great gouts of writhing smoke, thick and thin tendrils, each one a brilliant, bright, shifting set of colors—one moment reflecting the shine of the sun like a coin or blade might, the next a spark of silver shooting through a storm of grey, a bolt of lightning echoing through clouds.
The smoke snaked sinuous in the air, reaching out and doubling back but always expanding its circumference, pushing out a little farther.
“Good. Move back.” Ragged Sarah put a gentle hand on Kindred’s shoulder and pushed. In that moment, Kindred wanted nothing more than to enjoin her own hand there, but she allowed herself to go back, sliding across the platform until she felt the rough wood of the guardrail behind her.
“Stay back there,” Ragged Sarah said before stepping to the fire, to the smoky nebula it had become, allowing herself to be consumed by it. Kindred could barely make her out in the flashing and changing colors of the smoke, which swirled and cut around her with increasing speed.
Ragged Sarah began chanting in a high, ululating voice, singing without melody or music, like poetry. Words ran together into a slip-slide fall, eliding and colliding, a murmuration that threatened to entrance Kindred. Staring into that well of shifting, sliding smoke, staring into those kaleidoscopic colors, listening to Sarah’s strange litany, Kindred felt herself drifting away.
Ragged Sarah’s voice dropped away for a moment and then she spoke a single word, low and heavy, in a language Kindred did not know.
The storm of thick smoke exploded.
Tendrils raced in every direction, some leaping high, high into the sky, nearly disappearing in the cloud, their tails describing shifting, calamitous colors. Others dipped low, skimming the surface of the Sea and slurring the grasses there, while some spiraled corkscrews through the air before disappearing, only to blur into existence farther away, grey and black and silver punctuation marks dipping in and out of perceivable space, traveling forth in their skipping, stuttering jaunt.
Smoke streamed from the tendrils, as though The Errant were the epicenter of a great, sorcerous explosion, one that continued to affect the world, the edge racing forever on. Soon, many of the tendrils had disappeared over the horizon, blinking out of existence, leaving Kindred staring at Ragged Sarah, naked of her smoky cover, her breath labored, her face running with sweat.
“Now,” Ragged Sarah said, slumping to the platform, exhaustion plain on her face, “we wait.”
* * *
“What’s it like?” Kindred asked into the slow-sky of the crow’s nest. She had never realized how quiet the nest was, how unaffected by the work on deck it was. Apart from the steady song of the hearthfire in her mind, playing behind her thoughts and assuring her the fire still burned steadily in her absence, Kindred felt totally distant from the ship below.
“What’s what like?” Sarah asked, looking up from the small bundles of plants she’d been organizing and placing into her various pockets.
“The Once-City.”
Ragged Sarah shrugged and looked out into the sky.
“Most of the stories aren’t true, at least as far as I can remember it. Pirates aren’t cannibals; they don’t drink prairie air and feed on the darkness of night. They weren’t created from the chaos beneath the Sea.” Sarah said all of this in a low, mock-serious voice, arching her eyebrows at the conspiracies.
Kindred laughed, but then a thought struck her.
“How does begging sanctuary work? I’m guessing it’s more than just running up a white flag.”
“Slightly more than that, yeah,” Sarah said, chuckling. “It’s not flying a white flag or walking up to the first pirate you see and saying ‘Sanctuary!’ You have to ask in the ancient prairie languages, the ones that are carved into the central column of the Once-City.”
Sarah leaned back, smiling, her eyes far away.
“I hated just about everything in that place, but I loved looking at that enormous wooden column and seeing languages older than anyone could remember.”
Kindred tried to imagine it, but she couldn’t, and so she settled for watching Sarah’s remembering.
Without warning, Sarah’s voice shifted, and she spoke words in a language Kindred didn’t know, a language like no other Kindred had ever heard. The syllables made Sarah sit upright as they rolled from her tongue, as if demanding respect, and Kindred found herself sitting up straighter, too. Sounds like power, old as paths underfoot, thrumming with meaning. The crow’s nest filled with the sound of Sarah speaking, and Kindred realized it was the same phrase or sentence or verb or something said over and over.
Finally, Sarah stopped, and Kindred felt breathless. She was smiling, wider than before, without realizing it.
“That’s begging sanctuary,” Sarah said. “If you can’t do it correctly, there’s some test you have to pass. I never knew any to take it, though I left the Once-City quite young and didn’t have much to do with that side of things. I taught the captain how to beg sanctuary correctly, but I can just do it when we arrive.”
Kindred leaned in close and said, “Teach me.”
Sarah laughed, and so she did, sounding out bits of the whole and encouraging Kindred.
“Does everyone there speak this language?” Kindred asked when the syllables began to congeal together on her tongue and she had called it quits. She would try again later.