“No, no. Apart from a few phrases like that one, it’s mostly forgotten. And it’s only one of the old prairie languages—there are others that have even fewer remembered bits. It’s all carved into that central column, the languages mixed together. I used to think the letters and symbols up on the central column were like grave markers. Only a few people in the Once-City can actually translate and understand it—we’ll need to have one of them come out and verify that we’ve correctly begged sanctuary.”
“How big is the Once-City?” Kindred asked, trying to picture it in her mind.
“Much bigger than most think. It’s a city, but really, it’s more like several cities, each a different level, stacked on top of one another like wheels. Most of it is below the Sea, you know.”
Kindred shook her head. The only thing she’d known about the Once-City was that it floated in the Forever Sea, always moving.
But a whole city mostly below the Sea? Kindred thought of the Marchess and saw her own steps toward the deeps.
“If it’s below the surface, how will we find it?” Kindred asked.
Ragged Sarah smiled into the wind.
“You know those insane stories about the Once-City being carved into the trunk of an enormous tree?”
“Yeah, of course,” Kindred said, remembering the drawings she had seen, done mostly by children, of people living inside a vast tree.
“They’re not just stories,” Ragged Sarah said, grinning.
* * *
It began with birds like stars in the sky.
Kindred saw them in the distance, tiny tinklings of white, an entire flock of birds, angling to catch the sun’s light on their back one moment—a brilliant white constellation—and then disappearing the next.
Ragged Sarah had been saying something about ointment, when to put more on her hand or how much to put on or something like that, but Kindred felt herself pulled away.
She could remember every time she’d ever seen a bird on the Sea.
A wilting loon, her third year aboard Revenger, seen from afar.
A great condor, her fourth year aboard Revenger, its body tangled in the grasses of the Sea, magnificent and terrible and so, so sad in its death.
A rainbird, only a few spans past, though it had been so far off that no one aboard had gotten a good look at it. The captain had demanded they turn and give chase, hoping to sail beneath it and fill their water stores with the mythical rain the stories promised surrounded the rainbird, but even The Errant racing with full sail, hearthfire raging, couldn’t catch it.
But this, to see a flock, a family, a coterie of birds in flight. Kindred felt her heart race at the discovery of it, the sheer impossibility of seeing so much amid the endless forever of the Sea.
“Gods,” she whispered, pulling herself upright and grasping for Ragged Sarah’s longsight. Ragged Sarah chuckled and handed Kindred the instrument.
Through the circumscribed magnification of the longsight, Kindred could see them, and she began to describe what she was seeing aloud, because wonder, true wonder, must be shared, must live on the breath.
“Eight, nine gembills. At least, I think they’re gembills. Long wings, white and brown feathers, bills sparkling even from here, like they’re crusted with precious stones.”
Kindred remembered Messit’s Birds and Dragons of the Forever Sea, a book she’d spent many long afternoons poring over, studying the pictures and memorizing the names, the minutiae and ephemera of the creatures Messit had spent his life seeking. Another life spent reaching into the unending world of the Sea.
“Only nine? I must be losing my touch,” Ragged Sarah said, and Kindred barely registered the wry humor in her voice, the smile apparent in her tone. Kindred cared only for the patch of sky shown in the longsight.
“They’re flying in a strange pattern, almost as if they’re circling something. Messit’s book said they flew only in long, elegant lines, but this, it’s—oh.”
The flock of birds flickered in and out of existence—not the play of light on their backs giving them form and then reducing them to faint shadowed lines. They disappeared entirely, gone from sight, no more—wait. There. A single bird remained, one of the larger gembills, its color darker, its bill etched with thick veins of vermilion-colored gems and smaller glittering tributaries of dark, rich blue and black.
The bird flapped for The Errant with speed and purpose.
A raucous cacophony sounded behind Kindred, a rich coughing of wry laughter and chortling. She turned quickly enough to stumble, hungry to see what she hoped, what she thought—and then a hand on her hip, steadying her, Ragged Sarah’s voice in her ear.
“Easy. They’re not going anywhere anytime soon. You’ve got time enough.”
In her amazement, Kindred sank back against Sarah.
A rowdy tangle of crows sported in the air just off The Errant’s bow, chuckling against one another like clever children, their play one of just-misses and daring dives. Too, too close: leaves of the same branch. The awed exclamations of the crew below filtered up to where Kindred and Ragged Sarah stood.
The birds were near enough to see with her naked eyes, but Kindred hungered for specifics, so she brought the longsight up again, joying in the waxy glisten of black, the adolescent amusement in curving beak and talon.
But there—distant as the crows were close, a pair of birds, just visible as they flew in front of a low-slung cloud. As if meant for the sky, the birds flapped their wide, white wings only occasionally, their movement stately and graceful, easy even as they cut through the air. Long, perfect, with speared grey heads splashed with a vivid, bloody red, they neared, and Kindred felt everything in her go unbearably still.
“Sandhill cranes,” Kindred said, voice hushed into reverence.
“What?” Ragged Sarah stiffened suddenly, shifting around and taking the longsight from Kindred’s hands. “It can’t be.”
Kindred barely heard her, not needing the longsight to see the approach of the cranes—and, approaching from what seemed every direction, the wonder of birds streaking through the sky toward The Errant, many of them close enough now to make out specifics: the way a pair of feet were held up under the body in flight, the teeter-totter tip of wings catching updrafts. She saw great larks and lesser larks, edgewings, Potter’s loons, prairie geese, white pelicans—birds that brought to life memorized pictures in her mind and birds that she’d never seen before.
“This is bad,” Sarah muttered, her voice dark with despair.
“What do you mean?” Kindred asked.
“Different birds offer different information. Some speak to the character of the Sea. Some weather patterns approaching. Some what lies before, others what lies behind. They’re signs to be read, interpreted.”