Amid the shouts and flurried movement aboard, the bone closet was a pocket of peace. Bones in rows of white held down with carefully secured straps, still and calm as time itself. The chaos of the deck was muffled in this space, and Kindred took a breath of dry, dusty air, filling her lungs with this silence and reverence, letting it calm the hysterical fear beginning to well up inside her.
“Tenuous length,” she whispered to the bones, letting her hand slide over the rows of white until she found the one—a rib bone, describing a slender arc. Not the longest bone in the body, Kindred knew, but both long and tenuous, just a thin ray of white meant to protect a beating heart, billowing lungs. Like a strand of spiderweb, calcified and fragile.
The swaying cut of The Errant through the Forever Sea, the shouts of the crew and even the threat of the pirates—all of it faded in the bone closet. Kindred thought she could hear Rhabdus crowing for her, but even that sound was muted by the peace in the bone closet. The world became dust catching stray rays of sunlight, dust becoming constellations in the late-afternoon light angling in around Kindred, dust from before this day that would last well beyond.
Another explosion slammed into the ship, and even in the relative quiet of the bone closet, Kindred felt it.
She was needed.
Her crazy, insane, nigh-suicidal plan was needed.
She climbed out of the bone closet, letting the trapdoor slam shut.
The captain was shouting for more fires to be put out, and crew members clustered starboard aft, fighting the blaze. Cora the Wraith clung to the mast, cutting away the remnants of the mainsail fluttering from the yard.
Long Quixa, though, lay on the ground, one arm bent at an unnatural angle beneath her, blood trailing from a head wound.
Relieved, Kindred saw Ragged Sarah, the crow-caller who normally spent all of her time in the crow’s nest communing with birds, tending to Quixa’s injuries. Stone-Gwen knelt beside her, helping as she could, her face a picture of calm despite the madness.
Ragged Sarah looked up as Kindred moved back toward the hearthfire, and even with everything going on—the pirates, the fires, the captain’s shouts, the too-slow rise of land on the horizon—even with all of that, Ragged Sarah looked up at Kindred as she passed, and smiled.
It was a small thing, quick and then gone, but like the bone closet, that moment existed outside of the chaos.
“No time,” she told herself, muttering the words under her breath and forcing her feet to continue moving, forcing her mind away from the way Ragged Sarah angled her head to one side when she smiled, the way her cheeks dimpled just slightly, the way—
“Get over here, girl!” Rhabdus shouted. “You don’t just get up and leave when we’re running this hard.”
Rhabdus still had her hands in the fire, though for what reason, Kindred couldn’t see. Shal-El-Shep was perfect. It looked exactly like the drawings in the manuals. Rhabdus had been forcing her to read them to make up for Kindred’s lack of schooling, the pages full of diagrams and arrows, charts and tables, turning the magic of keeping the fire into a fearful science.
“Keepers! Either get us moving or send us to the deeps now and be done with it!” The captain’s voice rolled over the deck, eliciting a grunt of anger from Rhabdus. Kindred thought of the length of bone she held hidden behind her back.
Speed in tenuous length.
Rhabdus slapped the deck by the fire.
“Sit. And sing speed.”
Kindred sat down and began singing, the bone hidden beneath her thigh, and waited for her chance.
And soon enough, it came.
Kindred sang, asking more from a fire and build that were spent, while Rhabdus’s hands were plunged into the fire urging on Shal-El-Shep, when a great explosion slammed The Errant forward. Crates and rope and spare tools scattered about the deck and sent any detritus not tied down in a whirligig dance around the ship and, in some cases, overboard.
Rhabdus was flung back, and she cried out in pain and frustration as she careened into the ladders leading aft toward the quarterdeck. Kindred rolled the other way, right into the mainmast, and despite the pain of her collision—a sharp shot through her shoulder—she immediately looked down and breathed a sigh of relief.
The rib bone remained whole and unbroken.
“Speed!” Captain Caraway shouted. “Speed!”
Kindred launched herself toward the hearthfire, already letting the music tumble from her mouth, letting the blaze know she was coming.
Her song was different this time, more urgent. She chewed out the sounds, letting them fall from her mouth in blocky, low bits. It was a song for breaking, and she did its work with her hands as she sang, reaching into the flames and collapsing Shal-El-Shep as quickly and brutally as possible into a thick bed of hot coals. From nearby where she lay, Rhabdus let out a cry of rage and disbelief.
“What are you doing?” Rhabdus shouted.
Every moment the fire burned without a structure, the ship lost speed.
The breaking song done, Kindred looked at the still-smoking mainmast. She thought again of that day so long before on her grandmother’s ship, the only other time she had tried this dangerous maneuver.
“Speed in tenuous length,” she whispered.
She sang then, a song without form, a single note really, wavering and high, high enough for her voice to splinter slightly, to fray at its peak. It was a song, Kindred thought, for high hopes, for a structure without a name, so basic and simple and dangerous that no keeper sailing the Forever Sea would consider it.
Kindred brought down the slender length of rib bone through the flames and buried it, planted it in the bed of coals. She let her voice unravel completely into a single, wordless call for the fire to burn, for flame and speed and power.
And the hearthfire answered.
Flames roared up around the bone, reaching into the sky, challenging the majesty of the sun’s dying light. The hearthfire became color, shifting sickeningly from wild violet to blinding whites and yellows and back again to violet, flames the color of freshly watered mud growing with the promise of harvest, blues as sacred as a cloudless sky, oranges the color of clouds caught too early in the morning. On and on the fire shifted and roared and grew, and as it did, The Errant picked up speed.
“Hold on to something!” Kindred called out, pushing away from the fire, until her spine collided with the mainmast. She heard her call echoed by the captain, who sounded, if anything, joyful, ecstatic with the sudden speed and danger.
Rhabdus hooked an arm around a post and stared at Kindred. Her eyes full of a murderous rage that nearly blanched Kindred’s adrenaline, she shouted, “You’ve killed us all, girl.”
“Help us with her.” Stone-Gwen called Kindred’s attention away. She crawled over to where Sarah and Gwen struggled with Long Quixa’s still-unconscious form. Between the three of them, they dragged her to the mainmast and tied her tightly to it.