She abandoned Centicipitous.
She flicked through the builds in her memory, searching and searching. Tesu’s Wreck could be done one-handed, she thought, but was focused on solidity in huge winds, and so provided little speed. Three-Fold, too, could be built with a single hand but it was designed for accentuating speed while beating windward.
“Back to the fire, Kindred,” she told herself, just as she used to as a younger girl, angry at the Marchess for keeping so much knowledge from her.
She whispered the litany to herself, remembering the rough deck of her grandmother’s ship, the close quarters there, the sound of its single sail pulling and straining in a fierce wind, the life she had aboard Revenger.
“Speed in tenuous length.
Solidity in bolstered support.
Arcs in green, spirals in gold.
Fire burns first and hottest at the base.
Do not circumscribe the fire.”
Crew continued to run across the deck around her, and shouts became ubiquitous in the air.
“Speed with a transition to stability,” Kindred muttered to herself, trying to work out their situation. With the reef still some distance ahead, the Roughs coming close, and ships pursuing from behind at speed, she would need something that began tenuous, that offered speed over stability, and there was no way she could create a build like that with only one hand. She could picture a rudimentary version of what it should be: a single stalk rising from the coals with a hellishly complex and intricate bony bolus perched atop it. To graft and twist all of that together would be too difficult for Scindapse, certainly, but for Kindred and her one usable hand? No, it was not possible, not in the fire.
She needed some way to build the structure outside of the fire first, but without the hearthfire’s magic and heat, she couldn’t graft and mold and pull the bones.
“Ships sighted! Aft!” Ragged Sarah’s call stilled the crew for a moment, and Kindred suddenly became aware of Little Wing standing over her.
“What the fuck is going on, Kindred?” Little Wing demanded, surveying the wreckage of Kindred’s attempts, bones like so much detritus littered around the fire. “Can you do this or not?”
“Yes, I can,” she said, unable to focus on Little Wing as she fought to come up with some plan, some build that would work for them.
And there, so close to the heat of Little Wing’s anger, trapped and ready to dissolve, Kindred had an idea.
An insane, terrible, mad idea.
But an idea.
“Child’s Build until I get back,” she said to Scindapse as she pushed herself roughly to her feet and ran for the edge of the ship. On the way, she shouted over her shoulder for help, a pair of strong hands to hold her. A voice shouted “aye” behind her, though Kindred did not know who said it. Her focus lay ahead, on the Sea. As she ran, Kindred picked up one of the harvesting harnesses—a webwork of rope meant to hold a harvester while she was lowered into the Sea to cut precious plants. At the gunwale, she began to step into the harness, hoping her instinct was right about this.
“Be ready to pull me back,” Kindred said, handing the line trailing from the harness back to Little Wing, who had followed her. Her mind was chaos, racing through the danger and possibilities of this build, this plan, this madness.
She clambered over the gunwale and set her feet into the ladder, the Sea before her, racing by, though how much longer the scattered build she’d left in the hearthfire would last, Kindred didn’t know. She needed to work fast.
As she put one foot below the other, Kindred felt a shot of joy and excitement move through her chest, buoyed by the whisper-shout of the grasses below her as The Errant cut through them.
At the ladder’s end, Kindred pulled once on the line to make sure someone had her. After she felt the tension on the line, she shouted up, “Let me down slowly.”
“Aye.”
But Little Wing was already lowering her down into the moving chaos of the Sea, a whiplash riot of green.
Kindred took a deep breath in—the scents of dry grass and life pulling by her and burning in her nose.
“Good there!” she shouted up, hoping her voice didn’t betray the fear she suddenly felt. Would Little Wing drop her? How easy it might be, Kindred realized, to make it seem an accident. A bad rope. A broken harness. A current too strong, a ship speed too high. Any of it could justify Little Wing turning back to the deck, her hands empty, Kindred falling below into the black.
Still, she dropped lower.
Panicked now, Kindred grabbed the rope and tugged on it twice, and shouted louder.
“Hold there! Hold!”
Finally, after another drop down, she stopped, the rope above bending toward the ship as Kindred was pulled a little behind the course, dragging.
Despite the constant press of green parting around her and the intense feeling of closeness, Kindred let out a sigh of relief.
Listen for me in the grasses and listen for me below.
Her grandmother’s words moved through her, unbidden, and Kindred thought of the promise of a wide and impossible world waiting beneath the green. A shiver of anticipation ran along her spine.
Quickly and with as much force as she could manage, Kindred grasped at the passing grasses, swiping forward and pulling her fingers together into a fist. Her reward was a bouquet of green blades, each half as wide as her hand and as long as her arm, a few with their ends still trailing in the Sea. It would do.
Kindred pulled again on the rope with her bandaged hand and was quickly pulled up. At the top, Little Wing hauled her aboard, the might of her muscles making Kindred feel like a slim sack of dried plants.
“Thank you,” Kindred said, looking up to meet Little Wing’s eyes, but she was gone already, moving back into the work aboard without so much as a backward glance.
Dropping the harness, Kindred rushed back to the hearthfire, frantic and eager to test this new idea and just as fearful of its huge potential for failure.
At the fire, she placed her green bounty next to the bones and pictured again the structure she would need to make. It would be a crude thing with so little time to plan and no time at all to experiment.
“I need you to tie these bones together with this grass fast as you can. I’ll hold them two at a time where they need to meet, and then I need you to fasten them together. Understand?” She spoke quickly to Scindapse, who had constructed the Child’s Build. Wrong again, though less wrong this time.
“We’re building it out of the fire?” Scindapse said. She had already pulled out a strand of grass and was holding it ready.
“Yes,” Kindred snapped, frantically sorting through the bones they had out and pairing them with the bones she was imagining for the build in her head. “It’s a terrible idea, and you should never do it, and there’s no reason any good hearthkeeper would ever try it, and I’m out of fucking ideas, so we’re doing it, now tie several knots here.”