She held out a long, straight bone and jabbed at a point on its length where a small notch had been created, either during life or after. Scindapse began tying without asking a single question.
And they set about building the structure out of the fire.
The heat and flames of the hearthfire enchanted bones, allowing them to stretch and pull, to find purchase in and amongst one another. In the hearthfire, bones became malleable spirits eager to bend to the experienced keeper’s will and imagination.
Working on a structure out of the hearthfire was like trying to sail a ship on land, the keel buried deep in rock and mud, rags up, shouting at the crew to gain more speed.
But Kindred pushed past all of this, hoping cleverness might win the day when magic would not, could not.
A manic desperation moved Kindred as she found and held up bone after bone for Scindapse to tie, examining and piecing together the build in her mind as she and Scindapse did it there on the deck.
As it came into being, Kindred smiled, realizing that what they were building looked uncannily like a sail, caught full in the wind, blossoming in it, supported by the strong thrust of a mast.
A delicate wristbone, tied tight to the mast.
Strong arm bones to serve as the yards, radiating out in as many directions as possible.
Fingers looped by grass hung from the yard and tied to a boom below, a sturdy sternum.
Thick section of spine tangled in the growing net of the sail.
Arc of white strung through the now-choked tangle of bones in the sail.
“Keeper! Get us moving!” Little Wing’s shout pulsed with an undercurrent of fear, and Kindred remembered the ships behind and ahead of them, Cantrev and the pirates closing on them like jaws.
Kindred dropped back to her work, trying to focus on the bones, the grass, the hearthfire still blazing before her, though she thought of Little Wing’s litany of horrifying acts done by pirates, and she thought of being caught, boarded, the pirates stealing their bones, stealing the captain for her bones, and forcing the crew to take the green dive, down into the deeps.
A shiver of something that was not totally fear ran through Kindred.
She shook her head, blowing a quick spurt of air out of her mouth, releasing those imaginings for the time being.
“I think it’s ready,” she said, nodding to Scindapse as she finished tying the last bit of grass and bone into the structure, which tinkled and chattered in the wind, strangely musical.
Scindapse took the whole of it from her while Kindred reached into the fire and began to sing. She let her voice lurk beneath the chaos on deck like a secret, a song only for the hearthfire, a covenant between her and the flames.
With her free hand, she patted down the coals and embers into a firm foundation, a rich pasture of glowing reds and oranges, letting the magic of her song seep into the spent bones, asking them to welcome this new structure, to fuse the grass instead of burning it away, to aid it in joining the bones together, at least until Kindred and Scindapse could magically firm up the connections.
The whisper of the hearthfire, a counterpoint to her song, was encouragement enough. With a nod to Scindapse, she took the structure—Mast and Sail, she’d decided to call it—and placed it in the flames, burying the mast deep in the coals and feeling a pull as the hearthfire took the bones as its own.
Kindred continued singing, fighting to keep the anxiety and tension out of her voice. The flames began to burn in earnest at the base of Mast and Sail, and Kindred felt the familiar push of speed as The Errant rushed forward, the tenuous length of the mast offering up its bounty.
But the fire reached higher, not yet burning through the bones but making itself known to them. Kindred moved as quickly as she could with just one hand, and Scindapse worked at the easier joints, the two of them twisting and pinching bones together, magic flowing into and through their fingers, grafting the lengths and clusters of white onto one another in the arcane heat of the fire.
And though the grass began to smoke and wail, adding a third voice to the melody Kindred and the fire and now Scindapse had created, it held, just, as Kindred had hoped it would, at least long enough for her to knit the bones of the sail together.
Scindapse leapt in the air and whooped her joy to the sky as their build channeled heat and air into power and speed. A few of the crew noticed, too, and added their own calls of joy.
A whistle from above pulled Kindred’s attention up, and she saw Sarah leaning out over the crow’s nest, extending out as far as the rope she held would let her, grinning down.
And for a moment, Kindred floated in that grin, her eyes on Sarah’s as The Errant raced east.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The calls came on the heels of one another, three shouts from Ragged Sarah above, barely a breath’s space between them.
“Pursuit! In sight! In sight!”
Breath.
“Roughs ahead! Reef ahead!”
Breath.
“Pirates! Starboard fore and heeling hard toward! And warships aft! Aft! Aft!”
A moment of tranquility filled the deck—brief, so brief—and then movement and voices shouting and ropes coiled and uncoiled, sails shifted to better catch the wind, to better aid the push of the hearthfire.
Kindred leaned in closer to the fire and was surprised to see the grasses still wound through Mast and Sail, their twisting, winding, knotting lengths no longer a brilliant green but a covetous, singed black.
The grasses should have fallen apart by now, burned away, ash on the wind. And yet they remained, looking as though they might even still have held the structure together if Kindred hadn’t pinched and pulled the bones together in the magic of the flames.
“Push, Kindred!” came Little Wing’s shout from where she stood at the wheel, hands wrapped around the handles, eyes alight. This was her element, the wilderness of the Sea, the danger of pursuit, and it was easy enough to see Captain Little Wing there, commanding her own ship.
“Sing a melody low and fast, but don’t touch the fire or the build,” Kindred said to Scindapse before leaping to her feet, scuttling up the mainmast, and wrenching herself up along the shroud until she could see clear of the forecastle.
She could sense the Roughs ahead, could probably calculate the distance well enough to burn hard and then pull back for stability, but she needed to see it.
Kindred gasped. The curated, carefully maintained level of the Sea exploded in front of them, grasses reaching high in multilayered bunches, their rise tangled through with other plants—creeping, rhizomatic vines and dramatically colored flowers and the burnished bronze of clipweed and the bunched orange of butterfly weed and a thousand thousand others, rising and falling in hills of color and texture. This was the Forever Sea as it should be, untamed and unchallenged.