Just beyond the start of the Roughs, Kindred saw the thistle reef like a mountain range, huge and foreboding, holding up the sky, its impossibly broad shoulders stretching off farther than Kindred could see in either direction. Its slopes and peaks twinkled like stars in the sunlight, the promise of countless thorns and thistles.
Before this, all of it known and unknown, a world neither built nor cultivated for her, Kindred grew large: her roots sank deep, her leaves and petals drank in the same sunlight as the reef, the Roughs, her heart the Sea’s, the Sea’s heart forever hers.
Kindred shouted with joy and dropped back to the deck.
The fire was burning hot and hard by the time she returned, the flames responding to Scindapse’s song. Kindred joined her voice with Scindapse’s, nodding at the younger keeper as she changed the melody into something like a chant, a plea for speed, for a fire that burned through the remnant of the mast still rising from the coals.
Her voice sparked through laterals and trills, sharp sounds like explosions against her teeth and tongue. The language of the fire was often a gossamer thing, diaphanous and ghostly, a south wind haunting, but now Kindred dug deep into the language’s harder, sharper side, running through every fricative phoneme she knew and then pushing past those, inventing verbs and names and sounds to push the fire on. Scindapse fell away, unable to do anything more than hum quietly.
And like a faithful friend, the hearthfire grew—hotter and bigger and wilder. It had been a burning grey, steady as a wall of rainclouds, but now it reinvented itself in a flash of vivid viridian flames, a swirl circling the mast and flaring out at the sail.
Kindred reached her unburned hand into the flames, pinching off part of the remaining mast, slimming it down just enough to allow the fire to chew through it faster and with more added speed. She worked entirely by instinct and feel, holding the distance to the Roughs and the reef in her mind, sensing how much length they would still need on the mast before the safety and stability of the sail was needed.
The Errant rushed forward as the hearthfire burned. Kindred laughed at the sudden push of speed, her heart light in this new world.
“Aft casting fire!” Little Wing called.
“Aye,” shouted Kindred in response before turning to Scindapse. “Stay with the fire and keep encouraging its speed. You’re doing great.”
Kindred reached into the fire and scooped a coal up in her hand, singing quietly, smiling at the pulses of energy the coal sent up her arm.
She moved between crew rushing about, feeling purposeful, and at the aft casting fire, she found Little Wing waiting, a bundle of blackroot in one hand, a bundle of trimmed wisteria in the other.
Of course. With only a few on board who could cast, and with Little Wing strongest among those few, she would be there, where strength was most needed. Quixa held the wheel.
The joyful beat of Kindred’s heart in this new world faltered a little at the hard look on Little Wing’s face.
Kindred bent to light the casting fire, accepting a few strands of blackroot from Little Wing, who knelt down and said only, “We’re fucked.”
“Little Wing—” Kindred began, but Little Wing cut her off.
“Save it. Do your job.”
She turned from Kindred, focused on the fire, which had taken in the basin and was burning well now. But Kindred could hear Little Wing still talking, whispering furiously to herself, words snatched away by the wind before they resolved into anything other than anger, rage.
Kindred backed away slowly, leaving Little Wing to her dark mutterings.
* * *
The sounds of impending battle grew from whispers to shouts to screams punctuated by Little Wing’s terse orders, shouted from wherever she happened to be at that moment: the wheel, the casting fires, the rigging. She was everywhere, trying to be everything for this ship, this crew.
Ships pursued—pirates or Cantrev, it didn’t matter at this point.
At the hearthfire, Kindred prepared for the Roughs, for her own battle, while the songs of violence and fear flooded the deck. One of the songs, a battle hymn Kindred had composed, rang out like a silversmith’s hammer joying against an anvil.
“We need something steady to keep everyone casting in time,” the captain had told Rhabdus, who had passed the job off to Kindred. “The words don’t matter. Just the heartbeat. We all need the same heartbeat.”
Listening now to the hymn pulsing through the chaos, Kindred heard one heartbeat in the music, and it was this she focused on while making her own preparations, setting the bones she would need in front of her like a woman setting a table.
“Yo ho, we go, a song to fight,
Cast bright, scream loud, a fight, a fight!”
Spell light flashed across the deck for a moment, doubling Kindred’s shadow—one for the sun, one for the spell, though whether it was friendly magic or enemy magic, she didn’t know.
A lower-back bone, a chipped vertebra, round and cupped, old and yellowing in age. Kindred spoke her thanks, to bone and fire, and handed it to Scindapse.
“Keep hold of this and be ready with it.”
Orders rang out on deck, blending with the battle song giving form to the fight.
“Quixa, the wall! There the wall!”
“Hooks! Starboard!”
“For sail and Sea, for crew and sky,
For these we fight, for these we die!”
Next was a fingerbone, delicate and small, made for intricacy, perhaps one that had sewn sails or threaded the clothing of sailors now dead. Kindred spoke her thanks, to bone and fire, and gripped it tight in her hand.
Shouts strangled in strange, new voices began to filter into the chaos on deck, signaling the proximity of enemies. They closed.
Kindred could see glimpses of the Roughs ahead, the pass through the reef twinkling in silver and promise. There was nothing for it. The Errant would hold until the pass or they would all perish. The time for speed was gone.
Their hopes lay in the possibility that Cantrev’s ships were not prepared for the Roughs and would peel away as soon as they entered, but of course, that left the pirates for whom the Roughs were familiar grasses.
Explosions in triplicate rocked the ship, pushing The Errant off course for a moment, throwing Kindred to her side. As she righted herself, she looked back and up, thinking for a mad moment that it was Captain Caraway back at the wheel, her wild smile a balm for the mounting panic in Kindred’s chest.
Instead, it was Quixa who held the wheel, her eyes locked ahead, turning desperately to get them back on course, teeth showing in a grimace of fear and effort. If Little Wing had joined the casting—were they boarded? was that the shout about hooks?—the battle could not be going well.