Or worse: had Little Wing fallen? Did they sail without an acting captain of any kind?
Kindred pulled herself back to true. She was the ship’s heart, and if she was not beating, its mighty arms could not work. Her job was here. Her battle was here.
She settled the bones she’d already placed back into their spots before continuing with her quiet struggle.
“So cast, so sing, so shout, YO HO!
One blade, one arm, one crew, we go,
The sky is clear, the Sea runs on,
Spit flame, strike true, one arm, one crew.”
Kindred pulled from her pocket a handful of teeth that devoured sunlight with their black-and-grey depths. She had never burned these before. Rhabdus had kept them around as a theoretical necessity should The Errant ever find herself in grasses unkept and untamed by the mage guilds.
“Teeth?” Scindapse asked, staring down at the collection in Kindred’s hand.
“In rough grasses, burn teeth,” Kindred shouted back. It was all she had ever heard or read on the topic. No strategies or builds, no plans or schema. She wondered for a moment how the Marchess had sailed Revenger into the Roughs. Had she used teeth? Some other method? Or had she, even then, been thinking so completely of the deeps that she had done nothing special? Certainly, the scars that decorated Revenger’s hull suggested something like that.
Kindred spilled her rotted bounty on the deck before her, hemming in their escaping rolls with her arms, cupping them together into a small mound. It wasn’t much but it would have to last; she didn’t have any more.
The grasses began to chop and chuff against The Errant’s hull, sounding a warning call to any who were listening. Kindred ignored as best she could the sounds of battle and focused; this was her battle, and it was one she intended to win.
“Roughs! Roughs!” came Ragged Sarah’s shout from above, signaling to the crew what Kindred sensed in every part of her body, heard in the hum and sway of the hearthfire, felt in the shiver of the grasses beneath them. She leaned forward, eager for the unknown.
The Errant pulled hard portside as it cut into the Roughs, sloughing along a bank—a bank!—of rising prairie grasses populated by flowers and plants and vines and stems Kindred felt through her connection with the fire but could only guess at identifying.
It occurred to her as she pinched off the remaining stem of the mast still burning in the fire that she was lost—happily, joyfully, terrifyingly lost—in this situation. She had no idea what song to sing, no guide or book or lesson to inform her build in the flames. Kindred sailed off the known map.
This was intuition. This was art. This was Kindred giving herself over to the world, a sail caught and pushed by a true wind.
Kindred hummed a light, airy melody as she dropped teeth like beads into the flames, feeling them bounce and ping off the nest of bones making up the mast. She used only a few, wanting to hoard the teeth for whatever was coming.
The effect on The Errant was immediate. The ship sank low, deep into the Sea, into The Roughs, no longer sailing atop it but carving a swath through it, the ship’s wake like a thick scar. Kindred felt the pull of the fire as it devoured the teeth, heard the groan of The Errant as it pulled itself upright, no longer heeling precariously against the rise of the bank.
The ship should have lost its speed—the grasp of the Sea, especially with the hull sunk so far down, should have brought them near enough to a complete stop—but The Errant pushed through. Somehow.
The fire in front of Kindred blazed with a ragged, perverse light, flaring with bilious greens and yellows, slapping her face with flashes of heat, warning her away, reacting strangely to this new Sea, these new bones, Kindred’s song.
“Get away!” she shouted to Scindapse as the fire raged.
Kindred flinched back, bringing a hand to the rising sun she felt her face had become. Tentatively, she began to sing again—the light, quick melody hadn’t worked, so she reached out for something different. A dirge, slow and low, like heavy bags of sand swung back and forth, back and forth, low, slow, low, heavy, heavy—
Heat struck Kindred like a slap, hard across her face, deflating her lungs and pulling sweat from her skin all in an instant. She pushed herself back from the reach of the flames, which had turned chaotic. On the other side of the fire, Scindapse had moved as far back as she could manage, and she sat with wide eyes, the vertebra still clutched tightly in her hands.
Normally, Kindred could see the pattern in the fire, like a rhythm guiding the flourish of a melody. But this fire, its flames shifting and paling in colors that burned Kindred’s eyes, flared in no pattern she could see. If there was a rhythm to its music, it was beyond her.
She tried every song she could think of as The Errant continued to carve its trench through the Sea, still somehow raging along at enormous speeds. Nothing would match the fire—none of the songs she’d stolen from her grandmother, none of the songs Kindred had composed herself, nothing worked. It was as if the fire rejected melody, twisted away from the rigid confines of rhythm.
“I don’t know what you want!” she shouted at the fire, which shifted and shook, a friend suddenly unrecognizable.
Scindapse sang from where she sat, her voice frayed and dissonant, as always. She had already started to improve in the short time Kindred had worked with her, but still she strove and failed to find notes and melodies.
Kindred sucked in a breath, shocked.
The fire, which had simply tolerated Scindapse’s singing before, now joyed in it, flaring in unison with her missed notes and failed melodies, straightening itself into uniformity when Scindapse slowed or sped up unintentionally, arrhythmic and lopsided.
Nonsense, Kindred realized. The fire wants nonsense for this nonsense build.
Kindred enjoined her voice with Scindapse’s, wincing at the dissonance, the just-missed harmonies, the uncoupled rhythms.
If it was poetry, it shifted from villanelle to free verse with abandon, from couplets to quatrains with no thought. But it was not poetry.
If it was music, it married major and minor keys without concern for time or meter. But it was not music.
If it was story, characters lived without dying and died without living; worlds without purpose became metaphors that devoured themselves. But it was not story.
Kindred and Scindapse mumbled and hummed and shouted and cackled and sang and spoke and whispered nonsense to the fire in an oft-broken, pitched stream. And the fire, like a lock finally greeted by the right key, opened.
She saw into its madness, saw the chaotic influence each burning tooth had in the flames. There were six of them in the fire, and each one burned like its own sun, floating aloft in the tangled morass of bone, loosing light and power into the fire, into the ship, into the world.