The teeth burned hotter and wilder than anything Kindred had ever put into the hearthfire, and it was their force that pushed The Errant down into the Sea and propelled her so quickly forward.
They cared nothing for the delicate balance of a keel slicing cleanly through prairie grasses. In their heat and power, they demanded the world fall around them, and so it did.
Kindred marveled at the sheer power, brute and monolithic, from things so small, so ubiquitous in the world. Though even in her wonderment at the possibilities—how would the fire change with an odd or even number of teeth? With teeth of a larger or smaller size? With teeth the ghost-grey of a long-serving captain or the pristine yellow of a sailor recently tested and turned captain?—Kindred felt a deep, dissonant disgust.
The teeth burned bright and hot, and The Errant, if anything, had gained speed since falling down into the grass. And yet the whole thing, the colors and heat and whiplash crack of the fire, felt wrong to Kindred. Obvious and brutish. To keep the fire was to court delicacy, to articulate a plea both poetic and selfless. It was poetry and prayer together, melodic as the wind.
But this was muscle without articulation, noise where there ought to be music. This fought the Sea, fought the wind, pushed when it needed to and when it didn’t.
Above, the sails told a story of listless, light winds—the kind of winds a hearthfire might supplement but not overcome. This was a fire that cared none for wind—it would rage in calm and storm alike, scream through grasses in becalmed seas. It rebelled against the natural world, and the longer Kindred considered it, the longer she spoke and sang with it, the more her stomach turned.
A great explosion behind The Errant cracked the air.
“Keep this going,” Kindred said, gesturing to the fire, as she rose and moved back to the mainmast. It took effort, but by twining a rope around one arm and using her unburned hand, she was able to climb high enough on the mast to look back over the aftcastle, tracing her gaze along the trough The Errant carved in the Roughs, down, down, down the hill they climbed to see the calamity ensuing at the bottom.
Cantrev’s warships sailed without the stability of burned teeth, their hulls raked by the Roughs, their movement wobbly and dangerous. They sparred with the black-sailed pirate cutters at the base of the hill, their mages trading volleys, spells arcing off of and slamming into and smashing through defensive magic on both ships. One of the pirate ships, a cutter, slim and wicked, wobbled dangerously, one of its masts reduced to a ragged digit rising from its forecastle, flaming holes spotting its hull like a sickness, spreading aggressively. A volley of violet magics, buzzing through the air loud enough for Kindred to hear, arced from one of Cantrev’s ships and exploded onto the deck of the pirate ship, lighting it ablaze and sending it spinning down into the depths of the Forever Sea.
“Kindred! Get down from there! The reef!” Little Wing’s voice cut through the air, picking Kindred out where she clung to the shroud.
Little Wing had returned to the wheel and clung to it, and the blood spattering her clothes and skin described injuries that Kindred couldn’t see but knew were there.
Kindred swung around to look ahead.
And stopped breathing.
The Errant crested the hill and the world broke before it: huge shards of reef shattered the surface of the Sea, impossibly tall, like monuments to gods forgotten, queens and kings of ages lost to time. The reef, for it was all of a single piece even if it jutted and rose in myriad heights and forms, dominated Kindred’s vision and mind, and she lost the nonsense song the fire sang in the back of her mind, letting it flare into unmitigated chaos once again. She no longer cared—the reef was all, and she felt herself grow to impossible heights in the face of it.
She dropped back to the deck, her knees crying out, though distantly, a cry barely heard through a gale. In her mind, the reef. In her eyes, the reef.
“Hold on!” Kindred shouted to Scindapse as she fell into place before the fire again. “The reef is coming!”
The Errant pitched forward, rushing over and now down the hill, spilling into it, hurtling toward the reef and the pass cutting through it.
“Reef! Reef!” Ragged Sarah called out, as though there was anything else, had ever been anything else.
“Aye!” shouted Little Wing.
“Aye!” shouted Kindred.
“Two ships still in pursuit!” Ragged Sarah shouted.
She did not know what would become of the battle behind them or who continued to follow, but Kindred could not dwell on it for long.
The Errant fell into shadow.
Darkness at night or a heavily clouded day—these were phenomena Kindred knew and understood. On the eternal flatness of the Forever Sea, these were the only interruptions to the eternal sunlight feeding the grasses.
The reef appeared on either side of The Errant, interceding in the sun’s rays, inviting the ship deeper into its shadowed pass. Kindred could feel the reaching thorns of the mountainous reef, sharp and wicked, rising from either side of the ship, strong enough to tear the hull asunder with little effort.
More than anything, Kindred was shocked by the quiet in the pass—the thistle mountains seemed to absorb sound, to devour it whole, and so, after the battle before entry, The Errant was calmed by a sudden quiet that reached aboard the ship and stilled song and shout. The deck became silence, holy and reverential somehow in the darkness of the reef.
This might have gone on, but a whisper-slap broke the stillness: the green hands of grass, the myriad-colored fingers of flowering plants and vines reached over the rail, onto The Errant’s deck, pulling at bundled equipment and spooking those few crew members not keeping the sails or engaged in defense. The burning teeth had brought them too low and now the Sea was coming aboard. The grasping plants eagerly reached for the Errant, some with the dangerous cut of razor edges, others with the blustering blow of fortified stems.
The Errant would not be able to handle this.
Hemmed in by mountainous reefs on either side, followed by enemy ships, sailing straight for an enormous pirate dreadnought, The Errant cut forward. Kindred watched as plants—many the familiar species she had long sought and harvested, now grown wild and unruly—left long, elegant slices in the deck and pulled bundles of rope or equipment roughly to the gunwale before tearing themselves asunder as the ship raced forward and out of their reach.
“Kindred, pull us up!” Little Wing shouted, racing across the deck. She was no longer engaged in battle—the teeth burning in the hearthfire had pulled The Errant far ahead of where Cantrev’s warships battled the pirate cutters, minus the two that still burned hard in pursuit.
“What do we do?” Scindapse asked, looking through the fire at her.
Kindred felt exhaustion sweep over her, and pain too, in her knees, her back, neck, shoulders. Aches and bone-deep exhaustion, and all she wanted was to stop, to give in to the silence of the reef, the pull of the Sea, to step to the gunwale and dive headlong into the darkness. It occurred to her then that her grandmother had been sailing the Roughs when she had walked away into the Sea.