And yet there was Long Quixa, taking the wheel again.
There was Little Wing, her face still clouded with fear and suspicion but her purpose pure as she climbed the mast without hesitation, slung herself up to the sail, and put out the fires still smoldering there from the prairie mages’ attacks, began patching despite wind and danger, despite Roughs and reef.
There Stone-Gwen, recoiling rope, restacking casting plants, keeping The Errant’s little world in order.
There Castor Twin-Made, executing the more dangerous bugs and creatures finding their way aboard the ship. The crew would eat well that night if they survived the pass.
There Wints, helping.
There Syl Shieldqueen, helping.
There Grimm and Cora the Wraith, helping.
Here, Scindapse, young and untrained and terrified and ready to do whatever she could to help.
Everywhere Kindred looked, her crew helped one another, bolstered the endeavor they all shared: the ship, their purpose, their lives, like a network of roots wrapped completely in one another, tied so tightly as to give no sense of an end or beginning.
The Errant screamed through the valley pass, shadowed and sunk deep, plants and bugs, the life of the prairie, spilling onto the deck.
“Kindred! Get us up!”
“Ship ahead!” Ragged Sarah shouted, nearly speaking over the captain’s order. “Pirate dreadnought! We need to get up!”
Caught, Kindred thought, a chill running echoes through her body, remembering Ragged Sarah’s report of the calling.
She rose unsteadily and ran forward, ignoring Scindapse’s cries behind her, feet unsure beneath her, her progress slowed by trips and falls at times. But yes, there before them, a great pirate ship, masts rising from it in multitudes like weapons, its hull a huge, imposing shield, blocking their way. The ship took up much of the pass with its enormous girth, and even from this far away Kindred could see the casting fires burning all across the deck, pirate mages ready to fling forth their violent magics.
“Warships behind and closing still!” Sarah shouted from above.
A pirate dreadnought ahead; Arcadian warships behind.
And between them, like a rodent caught in the closing jaws of a predator, The Errant.
“Kindred! Pull us up!” Little Wing shouted as she ran past toward the front of the ship, making ready the defenses there, paltry and few as they were.
The steep, thorned slope of the reef pass gave them no chance of escape, and they would have no chance at any kind of defensive magic aft or fore if the Roughs continued to claw aboard the ship the way they were now.
Kindred returned to the hearthfire and stared into it, frightened and unsure what to do.
“What do we do?” Scindapse asked, voice quiet and frightened.
“Bring us up, Kindred! And give us speed! We might be able to skirt around them,” Little Wing shouted, though with a look of desperate doubt.
“Warships closing!” Ragged Sarah called. “Dreadnought ahead!”
Kindred reached into the fire to pull out the teeth, to bring them up, but she stopped, stilled by the silence of the reef and a sudden image of the Sea below, the stillness of the deeps, unperturbed by the quarrels and quibbles of the surface world.
When they had gone under before, it was the wyrm pulling them down. They were unwilling victims to it.
But now?
Enemies before and behind and nowhere to go.
Up, Little Wing ordered.
Up, the crew screamed.
Up, Ragged Sarah cried.
Down, Kindred’s heart told her.
As the crew shouted at the appearance of the dreadnought, as Little Wing bellowed again, as Cantrev’s ships pursued.
Kindred reached for the hearthfire and sang.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Kindred, dear, bring those bones over here.”
Kindred lifted the armful of bones and brought them to her grandmother, who squatted next to the hearthfire.
“Would you like to help me keep the fire?”
Kindred shrugged, silent. She knew her grandmother was worried about her, that she’d gone beyond the required period of mourning-silence, but she simply felt no urge to speak.
Silence, she’d found, was addictive.
This was the Marchess’s most recent attempt to bring Kindred out of her mourning. Revenger had been in at port for a few days, and the Marchess had pulled Kindred out of their room at the inn to sail around the harbor. Red Alay had even volunteered to take the wheel while the Marchess taught Kindred, and so the three of them toddled around Arcadia’s harbor.
“Or we could cast out for dinner? We might get lucky and catch a fire ant or two. I think there may even be tcaz qoilti in these grasses.”
Not even the possibility of her favorite meal could tempt Kindred. She frowned, shrugged, and looked back toward her book, which she had borrowed from her grandmother’s shelf and which lay on the deck near the closet of bones. It was one she’d read before—the story of Laris Thrice-Born, the mythic hero born once in the sky, once on the land, and once in the Sea. Kindred found herself reading the final chapters over and over, the pages filled with descriptions of Laris’s birth deep in the Sea, the wyrms and leviathans singing the hero’s mythic arrival. For some reason, reading of the dread deeps offered her something—not comfort exactly, but a calming, numbing quiet that complemented her silence. She imagined herself wrapped in the dark nothing found at the bottom of the Sea. For so many, stories of the deeps had become nothing more than children’s tales, myths meant to entertain and frighten, but hollow of substance. What good were stories of bottom-dwelling beasts with glowing skins like fire and whole civilizations living and speaking and warring in the dark deeps when the real world, filled with sun and ships, offered gold to be earned, homes to buy, drinks to be had? For Kindred, though, they offered relief and a sense that somewhere else, somewhere deeper, a different world lay waiting to be discovered.
“Come on, little ghost,” Red Alay called from the helm, smiling. “It’s about time this old ship got a new keeper, I’d say. Go on and learn a thing or two.”
The Marchess flicked her eyebrows up and down and smiled at Kindred, who sighed and sat by the hearthfire, near enough to watch her grandmother but far enough away to be safe.
“For you, my dear,” the Marchess said, sitting down next to Kindred, “I will break with tradition and offer you a piece of knowledge, free of guilt or grift. The old ways dictate that a new hearthfire keeper must steal the techniques and knowledge of those who have come before her. And the old ways are best. She must work to understand for herself, by herself. But for you—”