The Marchess reached out one long finger and tapped Kindred’s nose.
“For you I will break tradition and offer a truth. Now lean in, away from prying ears.”
The Marchess nodded her head toward Red Alay, who chuckled and looked pointedly away. Kindred leaned in.
“Never, under any circumstances, circumscribe the fire,” the Marchess whispered, her voice rough and hot against Kindred’s ear.
Kindred frowned and looked at the hearthfire, which burned a bright blue. An intricate structure of bone curled and swooped inside the flames, beautiful to Kindred even then. She knew the word—circumscribe—had read it in a book, just as she experienced most words for the first time.
But what it had to do with the hearthfire or the Sea or the ship, she didn’t know.
She turned back to the Marchess, who still leaned in and had fixed her with an expectant look. Kindred huffed out a sigh.
“Why?” she whispered, and the Marchess smiled, radiant and enormous. When she’d first met her grandmother, Kindred had thought she had the smile of a madwoman. She thought the same still, only now she loved it.
“Ah-ah. You have been reading of Laris Thrice-Born recently, yes? Of his third and final birth deep in the Sea. Would you like to see him down there? Down in the darkness where secrets and whispers live? Would you like to visit the peoples of the deeps? Drop like a stone into their world? The quickest way down, my darling girl, is to circumscribe the fire. Put it out and the heat will keep the ship afloat for some time, days perhaps.”
Her grandmother leaned in close to Kindred, smiling and mad and wonderful.
“But ring the fire in bone, and it’s the deeps for you, my dear.”
* * *
Kindred reached into the fire and made of it a ring of bone.
It took a moment—her single hand fumbling with bones, breaking apart the remnants of the sail still holding in the flames, scattering to the edges the fiery comets the teeth had become.
“Oh, no!” Scindapse shouted, watching Kindred’s actions with dawning understanding. So quick to learn. She would be a good keeper someday.
The chaotic song of the hearthfire gasped for breath, strangled, as Kindred pushed the last section of the circle into place, a collar for the wild beast the teeth had made the fire. Rebellious heat pushed at the ring of bones, and Kindred felt them flex, straining at the power of the flames, but the circle held.
Silence and stillness enveloped the world for the space of a single breath. Kindred heard the remnants of shouts hanging in the air, begging and demanding and pleading for the ship to rise, to again skim grass and cut sky. Bugs paused in their scrambling to get aboard or off. A plague beetle, as big around as Kindred’s head and the purple of plums, clung to the gunwale with one furred, clawed leg; its myriad eyes gazed shock.
The world stopped and held, and for that instant, Kindred felt the Sea, not just the grasses near the ship.
No. Her hand in the fire, the circle closing and closed, Kindred felt the song of the deep, heard the shush-hush of subsea winds pressing through endless stalks of grass, tasted the bitterness and sweetness and earthiness of plants that had never known sunlight.
In that single breath, Kindred fell spirit-deep into the Sea and knew the reach of tentacles longer and wider than a ship. Creatures like cities, populated and hungry, meted their impossible widths through the widening arches between pale stalks, throwing the world around them into garish, distorting light.
Plants with flowers that drank in darkness and extruded glowing red sludge. Vines with bulbous, bulging pockets of pus that whispered possible futures into the eternal night. Rocks bigger than houses, hollow, filled with the twisting ridges of labyrinths, holding dead languages at their centers like prizes or punishments. Soil that flashed with heat and then extreme cold.
Kindred saw all of this, all and more.
And then The Errant dipped down. Kindred knew what was coming, and the sudden drop still pulled at the base of her stomach and forced her to cling hard to the mast at her back.
Other crew members were not so prepared.
Ragged Sarah shouted in alarm. Long Quixa yelped and dropped her spear in favor of grabbing on to a pair of taut lines. Syl Shieldqueen, who had just finished scooping a plague beetle off the ship with her great shield, actually rose into the air before dropping back roughly to the deck. Scindapse was ready for it, being so near to the source, and she stayed in place.
Kindred tried to shut out their cries of distress and anger—Little Wing’s voice cutting through clearest of all. If they were going to survive this, the fire would need the whole of her concentration.
Quickly, as though it had never existed at all, the sky above disappeared from view, eaten by the rough surface of the Sea, though not before Kindred saw flares of magic fly by overhead. The dreadnought.
And then The Errant sailed through a cathedral of grass and darkness, the last hints of light filtering down from above disappearing, disappearing, disappeared. The world became only the walls of this cathedral, holy and pure, like the folds of thick cloth cinched tight high above, plants climbing for daylight bowing around the heft of the ship to create a shifting pocket in the Sea’s close press, lit by the aft casting fire and the flickering, feeble light of Kindred’s gasping hearthfire—now a weak, pale blue.
How different it was to sail below of her own choice, not dragged down but diving. Choosing it. Her own path, taken by her own choice.
Silence there was a near ubiquity, the only sounds the constant whisper of The Errant as it pushed through thick grasses, parting them like a veil, endlessly.
No one spoke, no one shouted. Orders were useless in this world, logic and hierarchy figments from a bizarre imagination. Here were only the cathedral of the Sea and the prayers of the penitent.
Around Kindred’s outstretched hand, the hearthfire began to die. The ring of bones continued to drive the ship down, and as the flames shrank, whispering their pitiful dirge, the descent of The Errant sharpened, the nose of the ship pulling down and down and down.
Kindred tried and failed to calculate whether they were past the dreadnought by now, but she couldn’t know, and whether or not they were, it was time to act. The hearthfire was down to a few flickering flames, and if it died completely, The Errant would be halfway to the bottom of the Sea by the time she got it started again.
A part of her thought that sounded like a very good idea.
Kindred shook her head and, focusing, sang a song of breaking, of destruction, though quiet and low, observing the holiness of this place. And she pushed at the circle of bone, which broke.
The hearthfire burst into song, filling the green cathedral with music—loud and visible, manifesting in colors like the lights Kindred had seen in the sky on those cold, clear nights on the Sea. Like phantoms, ghosts dancing in and out of existence, the lights moved with the music of the flames, no longer just in Kindred’s mind but ringing out over the deck, striking off wood and writhing around lines, confronting and infusing the crew.