Some stood, soft-jawed and silent, eyes wide.
Some collapsed, unable to bear the weight of the hearthfire’s music.
Some wept, for its beauty.
Kindred often forgot that she alone could hear the canticle of the hearthfire. Why it sang for all now, she didn’t know, but as those around her fell into amazed silence at its song, Kindred felt a spike of fear.
Something was wrong with the fire. Within its song, she heard decay, and in its flame, beneath the riot of shifting, rippling colors, she saw a broken ending. Though it flared and roared with life, Kindred saw an absence at its heart, growing.
The teeth still burned and were holding The Errant down, and so Kindred, trying to ignore the sadness inside the fire, moved forward and grabbed one of the few unused bones nearby. She stabbed it deep into the hearthfire’s heart, burying it in the soft loam of the coals, speaking her simple message: Rise.
Kindred’s simple build overwhelmed the drag of the teeth, and the hearthfire roared, the music swelling over the deck, the colors flashing bright for a moment—reds and golds and purples—before they disappeared, swallowed by the ambient fading daylight creeping through the grasses.
To Kindred, it was a goodbye.
The Errant rose, gaining speed and altitude, climbing, rising, rising.
“Hold on!” Kindred shouted, the speed of their rise pushing her back against the mast, flattening her against its solidity.
The surface broke before them, and The Errant cut high into the air, its speed carrying it wholly out the Sea, leaving a zephyr of cut leaves and petals trailing behind the ship, connecting it back to the Sea, describing its arc.
Above her, Kindred heard a shout, and she watched as Ragged Sarah, who had been climbing down from the crow’s nest, fell to the deck, her descent checked and hindered by tangled ropes and shrouds, lines and sails. Still, Kindred heard the snapping of bones—a sound she knew well, very well—as Ragged Sarah hit the deck and was silent, still. Kindred tried to push herself forward, but The Errant angled up and had become a shifting hillside, impossible to traverse.
Frustrated and anxious, Kindred held her breath as the ship rose, and clung with all her strength to the mast as it crested, slowing to a near-halt there in the sky, touching its apex and stopping for a bare moment before completing the arc, diving back to the Sea.
The bare bits of food she’d eaten in the last day—boiled ant stew, red leaf salad—shifted ominously in her belly as the descent sharpened.
With a world-shaking crash, The Errant rejoined the Sea, and next to Kindred, the hearthfire pulsed and groaned, reasserting its upward hold on the ship, checking its rapid descent.
Kindred’s teeth slammed together upon impact just as her body collided with the deck. Her shoulder exploded in pain, and her knees knocked at the wood of the deck hard enough for her to think for a moment that she had shattered them, though she could still move and flex her legs, so maybe not.
And then The Errant was sailing again, rocking back and forth in the Sea as it moved forward still, crew bathed in sunlight and cheering, shouting their joy into the sky.
Kindred heard betrayal in those shouts, felt the dissonance between the crew’s joy and her own longing to dive back under, to experience again that cathedral of shadowed green and the promise of a fuller darkness below.
But she couldn’t think of that now. Kindred pushed herself up, her whole body feeling like a muscle overextended and seizing, but she was up, lurching and lunging forward to where Ragged Sarah lay, a huddled mass, unmoving. Kindred knelt and felt for Ragged Sarah’s pulse, leaned in and listened for her breath.
And listened.
And felt.
And listened.
Finally, there, a quickening under Kindred’s fingers and a soft breeze, slow and thin, moving in and out of Sarah’s mouth.
Kindred leaned in, paying back her debt to Ragged Sarah, placing a kiss on her forehead. She found the broken bone—her leg, twisted at an awkward angle. It would be painful, but she could move Sarah without worry.
And then she was up, pulling Sarah toward the mainmast, tying her there, securing her against whatever was coming next. Kindred checked once more, assuring herself of breath, of pulse, and then she was moving back to the hearthfire.
It gasped and coughed, spasming to great heights and then sullen coals. Kindred listened for its song and could barely make it out, the notes no longer powerful, no longer victorious. Instead, it wheezed a minor melody, and it slowed, careening toward an end, a finality. Its last song.
Smoke coughed from the flames in ragged clots; sickly reds and whites shot through the flickering fire.
“What do I do, Kindred?” Scindapse asked, sprawled before the fire. “The song is fading. I can barely hear it.”
The Errant continued to list and rock, sloughing back and forth, and Kindred realized it had nothing to do with the aftereffects of their dive back to the Sea.
The hearthfire was giving up.
“No, no, no,” Kindred whispered, leaning in to the fire, singing, flicking aside the remnants of the burning teeth still caught in the coals, sweeping out ash, calling to the flames and encouraging them.
But it was no good. The hearthfire’s song continued to slur and fade, like a fresh painting left out in the rain, first losing articulation, definition, and then fading and mixing together into a mess before finally, finally washing away into nothing, emptiness.
But ring the fire in bone? And it’s the deeps for you, my dear.
“The dreadnought comes about!” came the call from Quixa, who had climbed foremast, filling in for Ragged Sarah. She paused, and then shouted, her voice different, awed somehow. “Ahead! The Once-City ahead!”
Kindred didn’t know how much longer the hearthfire had. Already, The Errant had begun to lose speed and power. They needed to dock and soon.
Kindred pushed through the cries of protest from her body and climbed the mainmast again, looking back and seeing the dreadnought coming about; it would catch them soon if they didn’t sink first.
And then she turned around and looked forward.
The tree gave lie to the Sea, challenged forever, contested infinity. In the shattered thrust of its branches, in the round resilience of its enormous trunk, in the ghost grey of its furrowed, livid bark, the tree anchored the present.
Vines rose from the deeps and covered the tree in an autumnal funeral gown, bursting flowers of orange and red, goldenrod and brown. They snaked and wormed in and through the tree, coloring it with life. As Kindred stared, flowers opened and closed demurely, like eyes. A warning and invitation alike.
Dotting the field before it were more trees, smaller and boasting branches full of green leaves.
But below, a rash of desolation in the beauty of the Once-City, were the Greys. Stretches of the dead and dying grasses striped the Roughs around the tree, trapping it in, banding its many-colored beauty in iron blight. Avenues of clean, clear grasses wove through the patches of Greys, but it was clear to see: the problem was there as well. The Marchess had been right; the Sea was dying.