And then Little Wing was shouting for her, shouting as The Errant dipped into the Sea and then resolutely rose again, listing starboard and then sailing true.
Kindred fell-climbed down to the deck, narrowly missing Ragged Sarah, and then she was at the hearthfire again.
“Kindred! I’ve got no control!” Little Wing shouted from the helm, her whole figure set against the wheel, which jerked and wrenched in her hands.
“The fire can’t hold!” Kindred called back. “It’s giving up the ghost.”
Kindred looked at Little Wing, expecting anger or confusion or an impossible order.
Little Wing only nodded, her jaw set.
“Make ready emergency port! All crew make ready! Make ready!”
Kindred returned to the hearthfire, which, in its death throes, had grown greedy, devouring much of the bone Kindred had placed in it. She rushed to the bone closet and took out several more, more or less dumping them into the fire. It needed fuel without articulation or elegance, and though it pained her to do it, Kindred knew it was the only way. There was no time for a proper build, and no need.
The Errant slowed and sped in great lurches as it caught on and broke through morasses of the Greys, each one threatening to halt the ship entirely, kill its momentum, and pull them all down.
“Port ahead! Port ahead!”
“Slow, keeper! Slow us down!” Little Wing called. She hauled hard on the wheel, every bit of strength she had, it seemed, to pull even the slightest bit, to steer them away from the trenches of Greys.
“Aye,” Kindred called, flattening the bones in the fire, giving them as much stability as she could, and as little speed, though still enough to push through any remaining Greys. It was shoddy, speculative work, and Kindred did it quickly. She could cut the fire off, she knew, end its suffering totally, but she needed to see what she was doing; she needed to see the dock, the port, whatever it was.
Once more, she pushed herself up, and as the rest of the crew rushed about the deck, grabbing emergency supplies, stuffing bits of this and that in their pockets, making ready to leap from the ship, Kindred climbed the mainmast and looked.
The great tree was larger now, a monolith of impossible proportions in front of them, and she could see great docks extended. For a moment, she wondered how they were held up, but then she realized.
They weren’t docks. They were roots, great winding roots that had been mostly straightened somehow and that reached across the surface of the Sea. Some had ships already docked along them, and Kindred imagined there must be a cradle of some sort strung below and between the roots. They were close enough now—and growing ever closer—to see people standing out on the roots, watching their staggering, rough approach, pointing and shouting and staring.
The Errant was curving into the space between two extending roots, neither of which had any ships docked, and Kindred saw where Little Wing meant for them to disembark. She was going to run them alongside one of the roots, and if Kindred could slow the ship enough to let the crew leap from the side, then maybe they could all get off safely, and maybe the cradle—or whatever they used here—would stop The Errant just as it had in Arcadia days earlier.
It was thin, Kindred knew, but it was something.
“Slow!” Little Wing shouted, and Kindred dropped back down to the deck, lunged for the hearthfire, and, as she had done only a few days earlier—a few days in which everything had changed, in which her world had grown, had deepened—Kindred threw her cloak over the fire and fell upon it.
The fire coughed a last breath, a last flare of power and control and song and life, and Kindred flashed to her first time stepping aboard The Errant, her first time singing to the fire, with the fire. It had been her best friend aboard the ship since she joined—her only friend for so long—and she bid it farewell now, singing her thanks into the muffled folds of her cloak, whispering her gratitude to the flames.
The hearthfire sighed and gave in, its work done.
The Errant tipped forward.
“Off! Off!”
Kindred pushed herself up, feeling the great vibrations running through the ship, vibrating the hull and deck, and she began untying Ragged Sarah, and lifting, straining to lift, straining and pulling and she didn’t have the strength. Like the hearthfire, her muscles were ready to give up.
“Help me!” she called to Scindapse, who rushed over to lift Ragged Sarah with her. Together, they started toward the edge of the deck.
“Move,” Little Wing shouted, racing past her. She had abandoned the wheel, tied it off, and had darted into the captain’s quarters. She ran now with Captain Caraway held in her arms like a child, cradled there.
In that moment, Kindred recognised Little Wing as a captain, who wouldn’t let any of her crew go, who was loyal to her ship and her people until the very end.
And they moved, running for the edge of the ship. Prairie grasses and vining plants and flowers and thorns and a hundred other species Kindred didn’t know had begun to reach aboard as The Errant sank, and Kindred realized it wasn’t any sort of cradle grinding against the hull—it was the root, the dock. Little Wing had turned The Errant into the extending root, perhaps to slow them down.
The Errant was sinking.
She was sinking.
The Sea reached for the ship, devouring it.
Kindred ran.
Little Wing ran.
The Sea reached.
Kindred leapt to the gunwale, taking all of Ragged Sarah’s weight from Scindapse, knowing the jump would be easier with just one of them carrying her, and then she was in the air, Sarah hanging over her shoulder. Ahead, Little Wing arced from the ship, the captain still held safe in her arms, the ship disappearing into the Sea beneath, behind her. Kindred hit the worn wood of the root dock and tumbled, losing her grip on Sarah, who rolled to a halt nearby.
Kindred came to her own stop and turned in time to see the spike of the mainmast fall beneath the waves, extended like a single finger reaching for the sky.
As the sickened Forever Sea took The Errant for its own, Kindred felt tears in her eyes, and she whispered her farewell in the lilting, shifting language of the flames.
“But the pirates of the Once-City will have to wait,” the storyteller says, breaking off from the tale to a chorus of disappointed gasps and sighs. “I suspect we could all use a rest.”
He is eyeing the smaller of the two fires, which, unlike the other, has not been fed throughout the tale and is fueled by a single tangle of thorns and vines. Every community has their own way of tracking time and what might pass for days, but Twist is the only one that burns row vines, which take somewhere near a whole day—what would once have been the length of the sun’s race across the sky—to burn down. The storyteller can feel the sun still lighting the world, and he knows it is actually midmorning there in Twist, but he says nothing.