Kindred crawled to Ragged Sarah and checked her pulse before cradling her body away from the violence. Nearby, the captain lay on the dock, breath husking out, shallow and dry. Her eye opened blearily, rolling about, as if drunk, uncomprehending.
The pirates took her, too.
A man struck Little Wing once in the head with a simple club, its weight cutting through the air and eliciting a sickening crunch as it collided with her head. She fell, her body limp.
“Sanctuary!” Kindred heard someone cry, a terrified voice in the storm. “We beg sanctuary!”
But that would not do; Sarah had made that much clear to Kindred.
Languages carved like gravestones into a central column. Words old as paths underfoot.
Kindred cast her mind back to that pocket of joy she’d found with Sarah up in the crow’s nest. Through the haze of her exhaustion and fear, pain and worry, the sounds of that language were distant, garbled in her memory.
A prairie wind filled her lungs as Kindred sucked in a breath before speaking, trying desperately to remember the feeling of sounds that could pull the curve from a spine, words that built a house of power from tongue and teeth, lips and lungs.
She raised her eyes above the fray as she spoke and was struck by the sudden realization that there were people living in the branches. Rounded, curved constructions of wood and cloth bumped out from the larger branches, like growths on an arm or leg, and from these more people were emerging. They carried weapons and climbed quickly down.
But the moment Kindred began speaking, the pirates stopped and the storm of violence stilled. Heads snapped toward her, eyes widening. She heard a hiss of breath nearby, but Kindred could not stop. Where was the end of the phrase? Had she spoken it already? Where had she started?
Still the language spilled from her; she spoke without understanding.
Two men stepped from the crowd, one with a long face and long nose, black hair tied behind his head. The other was shorter, grubbier, with tangled hair and a look of shock and something else—surprise? excitement?—playing across his face. A frown creased his brow, his eyes wide as he stepped close to Kindred, the larger man just behind him.
They listened to her.
Breathless, her voice cracking, Kindred stopped. As she drew in another breath to continue, the men looked at one another, and the grubby one, his mouth set in a disappointed slant, said, “So very close. But not quite. It’ll have to be the test for them.”
“Please, some of our crew need medical help. Please,” she said.
The larger man nodded and stepped close to Kindred, his hand rising and falling in a strike.
Stars and darkness slashed across Kindred’s vision.
After that, she watched as if from a distance as her hands and those of her crewmates were tied, and each one of them was carried back down the dock and into the Once-City, through an enormous archway carved into the trunk of the tree.
Behind her, Kindred could just hear the sound of the Forever Sea still rustling from the descent of The Errant, from Kindred’s choice.
Inside the archway, they descended a grand stairway cut into the wood of the tree, circling around and down a central column.
And the whole of it glowed, emitting a light like sun and honey and fresh-gathered goldenrod nestled into the crook of an elbow.
The pillar around which the stairs descended was carved with all manner of pictures and runes and languages, all of which Kindred longed to rake her eyes over but could not conjure the energy to. Here were the languages Sarah had talked of with such awe, made of deep cuts from ages before.
Down and down they went, and Kindred let her head loll against her captor, giving in to the pain in her head and letting her eyes unfocus and follow nothing, the carvings in the central column passing before her over and over and over. Nausea swirled in her stomach and she wondered somewhat idly if she would throw up on this person carrying her.
It wasn’t sleep that took her finally, nor was it unconsciousness. She simply floated away on the long waves of pain rocking her head, still aware of her body, still aware of being carried by this pirate deeper and deeper into the Once-City. Questions moved through her mind without weight or importance: How deep did this go? What would the pirates do with the crew? Was she about to die? About to live? Was this the end?
Finally, she was set down in a place darker than the central staircase, and she rested for the first time in days, sleeping finally, dreaming not at all.
* * *
Kindred woke to screaming and the dying song of the hearthfire running through her mind.
The screams came from far off in the darkness, muffled and distant, but they jerked her upright nonetheless. Groggy, sore, and thirsty, Kindred looked around, trying to piece together where she was and how she’d gotten there. Slowly the memories came tumbling to her through the darkness, bits that she stitched together into something like sense. The pirates. The staircase. The great tree.
The Errant.
She listened to the melody picking out notes in her mind, like her hearthfire but not. She looked around but found no fires. Maybe it was the songs of pirate vessels nearby, burning bones with abandon. Or maybe the hearthfire of The Errant—her hearthfire—still burned below, wrecked on the Sea floor but still alive, calling out for her.
Kindred swallowed the pain that thought conjured and focused on her surroundings. She looked around, still feeling disoriented. She was in a cell, the space big enough perhaps for ten paces from wall to wall, the floor a wood so hard, it felt like stone. Above, the ceiling hung close, low enough that Kindred thought she could probably touch it while standing.
The cell was dark, but not so dark she couldn’t see.
Forming a third wall before her were bars made of what looked like plaited Sea grass, and as she grabbed one, Kindred was surprised to find it didn’t give with her weight. It felt like metal, like stone, solid and unbreakable. Kindred stared hard at the bars for a moment before looking past them.
Breath hissed from her as she sat back, pushing away from the bars.
A person squatted there, a mass of shadows in the low light of what looked like a hallway. A man, she thought. Barely visible, he did not react to Kindred. He did not move.
He watched.
“Water,” Kindred mumbled, her voice cracked and dry. “Can I have some water, please?”
No response.
“Can you hear me? Hello?”
No response. As if he didn’t exist. Or she didn’t.
Kindred slumped back, eyeing the man and trying to figure out what to do next.
A soft whisper sounded behind her, a sound like coming home, and Kindred turned to find the Sea.
Where a fourth wall should have been was instead empty, a vast swath of nothing standing between Kindred where she sat on the too-hard wooden floor and the shifting, shadowed happening of the Sea.