Low, rounded buildings made of some sort of stone or clay huddled near to one another like gently arcing hills, somehow accentuating the stretch of this space instead of filling it. It was Arcadia’s opposite in every way: although a huge wall ringed the level, blocking out the Sea, this was a space that imitated the prairie’s openness. It didn’t shy away from the maddening wide smile of the Sea; it embraced it.
Light, too, filled the space, emanating from the stairway that rose through the center of the level. The wood itself was suffused with it, glowing like a gentle sun. Her memories of being carried down those stairs began returning to her. She didn’t know how long it had been since they arrived—days or half-days or whole spans—but it felt a lifetime before. Before descending those stairs, the Sea had been an imagining, the darkness below only something she’d kissed for a moment.
But now.
Kindred looked with new eyes, breathed with new lungs. She had seen the shape of the Sea, loosed her hands in its shadowed dance. If some madness had gripped the Marchess before her fall, before her leap, then it now gripped Kindred, too.
Something had changed within her.
She felt wild.
The glow of the staircase was a soft gold, as if it held within it the slow beauty and reinvigorating laziness of a cloud-free evening, sun dipping but not yet gone, light the color of sweet honey. Though they were far below the surface of the Sea, the light suffused the very air there, picking out the buildings in soft curves.
In the prairie wind, out the prairie wind, Kindred breathed as she followed the watchers and the others along a path cutting between two rows of the hilly buildings. There were no windows that she could see, and no doors either. As they passed within an arm’s reach of one, Kindred thought she heard a whispered conversation coming through the wall, spoken too quickly for her to understand, and in a language she couldn’t grasp. It mingled uncomfortably with the music still twisting through her mind, and suddenly Scindapse’s words—“I can still hear it”—echoed in her head, and Kindred realized what that melody she had been hearing really was.
A hearthfire. Broken, fragmented, wrong—but it was the music of a hearthfire nonetheless. Scindapse must have thought it was The Errant still sounding its melody from the deeps.
Maybe it was from one of the ships above, but that seemed wrong, too somehow.
A burst of whispers emanated from one of the hilly buildings nearby, startling Kindred.
“What is that?” she asked one of the watchers, the woman who had been crouching outside of Scindapse’s cell.
She shook her head, stopping to listen along with Kindred.
“No one really knows,” she finally said, smiling at the mystery of it. “Sometimes, they whisper. We’ve cracked open a few, but they’re always empty.”
“You didn’t build these?” Kindred asked, cocking her head to the side.
“Oh, no. The first citizens carved the stairs and the levels from the tree,” the watcher said as they walked, gesturing around herself at the vast open space of this level, “but these are more recent, within the last few hundred years or so. They’re not even buildings, so far as we can tell. They’re growing. Plants from the prairie, we think.”
Kindred slowed, seeing anew the low shapes, hearing anew the strange whispers.
“There will be time for exploring later,” the watcher said, grinning at Kindred and continuing on. “And these aren’t even the best mysteries.”
* * *
They walked up and through the second level without stopping. As they rose, the music of the hearthfire Kindred had been hearing faded from her mind, first to a whisper, then a suggestion, then gone.
After trying and failing to talk to the others, Kindred gave up and simply followed, letting her eyes wander. She had to keep reminding herself that now—right now, with this step and that one—she was below the Forever Sea, closer than ever to her grandmother and the great unknown that lay below.
Now that her stomach was no longer wracked by hunger and her thirst was dulled for the time being, Kindred let herself open to this wondrous, weird place. As they climbed the stairs past the second level, Kindred thought she spied trees—trees! But it was too dark, the glow of the staircase dimmed there from its glorious gold to a sedated green, and they were moving too fast to stop and see.
Instead, Kindred examined the central column of the staircase, picking out the shapes of characters and letters etched into the wood. Scenes, too, were carved there: boats cutting through waves of grass, cloud-crowded skies roaring with once-in-a-year storms; people, taller and strangely shaped, striding across the Sea as if floating, hands afire with magic, smiles wicked; the Once-City itself, etched deeply into its own bones, shining like a torch. Languages and scenes and figures took up every bit of space on the central column, the carvings perfect and sometimes layered over one another, tiny scenes cut into the space between letters, words tumbling around the outline of a ship.
On reaching the first level, they emerged into a chaotic city. It was as if the Sea itself had been transplanted and brought inside, unbroken and alive unlike the flats around Arcadia. Here, plants of all kinds bloomed and interlocked with one another, a slow wrestle of greens and golds, reds and blues, silvers and whites and browns.
And just as wild were the people moving through the space, running and laughing and playing and working and living. Kindred saw a nearby clutch of bush morning glory—so rare in the flattened grasses around Arcadia that she couldn’t even begin to calculate how much a single flower might sell for. The plants rustled precipitously and then exploded as a young girl came running through, followed closely by an older man, his laughter the same melody as hers, only weathered. Father and child.
The bush bounced back from their quick egress, though Kindred watched in horror and amazement as two flowers, lavender-pink petals funneling down to dark purpled throats, fell slowly to the rich soil.
Soil, Kindred thought, wriggling to look back down the steps. She’d thought nothing of the black bands between levels, dismissing them as simply the floor of one level, the ceiling of another. But now she saw it differently: the thickness of the separation, the dirt and soil spilling through slats of wood ringing the staircase, containing the great amounts of dark earth.
The watchers stepped off the staircase and entered the wilderness, moving among and laughing with those already there.
“New citizens!” one of the watchers shouted, gesturing toward Kindred and the others, who moved close to one another, unsure of themselves in this space, forgetting for the moment the fracture between them.
“Hooray!” came a chorused shout, from some Kindred could see and some obscured by the storm of plants around them. “Welcome!”
What was this place? Were these people, smiling and joyous and welcoming, the same who cut into Arcadian grasses and destroyed ships and lives in their reaving? Did these smiles curdle into cruelty? Or were they the ones Seraph had talked about, the ones who still kept to the old ways, and the pirates were entirely separate, living above in the branches of the tree?