She couldn’t reconcile the stories of pirates, the fact of them, with this, and so Kindred walked with that dissonance, picking at it like a scab.
“This is compass plant!” Cora said, gesturing toward a stalk boasting beautiful yellow flowers rising next to the path they followed. “I thought it was extinct. A handful of those flowers could buy you a mansion on Arcadia! Two, maybe!”
A watcher walking beside her laughed and plucked off a few of the flower heads. She handed them to Cora.
“There you go. I don’t know about a mansion here, but they make a wonderful soup if prepared correctly.”
So it went.
Plants only rumored, flowers only ever described in wistful tones late into the night, vines mentioned in increasingly esoteric texts: Kindred saw more and more pieces of the world they had always just assumed to be gone. Their responses moved quickly from loud exclamations to silent wonder.
Soon enough, the plants began to give way to settlement, though not as Kindred would have expected. Instead of plants cut back to make room for houses and streets and market stalls, all those things had simply been integrated into the wilderness itself.
Walls were braided together out of living grasses and plants; roads and paths were simply the places where the wilderness had been parted and pulled away to form structures. Entire homes were built from the still-living growth of thick plants braided and plaited together.
Children stuck their heads out of windows framed by wreathed blue grama, and Kindred saw a man walking into his house through a doorway made of living switchgrass and covered in tendrils of prairie smoke dropping down from above, making a door of sorts. The people of this city lived in this wilderness—in and with it.
Kindred thought back to Arcadia and the layout of the island, every building and road and structure created to keep the Sea at bay, to keep the natural world either out or contained in tiny squares.
Cantrev had always talked about how the pirates living in the Once-City were different from Arcadians, how they were cruel and dangerous and evil. But Kindred saw now a truer difference.
Arcadians fought against the prairie wilderness, bending it to their wills whenever possible.
The people of the Once-City lived within the prairie, had in fact bent themselves to its will.
Where that left the tree-dwellers who lived above, Kindred didn’t yet know.
A memory at once painful and sweet rose in Kindred: her grandmother standing aboard Revenger, gesturing up to the sails as the ship pulled out from port. The Marchess was always happiest when leaving the city.
“Let us bend in the wind as the grasses of the Sea and only then be ourselves,” she had said, smiling at Kindred, who thought it a quote from one of the scribes until Red Alay corrected her later that day.
“Ah, no, little ghost. Them’s your grandmother’s words, through and through.”
Maybe the Marchess had never set foot there, but Kindred felt her presence all the same. In the respect given to green growth, in the grin of a child crawling through creeping vines, Kindred saw her grandmother. As she walked behind the remains of The Errant’s crew through and out of the wilderness at the center of the first level of the Once-City, Kindred thought about wind, about wildness, about the world.
* * *
The chaos slowly coalesced into more familiar scenes: streets and paths made of stone and untangled by prairie plants growing over and around them; houses and buildings made of wood and brick and stone, though these were still rare in comparison to the structures built of grasses—cut from wherever they had once grown but grasses nonetheless.
Soon, Kindred found herself in front of a tall building backed against the outer shell of this level. The building appeared to be made entirely of prairie grasses woven together in increasingly intricate braids and loops. It towered over her, a feat of craft three stories tall. She found herself looking up and up, to the top of the building and beyond, wondering how the wilderness dominating so much of the center of this level was sustained and fed.
Above she found her answer.
Great apertures had been cut into the uppermost part of the shell all around this level. Sunlight reached long-fingered hands in through these cuts, and that alone might have been enough light for the plants, but then there were the shields.
Like coins or eyes or drops of rain, metal shields covered the ceiling of this level, their surfaces buffed and scrubbed until they shone, their placement angled to reflect the incoming sunlight down into the air, nourishing plant and person alike. The staircase offered its golden glow, but these shields caught and angled in the naturally occurring sunlight from outside the city.
Kindred longed to keep looking, but the rest—watchers and crewmembers alike—were walking into the building.
Inside, there were no rooms, not in any sense Kindred was used to. There were no interior walls, and the exterior walls, Kindred realized, had been plaited and set in such a way as to create all curves inside. There were no safe angles and straight lines there, no small boxes to cultivate human domination. This was a world of slow curves and luxurious arcs, of spaces that seemed to continue, always continue.
It was the Once-City itself but in miniature. This first floor was a single, large room and had a few people working at simple desks made of grass and arranged with no particular pattern or method. A winding staircase rose up from the center of the floor.
Kindred was escorted up this staircase to the next floor, which took up the remainder of the building, the ceiling vaulting up and up, pulling her eyes with it, demanding she see it.
Figures danced in the grasses braided together to form the ceiling, animals and plants and humans all articulated through the twists of green, the interplay of light radiated from torches stationed around the room and the shifting shadows they created. Kindred felt her breath pull a little as her eyes caught on one figure amidst the huge braided tapestry, a woman with wings curving away from her back and with a halo of what looked like bird feathers. While other figures like her were shown flying high above what Kindred took to be the Forever Sea, this figure appeared to be flying down into it, diving deep with a knowing smile, flickering with joy in the torchlight.
It was the Queen Who Laughed, one of those mythic figures from children’s stories, a story every person on Arcadia knew, even if only the children believed it—but here she was enshrined, braided into the fabric of this building, celebrated in a way that could only mean she was more than a playful tale peddled to kids. Kindred shivered.
She walked forward and found Little Wing already there.
Little Wing looked terrible. Her face was nearly unrecognizable amid the blood and swelling. Only one of her eyes was visible, and it was a bare slit of rage between pummeled flesh.
She greeted the other three with handshakes and careful hugs.
When she reached Kindred, her jaw worked for a moment before she spit, blood and saliva mingling, onto Kindred’s feet.