The hearthfire’s pull, normally a constant in her mind, was gone.
Or nearly.
Kindred reached a shaking hand toward and into the coals, letting her fingers slip deep into the furrowed darkness until she found, just at the bottom, a last lingering of warmth, like that on a pillow abandoned for a day’s work. Kindred released a short sigh.
“Idiot child,” came a husked voice just a moment before Kindred was wrenched up, a hand closing around the back of her neck. She turned, hissing in pain, to find Rhabdus, angrier than Kindred had ever seen her, teeth bared, jaw clenched. She spoke quietly, murderously, eyes wide and mad.
“Do you have any idea how dangerous that was? How close we were to wrecking? You nearly ruined the ship, nearly killed me, killed us all.”
“I’m sorry,” Kindred gasped, angling her body around, anything to lessen the pain as Rhabdus maintained her hold, digging her fingers deep into the skin of Kindred’s neck. “It was the only way. We needed more speed. I thought—”
Rhabdus cut her off with a slap that sounded like a tree branch cracking drily in the air. Rhabdus yanked her so close that Kindred could smell the older keeper’s hot breath, could feel the waves of heat and anger radiating from her. Her face burned from the slap.
“The builds are there for a reason, girl. That uniformity you’re always bemoaning? It means results you can count on. It means knowing how fast a boat will go, how to slow it down, how to keep it in one fucking piece. The builds keep the sailors on board the ship alive and keep the ship whole, which is more than I can say for whatever piece of creativity that nearly killed us all. What kind of damage do you think those chains holding us up right now did to the hull? Are you going to pay for the repairs? Are you going to tell the captain why the underside of her boat is beaten up? Are you?”
Rhabdus’s questions cut into the bit of glory Kindred had been holding close. She had brought them in safely—she had done that. Not Rhabdus. Not anyone else on board.
But she couldn’t forget the sound of The Errant’s hull scraping over the chains of the cradle, which were meant to support boats after they’d been brought in to port, but only after a slow, careful docking, after a measured extinguishing of the hearthfire, an easing of a ship into the support of the great, looping chains cutting through the grass below them.
They weren’t meant to slow a ship. They weren’t meant to check a reckless, out-of-control vessel pushed to breaking by a keeper working outside the known and expected rules.
Kindred’s victory turned to bitter dregs in her mouth, and she felt suddenly like she might throw up.
“Not our most graceful arrival to port.”
Rhabdus dropped Kindred to the deck, and both turned to find Captain Caraway standing there, a single eyebrow raised. The captain offered Kindred a hand up.
“Apologies, Captain,” Rhabdus said, before casting a disgusted look at Kindred. “Had I been in control of the fire, things would have been different.”
Kindred listened, her stomach churning with unease. She had hijacked the hearthfire, damaged the ship’s hull, and nearly killed everyone; she would be lucky if the captain only kicked her off the ship.
Kindred felt waves of nausea as she stared down at the deck, trying and failing to blink away the onset of tears. All of her actions suddenly felt foolish—her fight with the Marchess, her storming off the deck of Revenger, shouting back that she’d find a new boat, something of her own. Kindred’s certainty that she would make her mark, that she would find her place, that she would be loved and lauded, all of it felt like a fantasy now.
“I couldn’t see what was happening with the hearthfire there at the end. You’re telling me Kindred was in charge of it?” Captain Caraway asked, looking between them.
“Aye, Captain,” Rhabdus said, stepping between Kindred and the captain, cutting her out. “She stole control from me after one of the pirate volleys. She can’t be trusted.”
Rhabdus paused a moment—a single intake of breath that set Kindred on edge.
“She can’t be trusted, Captain, if you’re asking my opinion. She’s no good for the ship and no good for the crew. I don’t care who her grandmother is; she’s a reckless child.”
Every muscle in her body hurt from putting out the fire. She had saved them, this crew she was only truly beginning to know. She had saved them and the ship.
But had she saved them from a mess of her own making?
“Captain, if I—” Kindred began, but Rhabdus turned and kicked her, viciously silencing Kindred.
“You’ve done enough, girl,” Rhabdus said.
The crew continued to move about the deck, each one pushed by a singular purpose and a singular task, too busy and focused to pay attention to Kindred’s world falling apart.
“She’s been trouble since we took her on, Captain,” Rhabdus said. “Too young, too little experience. Yes, she’s the Marchess’s granddaughter, and I grant that she has some natural skill with the fire. But this is what happens when we take on a keeper who failed out of school, who couldn’t follow any of the damned rules, who couldn’t be bothered to learn like the rest of us.”
Rhabdus looked back at Kindred, disgusted, before continuing. Memories of her time in the Arcadian school flashed through Kindred’s mind—teachers talking about the fire as if it were an unruly animal needing to be broken, a puzzle to be brutally solved. Kindred hadn’t known then how to square their ideas about keeping the fire with what she’d learned from her grandmother: a bloodless, heavy-handed method from the bookmavens and an imprecise, instinctual approach from the Marchess. She wasn’t sure she had the answer now, but Kindred was clear that it wasn’t Rhabdus’s style.
“Her recklessness,” Rhabdus sneered, “with the fire might have been cute once, but look where it’s gotten us. The girl is a menace, Captain, and she doesn’t belong in this crew.”
The captain grunted and looked around Rhabdus at Kindred, her expression unreadable, her eye holding Kindred, intense and searching.
“If I could, Captain,” came a voice, and Captain Caraway and Rhabdus turned, revealing Ragged Sarah, who still knelt beside Quixa, wrapping her arm in a thick, black gauze. “Without Kindred’s work there at the end, we would have been caught up by the pirates, that’s for sure. They were gaining until Kindred took over.”
Silence took hold for just a moment, and Kindred thought she might kiss Ragged Sarah then and there. Sarah smiled over at her before returning to her work.
Captain Caraway turned back to Rhabdus, her eyebrow arced into a question.
“At what cost?” Rhabdus wheezed, her hands clutched into fists at her side. “A damaged hull this time, Captain, but what happens when she does it again? Do we have deaths? A full wreck?”