A man emerged from the open doorway, filling it with his bulk for a moment before stepping out and walking toward them.
“Ah, yes, right,” Seraph said, his eyes catching on the man before he turned back to them, speaking lower than he had been. “That is your warden, Barque. Each neighborhood in the Once-City is watched over by a warden, each in The Word’s employ. They’re here to make sure you get your ration of food and water each day, to take into account any concerns you may have, and to serve as a liaison between you and the Council. Barque is . . .” Seraph trailed off, looking quickly back at Barque and waving. He turned back. “. . . a completely odious man. A brutish bully; I can’t understand why The Word keeps him in their employ. Watch yourself around him.”
All of this was spoken in a quick whisper, and Seraph broke off as Barque neared, inventing a smile on his face so as to seem cheery and chipper again.
Barque was large, broad of shoulder and with a size that seemed to fill his robes in strange ways. As he approached, Kindred recognized what she thought were tattoos like Ragged Sarah’s—swirling lines tracing across his skin in unbroken patterns, disappearing beneath his robes and appearing later.
But then he stepped within their circle, and Kindred saw them for what they were.
Not tattoos.
Not ink and raised skin.
Plants.
Barque’s skin was covered in the close cluster of stretching plants: vines and stems and roots, rhizomatic in their reach and weave, diving in and out of the top layer of his skin. Green and gold shoots stretched and moved with him, as if part of his body, as natural as the flex of an arm, the flash of a smile.
Closed buds punctuated the run of the plants like gems, curled tightly into themselves.
“You’re the Arcadians.” It was not a question. His voice was deep and slung through with the same loose accent Kindred had heard from other citizens of the Once-City.
“New citizens, Barque!” Seraph clapped his hands, looking around at the group of them, his clandestine whispering gone now. “I’ll leave you all in your warden’s capable hands; he’ll have job assignments for each of you. I have Council business to attend to, of course. And Kindred, I’ll stop back tomorrow sometime, once you’re rested up, and we can get to work! I can’t wait to hear all about your dive!”
He giggled to himself, the sound childlike and strange coming from this unkempt, grey-haired man. Kindred wasn’t sure she had ever met someone so unabashed, so unaware, so purely himself. Anyone other than her grandmother, of course.
* * *
“Food and water inside,” Barque said as Seraph disappeared back down the road, into the tangle of grass buildings rising up into the vast empty space of this level, huge and encompassing somehow even as it was bounded by walls and trapped by a shield-studded ceiling. “I’ll deliver them each day. I have your new tasks as well; fifty days is what I was told.”
Kindred nodded along with everyone else. Fifty days of work—fifty days of offering whatever each crewmember could—the muscle in their arms or the knowledge in their heads, and then a ship, their lives back, a chance to leave.
But where would they go? Back to Arcadia? Around the island and all the way back to the Mainland?
Or would they sail farther out, toward the unknown and the uncharted horizon?
And perhaps most important: did Kindred think of herself as part of that they anymore? She looked around at sailors she had only truly begun to know, at stories she had only just started.
“Outside of your assigned tasks, you’re allowed to move among this first level freely.” He spoke with the recitative quality that Kindred had heard from news-shouters on Arcadia, standing at the juncture of two roads and speaking the news of the day, over and over.
“This is Breach,” he continued, gesturing to the entire level around them. “The second level is the Forest; if you have permission, the guards at the Forest entrance will help you through the paths. The third level is Wisdom, which you all have some experience with.”
A hint of a smile played across Barque’s face, and Kindred realized he was making a jab at their time spent in the cells, taking the citizenship test. But instead, she thought of all those sloped buildings growing up from the floor on that third level and shivered. The cells they’d been kept in down there were probably on the others’ minds, but Kindred couldn’t push the thought of those whispering growths away.
What had that watcher said? We’ve cracked open a few, but they’re always empty.
This was a place of mystery, sure as can be, but unlike everywhere else, the Once-City seemed to exist in harmony with its mysteries, to move with them. It reminded Kindred of sailing, of bending to the wind. It reminded Kindred of keeping the hearthfire, of not berating the mystery at the heart of the flames.
It reminded her of her grandmother.
“Where do we go to see the captain and Little Wing?” Cora the Wraith asked, eyeing the big man before them.
Barque turned his head slowly, regarding Cora for a moment before saying, “She will be down with the healers in the Forest. You’re not allowed back there.”
“Sarah, too?” Kindred asked. “Is Ragged Sarah, the crow-caller, back there?”
Barque was just as slow, just as imperious as he considered her for a long moment before answering.
“She is.”
“I’d like to see her,” Kindred said, before adding, “and the captain and Little Wing.”
“Official requests to visit the Forest can be passed to your neighborhood warden for consideration.” Again, that tone of speech one hears in oft-spoken words.
“Isn’t that you?” Kindred asked.
“It is,” Barque said, nodding. “Your request has been considered and denied.”
Cora coughed out a laugh, sarcasm and a snide smile on her face. “What an ass you are.”
“Welcome to Cruel House, new citizens,” Barque said, ignoring the barb and walking back toward the doorway. “Follow me and I will show you your new home.”
“Fifty days only,” Long Quixa said, looking around at Cora, Scindapse, and even Kindred. “Then we leave him and the rest behind.”
They followed Barque in.
Unlike the Council’s building, Cruel House had interior walls of old brick. Every so often, a brick or two had broken away or been pushed out, like a child’s lost tooth, a break in the pattern, offering little passages from room to room for an eye to look through, a hand to pass through.
Kindred found a table in one of the rooms on the first floor, a three-legged thing that looked as if it might slip into splits at any time. Atop it was a sack containing food: strips of burnt jackal grub. Next to it was a small barrel half-full of water.