“He’s all right despite being so prickly on the outside,” Ragged Sarah said, watching Sunu move along the rows to his next patient. “He said earlier today that he thought I would be out soon.”
Kindred wanted to reach out for Sarah’s hand again, to kneel beside her, to close the space between them again, but this was all new to her.
She had been with men and women before, sneaking into their beds during stays between Revenger’s voyages, but this felt different: a relationship beyond simply skin and want. It was a new love, a new language; it shared something with other tongues even as it spoke words only it could speak.
And so, Kindred spoke of simpler things, more immediate things.
“What’s going on with these?” she asked, gesturing to the plants connected to Ragged Sarah.
Sarah laughed, and Kindred remembered how much she loved that laugh, so full of ease and comfort.
“Apparently, I broke several bones in my legs and hips, but the grove can heal almost anything. That’s why they call this place the Healing Glade—it actually does the healing.” She held up one arm, vines trailing from it, blossoming with tiny, pebbly flowers of grey and black. “The bush senses where injuries occur and sends out these little shoots to heal the damage.”
“Does it hurt?” Kindred asked.
“Not even a bit. Feels strange, but good strange, you know?” She reached out for Kindred’s hand, and Kindred thought she did know.
“I wonder if it could heal my burn,” she said, holding up her other hand, still swaddled in the same grubby cloth wrap. She unwrapped it and offered it to the branch above from which so many of the vines going into Sarah came, and she was surprised when the branch extended a vine, a thin green thing reaching down toward her.
“Wait,” Sarah said, pushing Kindred away from the vine. The gentle smile on her face had gone.
“What?”
“The healing here,” Sarah said, gesturing to the vines threading through her body, “it doesn’t just fix you like a medicker on Arcadia would. It changes you, Kindred. A cut is not given a salve to encourage skin to knit together; roots thread through your skin and fill in the space with bark or leaf. Broken tissue becomes vegetal, broken bones become wood. Look at my leg.”
Sarah pulled away the blanket that had been obscuring her legs, one of which was mottled with bruises and puffed where the vines worked into her skin.
But growths sprung from the skin, too: tiny, gemlike flowers dotted the length of her leg, like dew on a strand of grass, stars in the sky.
“This place will heal you, but it will change you, too.”
The blossoms on Barque’s face suddenly made sense. The great flower on Captain Caraway’s chest too.
“I’m okay with change,” Kindred said after a moment, meeting Sarah’s eyes.
She pulled off the cloth, baring the puckered skin of her hand to the air, grimacing at the damage, at the curled, defeated thing her hand had become.
The vine continued to drop down from the branch, and when it landed on her hand, Kindred felt a sudden coolness move through her. The vine moved across her fingers and slithered over her palm, as if exploring a new land, as if searching for something lost.
Kindred felt no pain when the vine cut under her skin, branching out along her veins and across her hand, forming a new network of paths below her skin. The original vine broke off from the branch above, rooting itself deep in Kindred’s hand, well below her skin, down to the bone, it seemed. The plant shot up through her fingers, discoloring her skin even further and then, strangest of all, it broke through at several places, sending up curious little shoots of dark, dark gold. Each one of these curled in on itself, forming tight spirals across Kindred’s hand.
She tried to move it.
Her fingers quivered.
Sarah put a hand on Kindred’s arm.
“How does it feel?”
Kindred shook her head and opened her mouth to respond.
But a voice, breathless and hitched, spoke before she could.
“When I say no, I mean it.”
Kindred turned to find Barque, and she had a moment to wonder why she hadn’t heard him approach and then realized the same cool, thick grass below her feet had silenced his steps.
Beautiful, she thought as he neared. The buds had opened all across his skin, becoming delicate blue flowers rimed in white tracery, each one moving and swaying in a breeze Kindred could not see or feel. A single flower opened and swayed just below his left eye, a bloom on a venous vine winding up from his neck that Kindred hadn’t seen before.
A few healers were moving toward them, clearly aware that something was going on, but they were not close enough. Kindred even caught sight of Little Wing, her eyes raised toward them now, rushing forward.
From a distance, it might have looked silly or strange, this broad-shouldered, surly man playing host to a swaying barony of flowers, but up close, his anger seething through and filtered by the blue-white blooms, Kindred saw beauty and purpose.
This was her last thought before his cudgel caught her first in the shoulder and then upside the head.
Darkness came then, dreamless and empty.
* * *
Kindred woke to a head full of clouds and angry voices. She looked around, moving slowly, all of her joints thick and unwieldy.
She lay in her third-floor room in Cruel House on the roughly bundled, grassy mass that had once been a mattress and then a rope. It had been formed into a loose bed, and someone had even taken the time to pile up an extra few loops of grass to serve as a pillow beneath Kindred’s head. It was oddly comfortable.
She rolled over, slow as the moon’s crawl through the sky, until she was on hands and knees. And then up, kneeling now and then hunched over and then standing, leaning hard against a wall.
The room had changed since the last time she had been inside it. Apart from the grass rope, which had become a loose mattress again, there was another mattress in the room, this one whole and tidy. It had been pulled near Kindred’s, the only thing between them a waterskin and, set atop the waterskin, a note that read: Drink when you wake up. —Sarah
She did, and though it was warm, sour water inside the skin, Kindred found relief in it.
Her shoulder ached and she ran a hand over its swollen, bruised mass. It was the same side as her burned hand, which, now that she looked at it, had sprouted even more of those tiny, spiraled shoots of gold.
Something else was different, too—her fingers moved in strange, erratic jumps, like the spasms of a person sleeping through a nightmare.
But they moved, which gave Kindred a shock of joy.
She couldn’t focus on that long, though—her head throbbed along with her heartbeat, sending waves of pain down her body.