“I’ll meet you outside,” Kindred said, nodding to Seraph, before turning back to the captain. It had only been a few days—a span maybe—since she’d spoken with the captain, but so much had changed since then. They were impossibly far from the captain’s quarters, staring at the map, wondering which way to go, toward the known or toward the unknown.
“Keeper,” Captain Caraway said, stepping forward.
“Captain.”
“When we made the plan to come to the Once-City, I can’t say this was what I wanted.”
Kindred nodded.
“My ship is gone. So are some of my crew.”
Kindred didn’t speak. There was nothing to say.
“Instead of bartering for supplies and moving on, we’re laboring for pirates with the hope that they’ll give us a ship. And to add to that deal, you’ve offered your services to fix up their hearthfires and teach their sailors how to move more efficiently and quickly. Is that about right?”
“Betrayal,” Little Wing said from where she still sat at the table. She stared down at her hands.
“She betrayed you, Little Wing, not me,” Captain Caraway said before focusing back on Kindred.
“I was serious back on Arcadia, before we lost Rhabdus, when I said I liked that you were wild. The grasses around Arcadia have felt too small and too contained to me for some time now. I see that same sense about you that I feel in myself: the need for more, the need to see and know.”
Kindred nodded.
“But know this: to want more is to leave something behind. You cannot live in two worlds at once, and a step toward one is a step away from another.”
She leaned forward, and when she spoke, her voice grew hard.
“You cannot be truly part of this place and remain a member of this crew. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Kindred said, simply. To have the growing divide inside her spoken so plainly felt at once painful and freeing.
“Barring disaster, you have fifty days to decide which world you want to inhabit,” Captain Caraway said, turning away, back to her crew.
* * *
Outside, Kindred found Seraph, and they began walking. Seraph talked, of course, and as he did, Kindred found herself oddly looking forward to what lay ahead.
How did they build their fires there? From what Seraph had implied, the Once-City keepers had been using grasses and plants for a long time, which meant that Kindred’s bit of experimentation to get around being able to use only one hand was perhaps common practice there. What else had they thought of that she hadn’t?
A sudden image filled her mind: a build that allowed for a controlled and stable dive—a combination of bones and plants so rare as to have been considered extinct burning together to pull ship down and down, not falling but flying—sailing—below.
Her heart beat faster as they left Cruel House behind.
Kindred followed Seraph out to the central staircase, up to the surface, out onto the root docks, out to where the unleveled, wild prairie Sea rolled and writhed in endless waves toward the horizon. Plants she had never seen before opened and cut into the sunlight, growing wild, without any human logic governing them.
Just as shocking were the trees growing up through the prairie, far more than she had ever seen before on the Sea. The same magic that flattened Arcadia’s grasses also killed off any Sea trees before they could grow, but here they pushed through the surface of the Sea in sun-stealing masses of green. It was a miracle The Errant hadn’t slammed into one on their approach.
Kindred had spent enough time harvesting to know what she should see in the plants coloring the grasses around the trees: the riches that lay before her, the need to organize and rework such chaotic growth, the need to impose lines, edges, sense.
But there, with a warm wind on her face and the world open before her, Kindred relaxed into the chaos. She had seen the world below this one and did not give herself to worrying overmuch about madness above. She sought a darker logic, a deeper story.
Among the waves of color—green cut with red, blue, gold, white, and all the rest—were veins of grey, dead plants, the same that Kindred had seen beginning to appear around Arcadia. The Greys, not just plaguing the grasses around Arcadia.
“It’s here, too,” Kindred said, mostly to herself.
“It’s everywhere,” Seraph said, following her gaze to the coiled masses of sickly ash-grey. “Our long-haul sailors have reported finding swaths of it in every direction, hundreds of days sailing away.”
“I thought it was just Arcadia—some symptom of flattening the Sea.”
Seraph shook his head.
“Sadly, no. Something is wrong with the Sea itself. We’ve been noticing it for several years, but no one here can figure it out. The damaged grasses—if that’s what they still are—are technically sailable, but they do very odd things to the ships that pass through them, as I’m sure the Arcadians have realized. And they are resistant to fire, too, the patches of grey—no restorative burning, which is strange.”
Kindred nodded, staring at the patches, thinking of how much they looked like sick marks on a great body. The Greys, Arcadians called it. What had once been a patch of twenty, maybe thirty different individual species, each with their own name, their own classification and description and colors and identity—now gone, all those identities, all those names, devoured by the Greys.
Names, Kindred thought, might be ways of owning the world, bending it to a will or breaking it under a tongue, but they were also memorials, built and protected, for those parts of the world that might be forgotten, that might disappear completely. With a name, a sailor could call back into the world the spirit of a conversation, of an adventure, of a lost friend. What were the words she used, Kindred wondered, if not tiny gravestones, neatly arrayed, for that which had come before and that which might come again? What did she speak if not the language of ghosts?
“Do you know what’s causing it?” she asked, squinting to see into the mass of ashen grasses but failing.
“No idea,” Seraph said. “Though if I were to guess, I would place my bets on the Running Ones below. But that’s just speculation, of course.”
Kindred turned to look at Seraph, sure that he was playing a joke on her, but his face was the same as it always was: honest, open, curious.
“The Running Ones? From the stories?”
She knew about the Running Ones—every child born or raised on Arcadia or the Mainland knew about them. Kindred had loved hearing the stories as a child, sitting cross-legged on the deck of Revenger and hearing her grandmother tell stories of the mages living on the bottom of the Sea whose weapons were not fire and bone but strange books bursting with magical powers waiting to be unleashed. The Running Ones sprinted through the darkness of the Sea’s floor, their books held before them like torches, overflowing with light and power.