The Marchess would stand over the light of the hearthfire late in the night, a canopy of stars overhead, and tell great tales of the Running Ones, the monsters they fought, and the wonders they saw.
But those were only little fictions meant to inspire and frighten children. No one older than ten or twelve years actually believed them.
“You know them too?” Seraph said, turning to her, excited. “Our histories are probably different here, I imagine, but there are older texts that mention the Running Ones using spells that affect the roots of Sea plants. The descriptions are unclear, of course, but it’s too similar to not look into, don’t you think?”
Kindred blinked at this, trying to understand what it was that Seraph was saying. Explaining this Sea disease with bedtime stories of monsters and magic populating the floor of the Forever Sea?
Some small part of her—one she’d been unconsciously nurturing ever since the Marchess’s disappearance—bloomed at Seraph’s words, impossible hope suddenly becoming possible. What if there were worlds below? What had seemed to Kindred a chance to recover her grandmother’s body, or at least retrace her dying steps, became more. Stories that played at the outskirts of imagination and hope grew into a chance for another life—a real, tangible chance.
“I guess it is,” she said to Seraph, floating on the flare of hope and excitement in her chest. “Has anyone from the Once-City ever gone below the Sea, ever made it to the Sea floor?”
The brightness inside her dimmed as Seraph shook his head, though he didn’t laugh like those on Arcadia would have.
“No, though it hasn’t stopped many from trying! Different hearthfire builds, rope ladders, ships built for sailing below, harnessing wyrms or other beasts from below: it’s all been attempted. We still have a few of those below-boats down by the hearthfire supplies. But no, sadly we have no real communication with the peoples below.”
“Peoples below?” Kindred felt the world still for a moment around her.
“Well, they have to be there, don’t they? We’ve seen evidence of some kind of civilization below when some of the nomadic plant species rise to the surface to flower and seed. Little things, you know? Scraps of cloth caught among seedpods or scratches on stems that look strangely like language.”
“How do you know it’s not just bits that have fallen down from the surface? Arcadia dumps its trash into the Sea, and every vessel sailing out of there that I know of does the same,” Kindred said.
“Oh, no,” Seraph said. “What we’ve seen shares little resemblance to anything from Arcadia, the Once-City, or the Mainland—and if it does, it’s ages old and shows signs of having been repurposed. Sailcloth remade into clothing and covered in strange markings; bits of structures older than any here can guess, and without any precedent in books or histories that I know of. Just trash from the surface? Oh, no, I don’t think so!”
Seraph grinned, and Kindred found herself grinning, too.
People below. Peoples. Somehow, it felt like the clearest, strongest assurance yet that the Marchess was alive below.
Kindred looked back at the plague of withered grey to the ridges of the thorn reef rising in the direction of Arcadia, and she found herself squinting toward the gap between them, looking for any sign of a sail, any hint of Cantrev’s ships coming back. She felt such a conflict there between the freedom of this place and the tensions around it—something wrong with the Sea, Cantrev’s looming presence.
“Any signs of Cantrev’s ships returning?” she asked.
“We have scouts out watching for him,” Seraph said, looking where she looked. “We’ll know if he’s coming, though I doubt his ships made it back. The thorn reef takes a toll on a hull if the crew hasn’t any experience with it. I think his ships probably sank on their return journey—too damaged from the fight and the reef.”
But Kindred was shaking her head, thinking of Cantrev and his strange ability to persist, his ability to always find an escape, always.
“No. He’s coming back.”
She looked around the root docks at the full retinue of ships, some docked, some floating just a little away. It was more ships than she’d ever seen in one place.
“Gods,” she said. “That’s a fleet.”
Seraph shrugged, as though this wasn’t something he had ever really thought about.
“I suppose. It’s all theirs.” He hooked a finger above, to the clusters of dwellings above, bulging from the myriad branches climbing into the sky. So close, Kindred could see the spiderwork of ladders and bridges and ropes connecting branch to branch and dropping to the dock below, each one made of braided prairie grasses.
She followed Seraph around to the other side of the great tree, to a quieter group of docks reaching out toward the expanse of the Forever Sea, only a few vessels docked on this side.
“Why aren’t they on the other side?” Kindred asked, looking around at these ships, crews tying up or letting sheets down, the penitent sound of hammering ubiquitous in the afternoon heat. “Cantrev won’t come from this side.”
Over there, she could look out at the true Forever Sea, the expanse that no one, not even the High Mapmakers, had ever fully explored or reached the end of. It was too wide, too eternal to take in, she thought, moving her head side to side, never able to capture the whole of it in one glance.
Kindred had never seen such a thing as this, the Forever Sea unbroken and untamed, writhing and bursting in every color, reaching with the branched arms of myriad plants unknown to her and perhaps to anyone. It was a wild, ecstatic thing, and somehow, Kindred found herself longing for it.
She thought of the leveled, nearly homogenous grasses around Arcadia, a patch of the Sea that had once looked just like this. Before prairie mages came along and ordered it with their magics, it had been just as free, just as true as this.
Can a person long for a wild home they’ve never known? Can a person love only what a place once was?
“They can get around quickly if they’re needed,” Seraph said, walking out on the dock toward one of the ships. “And there’s far worse that can come from out there than anything Cantrev could ever bring. Those on Arcadia are shielded from the true wilds of the Forever Sea with that carefully maintained and leveled circle of prairie. Have you ever dealt with fast-creeping father’s hair? Or coughing grubs climbing up spurleaf? Last year, we had a wave of Antilles roaches—bad enough, right? Just after, maybe four days or so, an entire family of mid-grass badgers came from the east. Huge beasts!” Seraph waved his hands around to indicate their size, though Kindred was frowning. Apart from the roaches, she had never heard of any of it.
“Destroyed five of our best ships,” Seraph continued. “It took the mages ten days to drive them off—terribly hard to kill of course, mid-grass badgers.