“They make wyrms look weak and slow in comparison,” he added, seeing Kindred’s confusion. “Seem to have taken a liking to the greying patches of Sea, too. Very odd.”
Perhaps she should have felt fear at such things—a whole world of monstrous creatures capable of chaos and horror lived out there in the Roughs, creatures Kindred had never learned about from the bookmavens on Arcadia.
But instead, Kindred felt a spark of wonder. If this was just a taste of the unknown, then what else awaited discovery out there, toward the horizon or deep below the waves?
“And, of course, there’s always the danger of the return of the Supplicant Few!” Seraph grinned, pointing out toward the horizon. “A band of seven sailed toward the sun in the east, leaving behind their humanity—”
“To worship nature without cease,” Kindred finished, a surprised smile on her face. It was an old rhyme, one that was common in songs and stories on Arcadia. Everyone knew of the Supplicant Few—the mad band of sailors who had gone east to find the end of the Forever Sea. After a journey of horrors, the stories said, the Supplicant Few found a land of shadow and darkness beyond the horizon, and once there, they traded in their humanity for power, for immortality, for the burden of protecting and praising the natural world above all else. They were men and women turned monsters in every story Kindred had ever heard, and their return was an ominous promise. They would bring death and decay, rampant rot and a sky choked with reaching vines. They would bring doom. They would bring the end.
But they were fictions.
“Another shared story!” Seraph said, grinning.
“You keep ships over here because of a story?” Kindred said, looking at the mass of vessels prepared to stop a children’s cautionary tale.
“The Supplicant Few are much more than a story,” Seraph said, solemn suddenly. “We have artifacts of theirs here in the Once-City, little bits of history from when they docked here on their voyage east. Some day, they will return, and we should all hope to be long gone when they do.”
Kindred could think of nothing to say. She felt a continued unraveling in her mind, as if these long-held truths that had propped up and structured her world were coming apart, revealing something wilder, something stranger, something more magical that had been lurking beneath all along.
“But none of that is our immediate concern!” Seraph said, clapping his hands and brightening up. “Have you ever dealt with grey weed in a hearthfire? I’ve been experimenting recently and have had mixed results. Here, come up on deck; I’ll show you what I mean.”
Kindred looked out again toward forever and imagined a world of unending wilds, above and below. A storybook world cut through with magic.
Seraph walked up a plank onto a scarcely populated ship—a smallish cutter, by the looks of it.
The deck of the ship was littered with tools and ropes, and Kindred saw a few sailors, men and women, working up near the prow, fastening on a huge, painted beam, sharpened to a point.
Or no, not a beam, she realized after a moment. It was one of the thorns, from the reef. These sailors were attaching it like a ramming spur. Kindred remembered the damage those thorns had done to The Errant, the destruction they had inflicted on the hull. She could still hear the sound they made as The Errant sloughed too close to the reef, as those thorns tore and ripped wood strong as time, older than Kindred.
“Over here, over here,” Seraph said, waving her back toward the center of the deck, where the hearthfire burned, low and quiet. She approached and hunkered down next to him, opening herself to the fire by instinct, listening to its song, studying its rhythms and colors.
In the flames was a confused and confusing build, overly complex and fighting against itself. Bone shards littered the coals, some sticking straight up from the grey bed, others lying flat. Twists of plants Kindred had never seen before moved through the fire, tying together bone shards and whorling away on their own, seemingly without purpose or pattern.
Kindred saw the places where the fire worked against itself: arrangements of bone best used to give a ship stability during a high wind nullifying a slender arc of finger bone—shaved down for reasons Kindred couldn’t figure—that gave the ship lift and adaptability for quick maneuvering. She saw a spur of a rib bone burning away that should have propelled the ship forward into the dock, but then spied a twisting net of grasses woven around a pair of wristbones that, though crude and uneven, would pull a ship backward for a time; the two forces battled one another in the scope of the flames, neither winning out.
“As you can see, we’ve been experimenting with some new builds,” Seraph said, excitement and anxiety in his voice. Although he was an older man, he spoke like a nervous child, worried about showing his secret project to a new friend.
“I don’t know how this ship is even afloat,” Kindred said, shaking her head in disbelief and laughing, watching the flames ricocheting between greys and greens, the forces within the hearthfire vying for control. “By my count, you have at least nine distinct builds in there, and that’s not even counting whatever those plants are doing.”
Seraph chuckled, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet.
“It’s a tenuous thing, I’ll grant you that! I was aiming for something like balance with this one, though I may have overcorrected on a few. Take a look at the whorlweeds I’ve used here . . .”
It had been a long, long time since Kindred had talked with a hearthfire keeper like this. Rhabdus and the other keepers on Arcadia—those who learned their craft at one of the schools on the island—always seemed like heavy-headed hammers, beating the hearthfire into submission as if it were an animal to be broken and subjugated. They drew standardized schema and chanted hard rules to themselves, boxed up the hearthfire into neat, logical problems with easy, obvious solutions. Mastered it; stomped on every bit of mystery in the flames.
But here was Seraph, asking wild questions, swaying with the fire, listening to it, chaotic and weird. He reminded Kindred a little of the Marchess.
With a childlike laugh of her own, Kindred leaned in and worked.
* * *
“What do you think?” Seraph asked, kneeling next to the sixth hearthfire of the afternoon. Apart from one—so clustered and crammed with bones, some of which Kindred wasn’t sure were actually captain’s bones—they had managed to fix all of them.
Each was a new challenge, a complicated, twisting problem, and Kindred found a strange, new joy in tromping from deck to deck with Seraph, discussing the theory and art in each hearthfire, the possibilities of each new twist of bone or unidentified plant. The keepers, Seraph confessed, were mostly outside of his control. They took initial classes from him, but with so many ships sailing out and in all the time, it was too much for Seraph to keep up with completely. And so, he and Kindred moved from ship to ship, seeing the strange, experimental, wild builds each new keeper had come up with. It was their job to undo the mess, understand the possibility, and return the hearthfire to as near a fresh palette as possible.