“What are these plants doing?” Kindred asked, pointing to a twisting bunch of red-gold stalks curling around a clutch of bone shards. She could hear a strange note in the fire’s song and see the plants’ influence on the sway of the flames, but she couldn’t tell what it was doing to the ship.
“Can’t you tell?” Seraph asked, excited now, giggling a bit. “You’ve been so focused on other things that you didn’t even notice when you stepped aboard, did you?”
He stood and walked over to the gunwale, waving her over. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, nearly exploding with excitement as he waited for her to figure it out.
She saw what she had missed almost immediately.
The boat sat low in the grass, far lower than any she had ever seen, as if it were moments away from sinking, as if it had been frozen in the very act of going under. A thrill of fear shone in her then, and a sense of wonder. She pushed down the urge to leap from the deck onto the safety of the root dock.
Kindred thought of The Errant, first pulled down by teeth burning viciously in the flames and then by her own hand, a circumscribed hearthfire.
But this was nothing like the teeth—the boat wasn’t fighting the Sea, and she could hear nothing of antagonism in the fire’s song.
And the fire had not been circumscribed, else Kindred and Seraph would have been plummeting down into the depths right then.
“How does it sit so low?” she asked, turning back to Seraph, who looked as if he might burst.
“Isn’t it wonderful? Several of our keepers have been experimenting with it. Personally, I’ve only managed to get it to sit a few lengths below the grass line, but I’ve started to achieve more or less regular results. It’s something to do with the inclusion of certain plants, I’m thinking, though I need to do more tests. Given your controlled dive, I thought you might be interested in seeing some of our own modest attempts at a similar effect.” Seraph held his hands up, playing at humility but clearly proud of his keepers’ work.
“And what did you do here?” Kindred asked, kneeling before the hearthfire again.
“Oh! Yes, right. These are stems of feverfew I trimmed down, but I’ve managed to achieve the same effect with other plants, too. But how did I do it? Well . . . I have no idea!”
Seraph threw his hands up and laughed.
“I was hoping you could tell me! Certainly, the effect is something I’ve started to standardize, but I’m still not entirely sure how or why these specific plants interact in this way with the hearthfire. Did you do much plant work when you were learning to keep the fire on Arcadia? I don’t know much about the educational programs there for hearthfire keepers, but I imagine it’s a tad more rigorous than our own ramshackle pedagogy!” He laughed and shook his head. “Oh, I love a good mystery. I bet—”
But Seraph was cut off by the sound of a deep tolling, like a bell but deeper, louder, as if the whole of the world itself boomed in regular, powerful tolls.
She saw Seraph stiffen, his body going taut as he listened to the rhythm ringing out from the tree, vibrating along its dead branches, thickening the air with its warning.
“Oh, my,” Seraph said after the rhythm had repeated twice over. “That’s the alarm. Ships coming through the reef pass. We need to move.”
He stood and walked quickly off the ship, and Kindred followed. A few sailors who had been up in the rigging fiddling with one of the sails dropped to the deck, their boots explosive on the old wood.
Already, people were streaming around the trunk of the tree, spewing out of the entrance to the Once-City and racing for their ships. Sailors moved with purpose and speed, calling out orders and shouting for crew even as they slung themselves up onto the masts and across the spurs.
Kindred watched as a girl—a child who looked only half Kindred’s age—strode aboard the ship they had just been on, waving briefly at Seraph. She began working on the hearthfire, her voice ragged and beautiful as she sang to the flames, her movements practiced and smooth even if her technique was crude. Kindred watched as the girl maneuvered bones in and out of the flames, never changing the basic structure of the build but shifting it enough to give the ship mobility even if it continued to sit low in the grasses.
It was a way of keeping the fire that was totally new to Kindred, nothing like the way Arcadian keepers did it. This was messy and unruled, and yet the ship sailed, and the girl’s hands moved carefully and with practice. Was it truly messy? Or did Kindred simply not understand it?
More sailors hopped aboard as the ship pulled out and headed for open grasses, and just before it turned away, pulled into the growing tide of ships heading for the pass, the young girl looked up at Kindred and smiled, toothy and wide and full of joy, a warrior going to battle to defend her home, doing what she knew and loving what she did.
And then she was gone and Kindred was watching ship after ship angle away, around the reaches of the root docks and out to defend. Up this close, she could see that there were distinct flags flying on each of the ships, perhaps denoting ship type or crew affinity; she wasn’t sure. She counted four unique flags as the vessels moved by: blue with a grinning black skull, white with a roaring fire, red with a broken spear, and black with two eyes, one green and the other blue.
Kindred moved with Seraph around the trunk to watch as the fleet sailed to defend and intercept, and along the way she saw Little Wing and Captain Caraway, walking with a few guards and Councillor Ebb-La-Kem, who moved with a retinue of followers, each carrying a bundle of flags.
“Keeper,” Captain Caraway said, nodding at her and then at Seraph. Little Wing walked beside the captain and kept her eyes on the ships heading to battle.
“With me, Captain,” Ebb-La-Kem said, gesturing as one might to a child. He nodded once at Kindred and moved on toward a great wooden structure that workers were assembling on the dock. It rose into the air, a series of platforms from which they might observe the battle from a safe distance.
Little Wing stayed behind with Kindred and Seraph, and they watched Ebb-La-Kem begin scaling the structure, the captain and his flag bearers behind him.
“What’s the captain doing?” Kindred asked.
“Giving away Arcadian battle strategy,” Little Wing said, spitting on the ground, a look of disgust on her face.
Right, Kindred thought, remembering the captain’s part of the bargain with the Council. While the rest of the crew offered what they could to the Once-City, Captain Caraway offered perhaps the greatest gift of all: knowledge of Arcadia’s fleet and strategies.
“Why aren’t you going too?”
Little Wing turned to look at Kindred and smiled, showing off a few new bruises adding color over the older ones already ranging over much of her face and skin.
“I have proven to be a less-than-dependable resource, apparently.”