The Girl
POV: tress
Summary
Tress is introduced as the chapter's subject — a thoughtful, soft-spoken teenage girl living on a barren black-saltstone island in the middle of the Emerald Sea. Sailors and townsfolk describe her hair using the food metaphors that men reach for when describing women; she finds the habit faintly unsettling, and prefers the plain phrase "light brown." It is the unruliness of the hair, not the color, that interests her. Each morning she fights it into a brush, a comb, a ribbon and a tight braid, and each day a few strands escape anyway. She had been given the unfortunate family name of Glorf at birth, but those wild strands earned her the nickname Tress instead, and that — by her own estimation — is the most interesting thing about her. She has been raised to a careful pragmatism, the kind that grows naturally on lifeless islands that no one is ever permitted to leave.
The narrator pauses to describe the place. Locally it is called the Rock; on the maps it is Diggen's Point, named for a settler who left the moment he could and never came back. The island is shaped like an old man's crooked finger of black saltstone, large enough to hold a town and a duke's mansion. Its soil is poisoned by saltstone dust, its agriculture has been reduced to compost vats, and the equipment in the salt mines puts out a constant black smoke. The one thing it has of value to passing ships is a deep aquifer of fresh water — and even that water tastes of salt. The atmosphere is dismal, the ground wretched, the views depressing, and, in case any of that has failed to discourage tourism, there are also deadly spores.
The world itself is then sketched for the reader. Twelve moons hang in close stationary orbit around the planet, each large enough to dominate a third of the sky and each fixed above its own ocean. Wherever you stand, one is always visible. The points directly beneath them — the lunagrees — pour down a constant fountain of colored spores, filling the world's oceans with alien dust that ships sail as easily as water elsewhere. Diggen's Point lies in the Emerald Sea near the Verdant Lunagree below the Emerald Moon, which the locals worship as a god. The spores are inert only when dry; the slightest water sets the green ones sprouting explosively, sending vines into the lungs and sinuses of anyone unwise enough to breathe a wet handful. Salt and silver halt them — which is why the islanders tolerate the constant salt in their water and food, and teach their children a singsong rhyme about the two as a charm against the killer.
Because the place is so inhospitable, the king who the duke serves has made it law that no local may ever leave Diggen's Point. He gives military reasons for it — strategic resupply, friendly anchorage — but the islanders all understand the truth: the Rock is too dismal to keep a population on except by decree. Ships visit only to take on water and to drop off waste for the compost vats, and they obey the rule strictly: no local is ever taken aboard. In the evenings, then, Tress sits on her family's porch sipping salty tea from one of her painted cups, watching the ships she will never sail on slip away toward the horizon while the Verdant Lunagree empties its column of spores into the green ocean. She tells herself that there is a beauty here she actually likes, and that she will be content to spend her whole life on the Rock.