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Tress is in fact not as content with her quiet life on the Rock as the previous chapter let her pretend. The narrator wants the reader to understand from the start that this is a story about contradictions — a story about people who are both what they seem and not what they seem at the same time. Tress is therefore an ordinary girl by her own honest accounting: a fair needlepoint hand, a talent for baking, an early bedtime, lukewarm tea, a love of her parents and a mild irritation with her little brother. She has no secret fencing training, no royal lineage, no animal-friend talents. She has noticed that the other girls of her age constantly assert that they are not like everyone else, and concluded — with characteristic small wryness — that "everyone else" must be a category containing only her.

She is also too polite to inconvenience anyone. When the louder youths talk of running off to foreign oceans she finds the idea frightening; she has her parents, her brother, and her cup collection, and that is plenty. The cups are her secret window onto the world. Sailors who dock at Diggen's Point know of her fondness for them and bring her cups back from distant oceans where the spores are reportedly crimson or azure or gold; she pays for them with pies, baked from ingredients she earns by scrubbing windows. Battered or chipped is fine — a damaged cup, in her view, has a story.

Every new cup she takes up to the mansion at the top of the Rock to show Charlie, who claims to be the groundskeeper there. Tress has known from the beginning that he is not. His hands are unblemished, he is too well fed, his hair is too neatly cut, and he keeps removing a signet ring before she arrives — leaving a pale band of skin on the finger nobles wear them on. She has decided not to challenge the lie because Charlie is genuine even in his fibs, and that is part of why she likes him. The walk up takes her past inert grey spores killed by the island's salty air, past the fork to the salt mines, and up switchbacks to the overhang where the mansion squats above the smog. Today the guards on duty are Snagu and Lead — pies for both — and they let her pass even though it isn't her day to wash windows.

Around the back of the mansion she finds Charlie going through fencing forms with a thin dueling sword, an exercise he plainly dislikes and which his father wishes he liked more. He pretends, badly, that the sword is for gardening — practitioners on the king's island, he explains, are accustomed to ambushes — and at last gives up, jams the blade into a potted plant, and sits down beside her on the low wall. She has brought him a pigeon-and-carrot pie. She has also brought him the new cup: a tin one stamped in a vertical script that Charlie identifies, off-handedly, as old Iriali — a script of a people who reportedly vanished from their island three hundred years before, supposedly with golden hair like sunlight. He weaves an immediate invented history for the cup (the table of a nobleman, the dread of a poor fisherwoman, the buried hoard of a pirate grandson) because Charlie loves stories the way Tress loves cups.

The talk turns, in their usual oblique way, to the other thing. Charlie asks her quietly what she wants; she lets him understand that she means the same thing he does. He covers her hand with his. He tells her he is a coward, that he could never speak honestly around his father, but that if she were ever in trouble he would put on armor and come for her — dull armor, perhaps, since no one in a real emergency stops to shine it. From inside the mansion the duke is heard shouting at something. Charlie tenses, his smile fades, and the moment dissolves — but another arrives in its place, less intimate and still valuable for being time with him. He prods her to talk about her ordinary day, the salmon she saved at the market by spotting it next to a worse fish, every mundane thing she has done — and listens. He does that always. She tells herself that what she feels when she visits is warmth from being up close to the sun, even now in the moonshadow when everything has cooled. But the lie is getting tired. It is not about cups, and it is not about stories. The narrator promises us it is, in the end, about gloves.