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The first thing Tress tries to do is convince herself that the news cannot be real, then to think about anyone other than Charlie. Locals do not leave the Rock. Officials can; the duke himself does, and once won his medals at the price of many of his troops; but the duke has never before taken his family. The proclamation now says that the ducal heir has come of age and must be presented to the princesses of the civilized seas for betrothal. She is, as always, a pragmatic young woman: she goes about her shopping, sorts spoiled goods, salvages garlic and weevily grain, and notices none of it.

What hurts is the unfairness — she has only just admitted to herself what she feels, and now it is being taken away. She has been told that love hurts, but she had thought there would be honey along with the salt. Her practicality reasserts itself anyway. They had been able to pretend only as long as the real world held off. The real world is not pretending. Marriage at her station is about love; marriage at his is about politics, and politics is what nobles and the very rich do with the lives of everyone else.

Coming up from the market she sees the duke's procession already winding down toward the docks. She doubles back by a different path and arrives in time to find Charlie scanning the crowd for her. He bows like a self-conscious paladin and calls her *fare maiden*; she tells him not to bother being someone he isn't. He admits, blushing, that he is not the groundskeeper after all, that he is the duke's son. She informs him that this is amazing — that Charlie the groundskeeper and Charles the ducal heir should turn out to be the same person, considering how similar they look. He asks if she is angry. Anger, she tells him, is in line. It is seventh down, sandwiched between confusion and fatigue.

He tells her he is to be married — to a princess of some nation or another — and asks her what she thinks. She fumbles, says she wishes him well, then makes herself say what she actually means: she would prefer he didn't. He answers immediately that, well, then he shan't. She points out he hasn't got a choice. He says he has a secret weapon. He can, he confides, be incredibly boring. He plans to talk every princess he meets out of the marriage by going on, and on, and on. She tells him she has always liked the on. He tells her she is a special case, that she is like a pair of gloves, and tries to backtrack into clarification when she chokes up. She understands him perfectly. From the prow the duke shouts at him to be quick. Charlie squeezes her hands once more, promises he will not marry anyone, swears he will send a cup back from every kingdom as proof, and tells her she has always been able to see him when no one else has.

She holds on to his hands until she can't. *You are my gloves too, Charlie,* she tells him as he turns away. He jogs up the gangplank, his father forces him belowdecks, and the ship slips off the dead grey spores at the dock and out into the true verdant ocean. She climbs back up to the cliff above her house and watches the sails shrink to the size of a cup, then a speck, then nothing.

Then the long part. She does not wait so much as work. Windows. Meals. Her brother. Her father Lem limps from his old mine injury and can barely walk; her mother Ulba sits with him and knits socks to sell to sailors, and the yarn costs almost as much as the socks earn. Tress takes on the household. So she does not let herself wait — until the first cup arrives. It is delivered by a young new cabin boy on one of the ships: Hoid, the narrator quietly notes, in the first half-confession of the framing — *yes, that's me; what tipped you off, the name?* The cup is fine porcelain, without a single chip, and inside the package is a letter detailing how Charlie put off the first princess by enumerating the noises his stomach makes in various sleeping positions and by introducing her to his individually-named toenail clippings. Reading it she can almost hear him. *Fight on, my loquacious love,* she thinks the next morning as she scrubs the mansion's windows.

The second cup arrives — pure red glass, deceptively narrow — having defeated its princess via a detailed inventory of Charlie's breakfast eggs sorted by size. The third is a solid pewter tankard heavy enough to use as a club; it comes from a kingdom that Charlie suspected was made up, after the princess could not survive a lecture on the relative merits of various punctuation marks (including some he had invented). The fourth package contains no letter, only a small drawing: two gloved hands clasped together. The cup it accompanies is painted with a butterfly flying over a red ocean — which she finds odd, because the butterfly seems entirely unafraid of the spores.

The fifth cup never comes. Tress tries to play it off. Ships are slow; pirates exist; spores exist. The months stretch. She is at the dock every time a ship comes in to ask after mail, and gets nothing, week after week, for a year. Then at last a note — but not from Charlie. From his father, posted to the whole town: the duke is returning to Diggen's Point at last, and he is bringing his wife, his heir — and his new daughter-in-law.