POV: tress
Summary
Tress sits on her porch leaning against her mother Ulba, holding the last cup Charlie ever sent her — the one with the suicidal butterfly painted on it — and watches the horizon for the duke's ship. Her tea tastes of tears. She mutters that *it* (love, the year of waiting, all of it) was not very practical; her mother replies that love rarely is. Ulba is now stout in the cheerful way she has been for five years — since the day Tress discovered her mother was giving her own share of food to the children and quietly took over the shopping. Tress has at last managed to say to herself, only a year too late, what she should have said to Charlie on the dock: that she loved him.
A crowd has gathered at the docks for free wine — the duke has promised a celebration, and the islanders are not going to forfeit thirty kegs of his hospitality on grounds of taste. The baker Holmes waves Tress and her mother up onto his shop steps so they can see. Up onto the deck of the ship comes a princess almost too beautiful to be real, every feature exactly where it ought to be. Tress manages, with effort, to be happy for Charlie — *Charlie has at last gotten to be a story.* Then the duke presents his heir. The young man who steps up beside the princess is six and a half feet tall, square of jaw, and built so heavily his shirt seams creak when he raises his hand. He is unmistakably not Charlie.
The duke announces, to the silenced crowd, that an unfortunate accident has forced him to adopt his nephew Dirk as his new heir. He recites Dirk's qualifications: excellent fencer, answers questions in single sentences (sometimes only single words), war hero who lost ten thousand men in a single battle. The crowd does not cheer. The duke reminds them about the thirty kegs. The crowd cheers. The townspeople troop up the path to the feast hall — admiring the princess's beauty, marvelling that Dirk can keep upright at all with a centre of gravity that high — and Ulba follows them to get answers.
Tress is left at the foot of the gangplank, where Flik — one of the duke's servants, ears wide as a startled bat's — waves her over. He has been given something for her. It is a sack of broken ceramic: the fifth cup, in pieces. Flik tells her quietly the rest of what happened on the tour. Charlie tried everything to put the princesses off — eighty-seven types of plywood, the names of his childhood pets, religious lectures, throwing up in the lap of a deaf princess at the fifth court — but his father finally figured out what he was doing and got *right mad*. The smashed cup is part of what happened next.
Tress presses for more, and Flik says only that the young master sailed the Midnight Sea beneath Thanasmia's own moon and that the Sorceress took him. The names alone are enough to chill her. Even on a backwater like the Rock people know of the Sorceress and her unreachable stronghold somewhere in the Midnight Sea, with the unpopulated Crimson Sea standing between it and the Verdant Sea from any direction. She presses Flik further: did the king send Charlie to try to marry the Sorceress? Flik won't answer. *No,* Tress says aloud, working it out. *He sent Charlie to die.* Flik says he did not say that, hurries away, and reminds her that, *if anyone asks,* he did not say it.
She listens, numb, as servants give the same story to other curious dock workers. Charlie was sent to the Midnight Sea by the king and duke in agreement, because someone had to do something about the Sorceress's raids and Charlie was, evidently, *the obvious choice for reasons*. The arithmetic of it horrifies her. The duke got an heir he could be proud of. The king got the marriage alliance with Dormancy he wanted. Everyone got another death to lay at the Sorceress's door and another piece of public opinion for the next war. Three days later she gathers enough courage to ask the duke's steward Brunswick for more, and — for the price of a pie — gets the confirmation: a ransom letter did arrive from the Sorceress, and the duke chose to read it as a trick to lure more ships into her trap. The king has declared Charlie officially dead.
Tress drifts through the next weeks watching the rest of the island go back to normal, because no one cares. Dirk is popular, handsome, very good at getting other people killed, and far easier to like than Charlie ever was for the people who didn't know him. She musters her courage one more time — bolder than anything she has ever done in her life — and goes up to the mansion to ask the duke to please pay the ransom. He calls her a *hazelnut-haired strumpet*, forbids her from washing windows in town, and her family's income collapses onto sock-knitting at reduced piecework rates. She fades into a lethargy in which she stops feeling like a human being and starts feeling, as she puts it to herself, like a human who is merely being. Then, two months after the duke's return, she makes her decision. There is somebody who still cares about Charlie. Naturally it will be up to that person to do something about him. She cannot impose on anyone else. She is going to have to go rescue Charlie herself.