POV: tress
Summary
The chapter steps off Tress for an evening and follows her father Lem, who is not poor — the narrator insists on the distinction — only short on money. While Tress sleeps, Lem limps the long road down to Brick's tavern. He knows Gremmy and Sor will be there because the tavern stays open until two. He hobbles in during the noisy half of the evening, before the room thins to the people who want company rather than companionship.
Lem does not approach Brick behind the bar, nor Sor and Gremmy at their table. He plants himself at the dartboard, where Jule offers him the next game. He throws his first dart several feet below the board and into a knot in the wood — one of two knots the tavern's regulars have long ago decided sit, roughly, where the duke's legs would be on the imaginary face higher up. Between throws he asks Jule in passing if it was true Jule had recently covered one of Gremmy's tabs. Jule nods. The next opponent is old Rod the innkeeper, who asks after Lem's cane and remarks that Lem has gotten better at darts since the accident; Lem asks in turn whether Rod still helps Brick with the brewing on weekends. He does.
One after another the men of the tavern take a game against Lem, and one after another they read the script underneath his small talk. Each remembers a thing Lem had done for them — a roof rebuilt, a drunk walked home, a hundred quiet favours done and never mentioned. The narrator pauses to make the point flat: Lem is a deep, pure well; people drink from him; he never reminds them. The fact that he is now obliquely asking for something means he is, in the language of his sort of men, very nearly begging. Word travels around the room without anyone having to say it aloud. Lem needs a favour from Gremmy, Sor and Brick specifically, and it must be a real one, because he is asking.
Before dawn the next morning the three of them are on Tress's doorstep, demanding to be told what they are helping her do. The chapter does not yet say what she tells them. It skips ahead a little over a week, to a row of six large ale kegs being trundled onto the dock for inspection before loading. The ship is the Oot's Dream, in port under a royal writ to buy Brick's ale; the crew does not know Diggen's Point and the captain insists on a proper inspection before the kegs go aboard. Exactly the combination the plan requires.
The royal inspector arrives in her red and gold coat, rod in hand, with her listening device, scowling enough to kill spores on contact. Sor watches his pocket watch and counts seconds. Gremmy mops sweat; Brick elbows him to stop looking guilty. The inspector works down the line, sounds each keg, finds nothing, waves the cargo aboard — then turns back at the last moment and kicks over the final keg. It goes *thump*, then it goes *ouch*. The inspector pries the top off with a crowbar and drags out a raven-haired young woman packed in feathers as insulation. She accuses Sor of conspiracy. Gremmy begins to cry openly. Sor wonders aloud whether Gremmy could take the punishment for him. The inspector charges them for only five kegs, declares she will tell the king personally of the betrayal at Diggen's Point, leaves her assistant on the docks, and sails with the Oot's Dream toward the Core Archipelago.
The chapter then turns and tells the reader, twice, what it has been quietly arranging: the young woman in the keg was not Tress. She was Sor's daughter Gret, whose debts to the conspirators would be wiped by the same scheme. Tress was not hiding in another keg either. Tress was not hiding at all. Tress was the inspector — uniform stolen from the real inspector's closet the night before, altered by her mother to fit, the dock register doctored so the real inspector would arrive too late to catch her. She walks aboard the Oot's Dream in red and gold, leaves Diggen's Point behind, and goes to find Charlie.