POV: tress
Summary
From the deck of the Oot's Dream, Tress thinks she can see the real inspector at last reaching the Diggen's Point dock, gesturing furiously at the retreating ship. By now, she calculates, Gret will have climbed out of the hollow keg and gone home. There are no other witnesses left on the Rock except Brick, Gremmy and Sor, all of whose debts are paid. Just like that, she is free.
Free does not feel exciting. It feels heavy. For the first time in her life Diggen's Point is the thing that grows smaller in the distance instead of the thing approaching. Almost everyone she has ever known lives on that rock, and she watches it dwindle hoping the new road she has stepped onto does not run straight off a cliff. She tells herself her escape went off without a hitch, and wonders if the rest of the rescue might be similarly easy — a thought, the narrator notes, that she can have only because she has no formal training in dramatic irony.
She looks up at the open sky and finds it almost obscenely blue away from the mining smog. The air smells of nothing she recognises and dangerously of nothing she recognises — no salt to kill stray spores. She is reassured at least by the silver trim running along the railing and up the mast. The crew, obligated by a royal writ to ferry her, leaves her largely alone on the quarterdeck. Her inspector's coat — red and gold, down past her knees — was the spare from the inspector's closet, stolen the night before and tailored by Ulba until it looked made for her. A doctored entry on the dock register had the wrong departure time for the Oot's Dream, guaranteeing the real inspector would arrive too late.
She has brought almost nothing with her: a small bundle of clothes and a bag of Charlie's cups. Her favourite is the fourth, the one painted with the butterfly. She tries not to gawk at the open spore sea but cannot help it — the green spores churn and burst around the hull, slap waves up the side, and break into puffs at the tips. The narrator interrupts to explain the science: vents on the ocean floor blow air up through the spores until the dust behaves as liquid, a process called the seethe by Tress's people; it comes and goes, and when it ceases every ship on the sea is stranded until it returns. A wave breaks high and tosses spores toward Tress; she yelps, but the spores go grey on the silvered deck and die.
The captain turns up at her elbow. He has terrible breath, a crisped tan complexion, and matted stringy hair; the narrator likens him to drain gunk come to life. He cheerfully explains the silver and the seethe and laughs at her every time the spores make her flinch. He is the best option she had found in weeks of watching, so she nods politely and keeps her coat buttoned tight. She gets out her notebook and works on her plan: ride the Oot's Dream to the Core Archipelago, find a way into the palace, get a copy of Charlie's ransom note. Paying a ransom herself feels impossible — but easier than crossing the Midnight Sea to deal with the Sorceress in person.
The captain leans nearer. He tells her her hair is the colour of a good cup of mead. Tress snaps her notebook shut and announces she will retire to her cabin. He smiles — the kind of man, the narrator notes, who assumes every woman is thinking about him, which they are, all of them hoping he will go the other way — and walks her down to the cabins under the quarterdeck. To her relief he leaves her at the door without insisting. She locks it behind her, pours water into the butterfly cup, sits down on the bunk to think.
It all feels much more real now. Was she really doing this? Had she really left her home? And what, she wonders, were those strange brightly-coloured pigeons, and why were they talking to her? The narrator, intruding one more time, clarifies for the reader that this is what happened when the captain had something put in her drink. There are no talking pigeons in this story. There are, however, talking rats.