POV: tress
Summary
Tress wakes, which she immediately counts as a positive — she had been prepared to die in the first day of her adventure. She has, however, a pounding headache and can see nothing at all. The creak of wood tells her she is in the ship's hold; her fingers find iron bars. She is in a cage.
A quiet, pinched voice in the dark tells her she will not find a way out. She asks who is speaking; the voice answers, *a fellow prisoner.* He has heard the sailors talking and asks if she is really an inspector. Tress says yes — though inwardly she is sure the captain has worked out her ruse and is turning the Oot's Dream back to Diggen's Point to fetch the real inspector and ruin everything.
The voice points out the obvious — that boarding alone was a lunatic move — and asks where she thought she would be taken. Her confusion gives the truth away. The voice explains: this is a smugglers' vessel, sailing under forged royal writs to skip tariffs, and they assumed the inspector who walked aboard at Diggen's Point was on to them. He laughs in a series of high squeaks at the discovery that she was coincidentally a fraud and not a threat at all. Tress is relieved, in a black sort of way, that at least she will not be returned to the duke — the smugglers will simply kill her and tip her overboard. She decides not to cry. Her eyes veto her.
The voice — gentler now — tells her at least she got off the Rock. She asks how he knows of Diggen's Point. He says he was on his way there for a visit, before the sailors found him out and locked him in here. He will not say why. *My kind*, he says, *are mysterious like that.*
He pulls a cork from a small hole in the hull he has been keeping plugged so the sailors will not move his cage, and light pours in. Tress sees a hold no taller than a man, her own little cell, and across from her a small cage lashed to a stack of boxes. In it is an ordinary black rat, sitting up on his haunches. The rat looks at her, falls silent, and cocks his head — she is much younger than he expected, no royal inspector at all. He pries the truth from her piece by piece. She is sneaking off the island. He cannot believe anyone would leave the Rock voluntarily. She tries to make him stop staring with her beady-eyed objections, and finds herself in a small ridiculous quarrel about whether one should ask a talking rat how he talks. The rat answers with his mouth, thank you, and adds that the story behind it is one he is not interested in telling.
He starts to seal his light hole back up and she asks him to leave it a moment longer. The boots above are stomping in a way that suggests the ship is changing course. *So... smugglers,* she says, by way of conversation. *Smugglers,* he agrees, and explains that he was caught chewing their rations and had the choice between giving up his secret or being thrown overboard as a pest; he picked the former, and they decided a talking rat might be worth selling on. He goes on, as if it explained everything else, that because of the coming war every second captain these days seems to be a smuggler — the king's commandeering of merchant ships in his buildup against the Sorceress has driven a lot of otherwise honest crews into forged writs and prolapsed morals.
She seizes on the political detail. War — with the Sorceress. He confirms it offhand: the Sorceress has been raiding more, the king is building up his fleet. Tress asks whether she could talk the smugglers down — explain she was never an inspector. *Oh, suddenly you aren't?* the rat says. She tells him a friend of hers is in trouble and she has to rescue him. *Him?* the rat repeats. *You left your home for a man?* Then, more kindly: no man is worth getting killed for; if she manages to escape, she should go home to her Rock.
*He's not just any man,* she begins — and is cut off by a pop somewhere outside, an odd noise so far out at sea. She cocks her head. The chapter answers her by sending a cannonball, priority delivery, through the side of the ship.