POV: tress
Summary
Tress picks her way across the stranded spores toward the enemy ship with Huck on her shoulder, breathing as shallowly as she can manage. Her boots are not laced tight enough, the spores are sliding through her socks, and she is acutely aware that a single drop of sweat in the wrong place would be enough to kill her. The narrator pauses to set the rules of a stilling: the seethe catches its breath now and then, sometimes for hours, but most stillings last only a few minutes. Hers, by implication, is not going to last.
The Oot's Dream is still being hammered behind her. Gulls have begun to gather around the wreck for reasons Tress does not yet understand. A bleeding sailor pitches off the deck into the spores, and vines erupt around him in coils that crush him out of sight while the gulls dive in and tear at the new growth as if the vines were the catch they came for. Behind her, another smuggler bolts across the sea kicking up spores as he runs; he goes down within a few strides, vines sprouting through his eyes. A second sailor strides past her, more confident, more than halfway to the other ship, and is dropped clean by a musket shot from a figure at the enemy ship's prow.
The figure is wearing a tall black plume and is aiming next, Tress is certain, at her. The shot does not come. She forces herself forward step by step, and reaches the shadow of the enemy hull feeling as if she has been walking with a knife at her throat for an eternity. Faces gather at the rail and look down. No one offers her a rope. The hull is smooth, the keel offers no purchase, and after a few attempts she accepts that climbing it bare-handed is impossible.
So she thinks. She wipes a finger clean of any loose spores, puts it to her mouth, and flicks a drop of spittle into the verdant sea beside her. A coiled vine "tree" grows out of the dust, ropy and ridged enough to grip. She climbs, Huck scrambling ahead, until she reaches a porthole and can read the gold name on the hull: *the Crow's Song*. Sailors above are laughing at her struggle, conversational and unhurried. Then the humming begins under the spores, the seethe resumes, and her vine ladder sinks away into the suddenly-fluid sea.
The Oot's Dream, wrapped in vines, lists, rolls, and goes down. The Crow's Song sails past the wreck. Two muskets crack from the deck and drop the two survivors clinging to flotsam. A third man, alone in a small lifeboat, is left untouched and alive — the only remainder of the Oot's Dream's crew. Tress hangs on by her fingertips at the porthole while the Crow's Song rocks beneath her, faces appearing every now and again to confirm she is still there. *Still there. Still there.* She tells Huck to save himself; he declines. She begins to slip — and at the last moment a rope slaps the planks beside her. She catches it, tucks her head in, and is hauled up.
A heavy man with black dreadlocks dumps her on the deck. The last spores on her clothing die against the silvered planks. A shorter sailor explains, friendly, that the captain said they could pull her up if she lasted fifteen minutes. *Fifteen minutes?* It had felt like hours. The crew speak openly about the king's colours they are flying being a lie; their proper black-on-red flag is still being sewn below by a Doug. So — pirates after all. New ones, by the sound of it, and pirates who sank a ship without ever demanding loot.
Captain Crow arrives at the rail: stout, black-plumed, drinking from a leather-tooled canteen, with a face the narrator describes as a first draft of a human being. She orders Tress thrown overboard. The crew does not move. She presses; they still do not move. So Tress — dizzy and aching — drags herself across the deck to a forgotten bucket and brush and begins to scrub planks. Crow watches her for a long moment, drinks from the canteen, and then walks off without giving the order again. The pirates drift back to their work. Tress keeps scrubbing into the night, Huck whispering encouragement, until she finally curls up on the boards and sleeps where she lies.