POV: tress
Summary
Tress wakes up the next morning on the deck of the Crow's Song, stiff and creased and with her hair in her face. She vaguely remembers being kicked aside in the night by sailors who needed to walk where she was sleeping; her first conscious thought is not for food but for Charlie. She feels naive for ever imagining she could simply leave home and pluck him out of the Sorceress's reach, and the narrator pauses to argue, gently, that empathy is the long-term investment of the emotionally well-off.
That is cold comfort on a deck full of strangers. Huck scampers off to scout while Tress picks herself up and listens to a call from below for first watch to come to mess. She edges toward the stairs and is intercepted by Laggart, the Crow's Song's lanky bald first officer and her cannonmaster, armed with a sword and a pair of pistols. He explains, helpful and smiling, that first watch eats now, second eats next, and the captain has put her on third — a watch Tress eventually realises consists of one person and is never called.
So she keeps her head down and watches the crew instead, in the hope of learning where she can stand without being shouted at. The narrator notes, in passing, that the Crow's Song's sailors are a mixed crew of women and men in roughly equal numbers and a variety of ethnicities — not unusual on the spore seas, where, he observes, sexism interferes with profits. They are not jovial, but they work with focus. Captain Crow watches Tress from the rail every so often while drinking from her plumed canteen, and her stare leaves Tress feeling like a stubborn smudge someone has just noticed.
Tress takes out her hairbrush, beats her hair into a braid, picks up bucket and brush again — and then realises she has no water or soap. While she is standing there, a thin white-haired sailor in his thirties walks over and hands her a fresh bucket, says something cheerfully meaningless about his gums, and wobbles off across the deck like a drunk penguin. Tress knows him. He is the cabin boy from the Whistlebow, the one who used to hand her the cups Charlie was sending home — Hoid, whose hair and gangly frame are unmistakeable, and who was, at last meeting, of perfectly sound mind. The narrator confirms it, declines to discuss it, and goes off to stuff shoelaces up his nose.
Tress moves up to the quarterdeck where the traffic is thinner and sets to scrubbing. She is, it turns out, very good at scrubbing. She picks out other half-familiar faces in the crew — sailors who have been let off at the Rock in the past and have hopped from one passing vessel to the next. The crew of the Crow's Song do not look like the kind of people who become bloodthirsty pirates. So how did they?
They did not even cover the painted name on the hull, Tress notices. And they left one sailor alive. Hoid wanders past again with another grin and another piece of nonsense, and Huck returns to her shoulder with crumbs and a piece of news: yes, they really are sewing a pirate flag below, but he thinks they are new to it — perhaps the Oot's Dream was sunk by accident. Tress does not buy it. They left the survivor on purpose, did not cover their name on purpose. Both choices read, to her, like an announcement.
Huck catches up. *They did it to declare themselves*, he says — and they killed thirty people doing it. Tress looks at the deck again with that fresh in her mind, and the focus she had read as discipline a moment ago now reads as the deliberate work of people trying not to think about yesterday. *Something is very wrong on this ship*, she thinks again — and is then taken, before she can press the thought any further, by a need to find the head.