POV: tress
Summary
Tress needs a toilet. The narrator pauses first for a piece of arithmetic about the Crow's Song — she is a far larger ship than the Oot's Dream was, four-masted, the equivalent of a small galleon, with a crew of about sixty — and then for an aside about how many of those sixty he is going to bother naming. The rest, he insists, are all called Doug, a convergent linguistic phenomenon he has met on more worlds than is reasonable.
Tress asks one of the Dougs where the head is and is sent down to the middle deck. The ship has four levels: the exposed upper deck on top, the middle deck (mess, armory, officers' rooms), the lower deck (sailors' bunks), and the cavernous hold beneath that. The toilet rooms have working plumbing and tiny portholes for light. Huck waits gentlemanly outside; Tress wonders what happens to the waste of a sixty-person ship on a long voyage and decides she would rather not know.
On her way back up she hears voices from a room near the head and lingers to look in. The big dreadlocked sailor who hauled her up on her first day is behind a counter — Fort, the Crow's Song's quartermaster, of a different scale than the rest of humanity, his fingers gnarled as if they had been broken many times and then left to mend on their own. He is talking to a gangly sharp-nosed woman with three pistols on her: Ann, the ship's carpenter, the one who stood up to Captain Crow on Tress's first day. They are examining a ceramic cannonball.
Fort does not speak. He communicates through a flat board the size of a small sign: he taps the back of it and words appear on the front. The narrator notes in passing that he uses it instead of reading lips, which is taxing and inaccurate even for experts. The board tells Ann that he has inspected every other round in the armory and found no further defects — none of the rest will burst late and tear through a hull instead of just locking onto it. He goes on, in plainer words, that he is not happy with how the Oot's Dream ended, with the killing, or with how the captain behaved after. Ann admits that she dislikes it too, but says it is too late to back out; the Crow's Song is better than getting press-ganged.
Tress ducks back into the head as Ann leaves. *Sounds like they didn't mean to sink her*, Huck whispers — once the first cannonball punched through, the rest of the deed must have been finished off as cleanup. They are still murderers, though. He explains the felony-murder rule to her: under the king's law, any death in the course of a felony hangs on every accomplice, intent or no, so the whole crew of the Crow's Song will hang together when the royal navy catches up. They need to be off this ship before that happens. Tress does not even know how she would get off, but the more immediate problem is that the captain does not mean to feed her.
She sneaks back to Fort's door. His back is to her as he sorts crates behind the counter, and she wonders if she could steal something to eat or send Huck to. *What?* Huck says, too loudly. She glares; he tells her, sotto voce, that Fort is deaf. He then volunteers a story about a deaf dancer he once knew, the best one he had seen under the moons, which got cut short for reasons relating to his being a rat — until Tress suggests, before one of the pirates spots a loquacious rat as something they could sell, that perhaps now is another good time for him not to talk. He agrees.
She turns to leave. A board creaks under her foot. Fort spins around at once and finds her in the doorway, narrowing his eyes — the narrator notes that every quartermaster he has ever known seems to have a sixth sense for someone snooping around their stock. Fort raises the board from the counter, taps it, and turns it toward her. *Come here, girl*, it reads. There is no point running. So Tress, feeling like she is walking into a dragon's den, steps inside.