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Fort looks Tress up and down, taps his board, and asks her name. She gives it. He asks if she is really a royal inspector; she admits the coat is stolen. *You're a pirate now*, his board prints, *and what you stole is yours.* When she protests that she is not a pirate, he warns her not to say so where anyone else can read her lips: that kind of talk gets people put over the side. She thanks him. He tells her not to call him *sir* — he left that title behind a long time ago.

Then he asks if anyone has fed her. Her stomach answers for her, and he comes up with a plate from below the counter, holding its thin edge between two fingers. His hands look as if every finger has been broken at some point and allowed to heal without splints; he manages all the same. He scrapes the bottom of a pot, slops out crusty hash browns and watery eggs, sets a fork on the plate, and waits. Tress takes the fork as permission and tries to eat. The food, she discovers, is awful: cold leftover dregs that someone with her cup-shaped opinions about quality endures the way a master pianist might endure off-key kazoo. She does not complain. It is the only food on offer.

To distract herself she comments on the board. Fort hands her a clean bronze cup of water — she drinks it gratefully — and explains, in printed words on the board's front, that what she says appears on the back for him, with a marker before each new speaker. The narrator pauses to clear up a misconception many hearing people hold about lip-reading: it is inaccurate and exhausting even for experts, not the universal solution stories make it out to be. Fort lived with that imperfect tool for years before this device found its way to him. He got it, he tells her, from a wizard from beyond the stars, traded hard for; the wizard seemed startled to learn how useful it would be once handed off. The narrator notes, off to one side, that the device is Nalthian — Awakened predictive Connection circuits — and that he was not the wizard in question, and is still curious which one it was.

Fort shows her the back of the board: a tap-keyboard that anticipates the word he is reaching for at unsettling speed. He has to leave it out in the sun once a week to keep it working, and it answers only to him. *Don't think about stealing it.* She would not dare, she says — he has been so kind. *It isn't kindness*, he prints back. *It's a trade.* For what? *Haven't decided yet.* Back to the food, girl.

Before she can finish, Salay strides in: the short curly-haired sailor who refused to throw Tress overboard on her first day, the Crow's Song's helmswoman. She and Fort are both from the Islands of Lobu in the Sapphire Sea, where zephyr spores release a burst of air when watered. She slaps three small gold earrings on the counter — *I'll give you three* — won, she says, off a Doug at cards. Fort's board insists earrings make his ears itch and he has no use for them. She adds a fourth. The word *deal* perks him up; he inspects the earrings, scratches his head, then sets out a pocket watch. Salay slips it off the counter and hurries back to her station. The earrings have no practical value to him at all; the good deal is its own payment.

Tress chokes down the last of the food. Fort fills her water cup again, shoos her away, but tells her to come back after the rest of the crew has had supper — he may have something for her. She nods her thanks. On her way out she passes the cabin boy skipping into the room and settling onto a stool. Fort sets down a plate of the same hash. *My favourite!* says Hoid, and digs in humming.

The narrator stops the chapter here to make a clarification. Yes, he can taste the food. Yes, he said earlier he lost his sense of taste to the Sorceress's curse. The reader thought he meant *that* sense of taste? Oh, the innocent fool. She took the other one — the important one — and with it his sense of humour, his sense of decorum, his sense of purpose, and worst of all his sense of self, which he is now mortified to discover is tied directly to his wit. *I mean*, he sighs, *it's in the name.* And so the reader is introduced, properly, to Hoid, the cabin boy. That, he says, more or less rounds out the names worth keeping: Captain Crow; Laggart the first officer and cannonmaster; Fort the quartermaster; Ann the carpenter; Salay the helmswoman. Everyone else, Doug. Oh — and Ulaam, nearly forgotten, but seeing as he is dead he barely counts.