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Laggart arrives at the forecannon, cranes his long neck over the barrel to inspect the bundles of spores Tress has packed, and pronounces the work well done — to the Dougs who had nothing to do with it. The narrator notes the small luxury he has just discovered: the credit is his, the blame is theirs, the work is somebody else's. Tress, invisible in plain sight with her scrub-brush a few paces away, is just as happy not to be noticed.

The Dougs drift off and Laggart makes a great show of cleaning the cannon himself — work he never normally entrusts to anyone else. Tress keeps her head down to her work and watches sidelong. Sure enough: he takes a fist-sized cannonball from his pack and tucks it into the false-bottom compartment of the spore-barrel. She was right. He keeps rigged ship-sinkers in the hidden cache — the kind that would never pass Fort's inspection. The question that has been turning in her head all afternoon sharpens. *Why?* Deadrunning is more dangerous and less profitable than ordinary piracy; the loot is the whole point of being a pirate. Unless, of course, you actually *want* the crew to become deadrunners — to push them across a line they would not have stepped over of their own choice.

Laggart finishes, shouts at a few Dougs for being lazy on principle, shoulders his pack, and strolls off to Crow's cabin. Crow lets him in, then posts a heavyset Doug outside as an unobtrusive door-guard — the way, Tress thinks, a tavern keeper might post one of his cousins outside a back room on a rowdy night. *I need to know what they're talking about*, Tress mutters. *Yeah, that would be great*, Huck agrees from her shoulder. She thinks aloud: she needs someone small, quick, and unlikely to be noticed listening. Huck offers a few unhelpful suggestions before catching on. *Oooohhhh. Rat. Right.*

He hops down and scuttles along the gunwale to the captain's cabin, slips through her window unseen by the door-Doug, and is gone. The narrator pauses for an aside: Huck has attached himself to Tress so quickly because, in his short life as a rat, every other human he had met had tried to kill him, capture him, or sell him. She was the first who did not. He would rather she not die. So — spying, then.

Tress scrubs furiously to ride out her nerves; she is acutely conscious that she has sent a friend into danger to feed her curiosity, which is not the kind of thing she would have done a fortnight ago. But Charlie is still out there, and an escape from this ship will require knowing what is on the captain's mind. So, perhaps, learning to impose on people a little is a price she is willing to pay.

Huck returns by way of the railing. *Spying is hungry work*, he announces. Tress glares; her own stomach growls. She steers him to a sheltered section of deck and turns her back to the Dougs so it looks as if she is only scrubbing. Huck then informs her that, in order to convey what he heard, he is going to need to get into character. Tress eyes him. Huck rises onto his hind legs, paws up by his nose, and adopts a startlingly good impression of Crow's aristocratic accent. He addresses her in it. He then waits expectantly for Tress to deliver Laggart's lines. *I wasn't there*, she hisses. *I don't know what he said.* Huck assures her she will do fine. She is, very reluctantly, press-ganged into the role.

Through this absurd two-rat-one-girl reenactment, the substance comes out. Crow has had word from a contact in Kingsport that the wreckage of the Oot's Dream has been found — but only as a single dead body. The lone sailor Crow left alive on the Oot's Dream to carry the story rejected her bountiful generosity by dying of wounds nobody had thought to notice. All that work, Laggart grouses (in Huck's voice), wasted; another ship will have to be sunk. The crew, Crow adds, is restive — there are sailors she fears might desert. Laggart agrees: Fort is brewing trouble, and Salay possibly with him. *We need blood binding them to this ship*, he says, *if we're going to do what you want.* And Crow: the crew will never follow her into dangerous seas unless they have no other choice, no other place to go. So another ship will be sunk, and this time a couple of sailors will be left alive to spread the word properly.

Huck finishes his performance and settles back onto his haunches. *Dangerous seas*, Tress whispers. The Verdant is among the safer; Crow is steering for somewhere the crew would refuse to follow if they had any other option. Huck, rather earnestly, asks if she thinks the captain has some kind of curse, some literal *blood binding* she can put on them. Tress gently explains that the binding Laggart meant is metaphor. Crow does not trust her crew's loyalty for what she wants of them, but she trusts that men cornered will follow the only road left. So she will make them deadrunners in secret — chased by the law, refused by other pirates, with nowhere else to go but where she points the ship.

Huck looks at her, twitching his nose in what passes for a rat's nod. Tress looks morose, he says. *Not morose*, she says. *Merely distracted.* He asks why. *Because*, she says, *I've just figured out a way for us to escape this ship.*