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Captain Crow comes out of her cabin and climbs to the quarterdeck while Laggart swaggers off toward the bow. Tress takes the chance to refill her bucket and send Huck off to forage, and on the way back up she repositions her scrubbing near the helm — close enough to the captain and to Salay, the short helmswoman who had traded earrings with Fort the day before, to overhear what she can.

For a long while she does nothing but scrub and listen to the boat. There is a particular freedom to the sounds of a ship under way, the narrator notes — the wood working, the Dougs calling to each other, the rocking against the spores. On a sea — even one made of spores — you are either bending wind and water to your will or being bent to theirs. The moon that pours green spores over this sea hangs visibly lower than usual today; they have sailed far enough north that its position has shifted. The green sea around them is, again, beautiful — and again Tress finds herself looking at the spores without flinching, even imagining what they would feel like on her skin, which is a thought that two weeks ago would have appalled her. Danger does not make a thing less beautiful, the narrator observes; if anything, the dark sharpens the candle. And there is no murderess in the world more transfixing than the sea.

Crow tells Salay to take them north, into the shipping lanes of the Seven Straits — the best place to find their next target. Tress sees her opening. Head down to her brush, she mutters loudly enough to be heard: that the Crow's Song will be killing more people, then. She gives names — Kaplan and Marple and Mallory — and lets the grief sound like grief. Crow steps over and asks if she's being ungrateful. *I appreciate my life*, Tress says, eyes down. *But?* *But that ship carried my family.* Why, Crow asks suspiciously, was a royal inspector travelling with her family? An inspector, Tress scoffs, had left this coat at a tavern they had stopped at; she had started wearing it because it made her family laugh. And now they were all dead. She lets the silence hang. She watches Crow turn the thought over and — exactly as Tress had hoped — start to see the use of a sole survivor with a story to spread about who had killed her family.

Crow tells Salay she has changed her mind. East, toward Shimmerbay; they will restock water. Salay notes, mildly, that they had water enough. Crow takes a casual swig from her canteen and observes that one can never have enough water — and besides, they have rats; they need a ship's cat. Salay calls the orders and swings the wheel. Tress feels a surge of triumph: turning for port is turning for freedom. The narrator pauses on the point. People are not telepathic, he says, but some of us read others so closely that we may as well be — picking up moods from the twitch of a muscle, the slide of an eye. Some such people become doctors; some clergy. Crow is one of them, only she puts the gift to other use: she dislikes finding out she has made someone happy, and dislikes it more if she has done it by accident. She does not reconsider the change of course. She does, however, pull her foot back and plant a boot square in Tress's stomach. Tress curls up in a puddle of soapy water, tears leaking; Crow strolls off whistling, screwing the cap of her canteen back on. The narrator observes that no available synonym for *jerk* quite covers her — truly an inspiration to the vulgar poet.

Salay, who has been on the wrong end of unearned kicks before, locks the wheel (something a helmswoman is supposed to do only in emergencies) and crouches down to check whether anything is broken. Tress refuses to be sent down to Ulaam — *he wants to cut pieces off me* — and Salay reassures her: nonsense, Ulaam wouldn't hurt a dove; doves don't have hands he can embalm. Tress manages a weak grin through the pain. Nothing is broken. Salay goes back to the wheel.

She watches Tress sit in a damp heap for a moment, then calls down to ask whether she has ever worked a ship's wheel before. The narrator notes that on Tress's world the wheel is no light matter — guiding a ship through spores is officer's work, treated as a privilege. Tress steps up, awed, and Salay sets her hands. She is told to hold the wheel firm — the vibration in her arms is the seethe shaking the rudder — and to move it slowly, smoothly, never sharply. A jolt at the wheel can throw sailors from the rigging. If the seethe stops, straighten the rudder so the spores don't tear it free; but gently, gently. Tress takes the wheel.

She feels the spore churn travel up through the tiller ropes and the wood and into her arms, and for the first time on this ship — perhaps for the first time anywhere — she feels she is the one steering. There is a peculiar strength in it; not power over the sea but the ability to ride it. The narrator stops the chapter on the thought: it is one of the tragedies of the world that so many people are made to soar or paint or sing or steer, and never find out. Human beings can't create energy, only harness it; can't create matter, only shape it; can't even create life, only nurture it — but we can create light, and the effervescence of a found purpose is one of the ways we do.

Then she sees Crow crossing the deck below and her stomach hurts again, for reasons that aren't only the kick. *Won't the captain be mad if she sees me up here?* She might, Salay says — and there is nothing she could do about it. The helmsperson alone decides who steers the ship: an old tradition, older than the captaincy, and not even Crow would dare contradict it. If Salay chose, she could keep the wheel from Crow herself. To prove the point Salay shows her the cabinet under the helm — compass, sky chart — and has her correct their course a few degrees to clear a knot of rocks ahead. *It's the helmsperson's job*, she says, gaze going distant down to the captain, *to keep the ship safe.* Out of storms. Away from spore explosions. Somehow.

Tress cautiously tells her that the captain is pushing the crew further than they wish to go. Salay does not argue, but says only that they all chose this. Tress presses, gently — *she is more reckless than the rest of you* — and very nearly tells Salay what she has found out about Crow and Laggart and the hidden cannonballs — but does not. She barely knows Salay or any of them. *She is harsh*, Salay says of the captain. *That might be what we need now that we're deadrunners.* The words say one thing; the look down at the captain says another.

Tress asks, softly, why they have done it — become what they have. Salay gives her own answer. It was either this or quit the sea, and she can't bear to. She knows how that sounds. But there is something about standing on a deck with the wheel in your hands. Tress tells her she understands. Salay regards her, then nods. And she has someone to find out here. Sooner or later she'll sail into a port and her father will be there; she'll pay his debts and bring him home. Surely the next port. She lifts her compass and looks off toward the horizon.

Tress feels a stab of shame she cannot quite place — something in Salay's voice that sounds too much like her own determination to do something nobody else will, for someone in trouble — and then the wheel lurches and the whole ship begins to shake. The seethe has stilled. Tress grips the wheel, terrified of pitching sailors out of the rigging, and eases it as gently as she can to straighten the rudder. The Crow's Song stops quivering and glides slowly to a halt. Tress looks at Salay, sweating. Salay, ever stoic, only nods. *That could have been worse.* And, seeing how badly the sudden stop has rattled her — *maybe go take a rest.*