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Tress spends her first real morning as ship's sprouter at the prow of the Crow's Song near the forward cannon, working through her first standing order from Laggart: forty pouches of zephyr charges to be kept ready in the gunnery barrel. Ann perches on the railing knocking her heels against the wood and undertakes Tress's education in the twelve seas and twelve kinds of spores — one moon, one colour, one sea each. Fort is up on deck for once, darning socks, and feels obliged to spoil the lesson by holding up his board: there are, after all, thirteen kinds. Ann calls that nonsense; Fort points out the difference between a lie and a legend; nobody, he notes, can even agree whether bone spores are meant to be white or black. Tress decides to defer judgement on bone spores.

Ann has been to three of the seas — Verdant, Sapphire, Rose — and is proud of it. Fort claims ten, which she does not believe on principle. *Why would I lie?* he writes. *You're literally a pirate*, she answers. The two he has missed are easy to guess: the Crimson and the Midnight. Most kinds of spore will kill you, Ann tells Tress — but those two are in a different category altogether, and a sprouter needs to know to stay far away from them. You cannot sail around the Crimson to get to the Midnight either, Ann adds, unless you fancy sailing through mountain ranges or all the way around the world. Fort supplies the political half of it: that geography is exactly why the Sorceress set up where she did. She owns the only passage between the planet's two halves and lets only her own ships sail it. There has been no real trade through it for years now — the king refuses to pay her tariffs, and a slow war stands in trade's place. Fort shakes his head: the king cannot even get a proper fleet through the Crimson to reach her.

Tress absorbs all this the way someone realises they should have known it years ago. While she counts pouches into a metal box — *was that twenty-two or twenty-three?* — she lets the conversation drift and is glad again that she did not walk off the gangplank in Shimmerbay the night before. Only one of the crew has ever met the Sorceress personally, but every one of them carries something she needs to know. She finishes her count — twenty-five — announces she needs to make fifteen more, and pretends not to be paying attention while Ann needles Fort. Quietly, fingers steady on the latch, she opens the false bottom of the gunnery barrel and counts five hidden cannonballs inside, each a little larger than her fist. With Huck as lookout earlier she had pulled ordinary cannonballs from the unguarded hold; now she swaps them in one at a time for Laggart's rigged ones, latches the false bottom shut, and stacks the twenty-five zephyr pouches back on top. People rarely watch you as carefully as you fear, the narrator notes; they are too busy worrying whether you are watching them. Ann, oblivious, asks whether Tress could maybe slip her a few extra charges to practise with. Tress says yes if the captain approves. Ann says of course — in the tone of someone who has been meaning to get around to that approval since the last time they meant to.

With Ann wandered off, Tress settles in front of Fort and asks why Ann hangs around the cannon like a teenager with a crush. Fort reminds her of the rules: information is for trade. Tress tries to opt out — *can't we just chat like friends?* — and Fort tells her, gently and at length, that the negotiation *is* the friendship. He coaxes her into trading: she admits she is out here looking for someone dear to her, and when he asks who, she tells him about Charlie and the Sorceress's raid and the ransom letter. Fort's shoulders drop. If the Sorceress took him, he writes, he is almost certainly dead; she should move on. When Tress insists there is a ransom note, Fort delivers the answer she has been dreading: the Sorceress does not ask for money. She asks for souls, generally royal ones. Money was never going to buy Charlie back from her. Tress, blushing at the depth of her own ignorance, says only *maybe* when Fort tells her she should let him go.

Fort honours the trade anyway. The information about Ann turns out to be no real secret: she was made assistant cannonmaster on the strength of asking for the job after the previous one died, *before* anyone thought to watch her actually fire one of the things. Her aim with a pistol once nearly killed Fort at point-blank range; her aim with the cannon left the target the safest spot on the horizon. She has not been allowed to fire anything since, though no one has formally taken the title from her. Tress suggests she might just need practice; Fort suggests, dryly, that he will be boarded up in his room with armour on while she finds out.

Then Fort adds the warning that matters. Even if Charlie still lives, the Sorceress will have laid one of her tailored curses on him — she always does, to keep her captives pliable. Tress asks how he knows so much about her workings, and Fort tells her: Crow herself briefed him, when she sent him to trade for Hoid. The captain specifically wanted Hoid — heard about his curse and his trip to the Sorceress and overpaid to get him aboard, to Fort's lasting reputational injury. Why, he does not know. Tress looks over at Crow across the deck and adds it to what she already has: the captain who manipulates her crew into piracy, then into deadrunning, then makes a point of acquiring the one man who has been to the Sorceress and back. Could Crow be planning to go to the Sorceress herself?

Tress takes, the narrator says with great fanfare, the singular heroic step that separates her from most protagonists. She stops, sits with the thought a moment longer, and decides she ought to think this through a little more carefully before jumping to conclusions.