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The narrator opens by making a great fuss about Tress's small act of reconsideration at the end of the previous chapter. Bravery, cleverness, heroism — these, he reports, are easy to come by; a worldbringer like himself spends his career sifting through them by the bucket. What he would actually trade a dozen famous heroes for is a single person willing to stop for one blasted minute and ask whether their plan is the right one. He runs through the wars and tragedies and tedious adventures that might have ended sooner if anyone had thought to do so, and offers the moment of Tress's pause as quietly majestic — because it saves her, he notes in passing, an enormous amount of trouble: Crow's plan in fact has nothing to do with the Sorceress at all, and everything to do with why the crew are so frightened of her.

Tress, armed with her new resolve to gather more information first, finishes the cannonball swap at the aft cannon on the quarterdeck and stashes the rigged ones in her cabin. Then she goes looking for Hoid — who, as the narrator concedes, is not at his best these days. She finds him on the middle deck wearing a shoe around his neck on its laces, with no pants and with the Dougs cheerfully taking his wages and the matching shoe off him at a game he has just invented, where everybody holds their cards backward. The Dougs scamper off looking for fresher victims, and Tress sits down beside him.

She asks straight out: he visited the Sorceress — does he remember anything about it? *Yup!* he says, beaming. Then his eyes glaze and his tongue locks; he stutters; words die on his lips. *Can't!* he manages, tapping his head. Tress works it out aloud: his curse forbids him from talking about his curse. He winks (mostly because there is something in his eye), but she has it right. The trap is exact: any direct attempt to discuss what she did to him collapses into stuttering or nonsense, and he cannot even tell people he is cursed unless they already know. He takes her hands, gathers himself, draws a trembling breath — and tells her, deeply, about the time he ate an entire watermelon in one sitting and gave himself diarrhea. Tress sighs and lets his hands go.

Beneath all of that, the narrator confides, a sliver of the real Hoid is still awake and horrified — and he has learned that the geas works on Intent. He blanks his mind and forces out an instruction: bring him to her planet, repeat it back. *Bring you to my planet?* Tress asks. *But you're already here.* He has already lost the thread; he tells her sternly that planets do not matter, that what she needs to do is find the group of six stars, and then collapses cheerfully back into deciding to do some empirical research on the flavour of his toes. Tress takes the six-stars riddle and the impossibility of getting any more out of him and goes back to her cabin.

She walks in on whimpering. The ship's new cat, Knocks, is crouched and tail-twitching under the bed; Huck is wedged into the corner behind a leg of the frame, hyperventilating. Tress throws the cat bodily out the door, slams it, retrieves a trembling Huck from beneath the bunk, and apologises. He cannot bring himself to make a joke about it for several minutes. He asks her to keep the door locked from now on; he can squeeze in through a crack in the floor after climbing a post in the hallway below. When he can talk again, he confesses what is really wrong: it is not that he cannot handle a common cat, intellectually. It is that he cannot plan, or think, or use the part of him that does the thinking, with a predator perpetually prowling and watching. The whole point of being small is that everything else considers you a snack.

She sets him on the foot-rail of the bunk and lies back, staring at the planks of the upper deck overhead. He talks, partly to settle himself; she half-listens. He suggests, gently, that she could come visit a place a lot like home, eventually — somewhere quieter than the twelve seas. He tells her, when she draws it out of him, that he is from a place where his kind have lived for generations; that his own kin had decided it was time he saw the world for his own good and dragged him off to do it, which had not gone the way they intended. He is not really supposed to be talking to her sort at all, he admits. But the good feeling he claims to have about her holds, so he stays.

Tress lets his voice run on around her and tracks the carvings overhead. Someone has scraped patterns into the wood with the point of a knife — bursts of crossing lines like little starbursts, one star here, then two, then three, all across the planks. No grouping of six. She is about to give up on Hoid as the lunatic Huck keeps telling her he is when Huck himself, peering up, notes that those look less like stars than like explosions; the *stars* are under the bed.

Tress rolls underneath. The underside of the bed-frame is carved as well, in clean stars this time — and on the side, a cluster of six, set apart from the rest. She pushes it. Something clicks; a small latch lets a hidden panel slide open. Inside is a little aluminum container the size of a matchbox. Huck climbs onto her shoulder while she pries it open. Black spores lie inside — midnight spores, here on the Crow's Song, somehow gathered and hidden away by Weev before he died.