POV: tress
Summary
The narrator pauses to explain — with the offhandedness of someone fishing for a compliment — how he happened to know what Tress was thinking in her cabin a moment ago. He has, after all, been told he has a knack for being in places he is not supposed to be. Even in his present state, fashionable in nothing but a vest, he is still good for a little constructive snooping.
Tress is holding the open matchbox of black spores. Huck hisses. The narrator is reminded of Crow's line that every sprouter is, to a degree, crazy — Weev, in his estimation, had been crazy in some excess of that degree. Huck wants the midnight spores sprinkled out onto the silver deck to kill them. Tress asks what they actually *do*, specifically. Huck admits he does not really know, only that he feels she is being far too relaxed about holding the most dangerous spores in the twelve seas. She points out that you can get used to danger if you take it in small doses, tucks the matchbox back into its hidden compartment, and decides she will quietly ask Ulaam what they do later.
The decision keeps for about a second. The warning bell rings above her three quick times. A ship has been spotted; Crow is committing to pursuit. Tress scrambles up the stairs and then forces herself to wait in the corridor so as not to crowd the Dougs rushing to their stations. When she finally reaches the deck the Dougs are bunched at the rail looking out at a distant sail. The Crow's Song is flying the king's merchant flag, as is her habit; the captain will not show her real colours until the right dramatic instant.
The chase that follows takes five hours. Tress had not realised, until now, how unusual it had been for her first ship — the Oot's Dream — to be caught flat-footed at close range. The Crow's Song is fast, especially once the ballast that sinks her into a merchant's silhouette is dropped, but "fast" on a spore sea is a relative thing; the seethe can stop or start at any minute, and this prey is a real hunt. The helmswoman reels them in mile by careful mile.
Tress's nerves wind tighter with every hour. This is the moment her sabotage gets tested. She is increasingly certain she has been found out — surely someone of Laggart's and Crow's experience has noticed her swap. Crow's voice finally cuts through her panic: forward cannon to bear, sailors to arms. The Dougs take up muskets the prey is still far too distant to be hit by, on principle. Tress declines to arm herself; she has fired a musket precisely never, and would prefer to keep her fingers attached. She gets close enough to the prow to watch Ann beg Laggart for first shot and be sent off to the others, where one of the Dougs pointedly exchanges her pistol for a cutlass — and where she comes up a moment later with a second pistol from a holster on her belt.
Crow calls for a warning shot. Laggart cranks his cannon round and sights through his spyglass, then nudges the barrel up by inches, then again, and finally takes a damp firing stick from the water bucket at his station and lays it across the firing pan. The zephyr charge detonates and the ball strikes true at the prey ship — not, of course, as a warning. Laggart's habit is "warnings" that go through hulls. Ann mutters at his shoulder.
The cannonball bursts the way an ordinary water-mortar should, throwing water across the side of the enemy ship without breaching her. The sea does the rest at once: ropes of vines erupt from the spores where the water has hit and lash around the wet hull, gripping the prey ship motionless. The boards groan even from a distance, but the hull is not cracked. Tress's swap has worked exactly. The Dougs cheer at the easy prize; Laggart curses softly and goes the colour of forge-hot iron. Crow crosses the deck to him with a look that could skin cats and says aloud, in the carefully measured voice of a captain in front of her cheering crew, that this was not exactly the warning shot she had ordered — but a very clean capture nonetheless. Laggart, whip-tight, thanks her and apologises for failing the order he had been issued. Tress watches him for signs of suspicion and tries not to start visibly hyperventilating. If he knows the cannonballs were swapped there is only one suspect for it.
Crow looks ready to call a second shot. Then she registers the cheering Dougs and seems to weigh the morale of her crew against the satisfaction of sinking the prize, and chooses morale. *Run up the pirate's flag*, she tells one of the Dougs. The prey, seeing it go up, sends a bright flare into the air — the sign of surrender. The Dougs cheer again. Tress starts to breathe.
Then the seethe stills. The Crow's Song lurches to a halt in the suddenly motionless spores and the enthusiasm on deck drains out at once. Tress sidles up to Ann and asks what is wrong. Ann explains: the prey surrendered because the vines had them; the Crow's Song could still move and they could not. With the stilling both ships are stuck in place — the sea has just evened the match, and the people on that ship are surely asking themselves whether maybe they should not just —
A puff of blue zephyr rises off the prey's stern. A crack. A whistle. A cannonball strikes the Crow's Song at the prow, exactly where the spores meet the wood.