POV: tress
Summary
The Dougs scatter, Ann swears creatively, and Laggart mutters professional admiration at whoever on the other ship just put a cannonball through the Crow's Song's prow on the first try. Then Crow shoulders her way through the cluster at the rail and lifts a long-arm none of the Dougs are carrying — sleeker than the older muskets they use, with an unfamiliar sight. She closes one eye, fires across the still-substantial distance, and drops the man holding the firing stick on the prey ship's cannon in a single shot. Laggart amends his earlier admiration to past tense.
*Carpenter and sprouter*, Crow calls out as she reloads — tipping a small pouch of zephyr charge into the muzzle — *we've been hit, and when the seethe restarts the next thing on this ship to learn the taste of spores is everyone aboard, so perhaps you'd like to do your jobs.* Ann tries to fire her own pistol first; half a dozen Dougs wrestle her for it while Crow coolly drops a second man hefting the next ball into the enemy's cannon. The narrator pauses to admit, despite himself, that Crow is one of the best shots he has ever seen — and primitive muskets, he notes, are not forgiving instruments. Crow's voice, when she turns it on Ann again, is ice that does not have to travel to another ship to land. Ann gives it up and stumbles over to Tress muttering about how very much the Dougs had wanted her pistol; they scramble belowdecks.
On the middle deck Ann asks if she has her tools. Tress points out that she became ship's sprouter this same morning and has no idea what she is doing. Ann wipes her brow, gathers herself, and improvises: they need rose spores from Weev's room. Tress leads her there; Ann hesitates at the threshold but Tress goes in, prises the top off a small barrel of pink-red spores, scoops a metal box full of them, and pulls open the closet where Weev's tools hang in rows on pegs. Ann picks out the ones she saw him use: a flat round one, like a small shield with a handle on the back, and a trowel like a small shovel — neither matching the kit the sprouter on the Oot's Dream had carried. Weev, the narrator notes, was a purist. Tress grabs the two tools, the metal box of spores, and an eyedropper bottle of water, and follows Ann down to the hold.
Bright sunlight slants in through a hole near the ceiling, some nine feet up. Ann fetches a ladder, sets it under the breach, and backs well away. *Grow a plug of roseite across the hole*, she tells Tress — it does not need to be pretty, she will do the pretty part in wood over the next few days. Roseite resists silver and lasts a long time once set, which is what makes it the right material — assuming the sprouter does not kill herself growing it. Tress asks for tips on that last part. Ann has none; she always stayed well clear when Weev worked.
On the ladder, Tress looks out at a flat motionless plain of spores outside the breach. The instant the seethe restarts the ship will surge forward and the spores will pour straight through the hole into the hold; even with a silvered hold the ship will sit too low to float in short order. No more cannon-shots sound above her, which she chooses to read as a good sign while she lays her gear on a shelf. She tips a few grains out onto the bare wood at the edge of the hole — and watches them go grey before she can ready the dropper, killed instantly by the silver lining the deck above. She closes the box, blushes at herself, and tries again — water first onto the wood, then spores sprinkled into the water with one arm raised to shield her face.
The patch she gets, generously, is a passable execution of a thoroughly bad plan. The spores burst into thick crystal lumps like rough quartz; pieces tear loose under their own weight, half tumbling into the sea, half clattering down to the bottom of the hold; one shard nearly takes her face off. The hole is not plugged. Below her, Ann yelps at her to be careful. Tress reminds herself that the sprouter on the Oot's Dream had done this with different tools, but she knows what the result is supposed to look like, and forces herself to keep going.
She notices, then, that the small flecks of crystal still stuck to the wood are slowly *growing* on the water already on them. Like a creeping mould. She tries adding more water — and yes, the patch keeps expanding, just far too slowly to fill a fist-sized hole on its own. Still, like the proverbial start to anything, it is a start. She lifts the shield-shaped tool and presses it to the patch; the growing crystals reach toward it, dragged along the simple iron of its face. The trowel, in steel polished bright, does the opposite — pushes the crystals away. Each tool steers the growth in a different direction. That, she realises, is the entire technique.
A long, low grinding sound starts up outside the hull. The seethe is restarting. Ann shouts her name. There is no time left for cleverness. Tress braces the shield-tool over the hole in one hand, grabs two or three spores with the other and drops them straight into the water already there. They explode against the iron; the force of it shoves her backward off the ladder and Ann catches her base. Crystal grows across the shield where it can; Tress uses the trowel in her free hand to push it toward the edges of the breach, shaping it like mortar that grows under her hand. Wind catches the sails, the prow lifts, the ship slams forward. Her patch shudders and cracks. Water on the far edge of the wood sprouts a few vines on contact, but there is not enough of it for them to grow large enough to lock the ship in place — and the plug holds.
Ann breathes out — *oh, moons* — and asks if she can lay a second layer over the first. Tress declines to push her luck. Her shield tool is overgrown into the patch and stuck fast; she figures she will need a silver knife to free it later, when they are somewhere safer. She climbs back down the ladder. Ann tells her, quiet, that until she had taken the sprouter's job that patch would have been hers to make in wood — and the pause in the seethe had been nowhere near long enough for her to nail wood across it. Another gunshot cracks above. The fight is not over. They go.