(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Tress ducks into her cabin to stash the box of spores and her remaining tool, reassures a quivering Huck under the bed, and runs back up the steps. By the time she reaches the upper deck the Crow's Song is already drifting up to the prey ship. Three of the merchant crew lie dead, the rest have their hands in the air, and Laggart's follow-up cannon-shot has gone off in another burst of vines across the prey ship's aft — the second of Tress's swapped balls in a row. The ship is still afloat. That, Tress realises, is the only thing standing between the merchant crew and a massacre — because the boarding is still on, and Crow is in the mood she comes back from with bodies on the deck.

Crow gives the order: swords out, board, kill them. Tress feels the bottom go out of her plan. Before anyone moves, Salay's voice cuts down from the quarterdeck. The helmswoman locks the wheel — they are anchored now, she does not need it any more — and walks calmly down to the main deck. By the traditions she invokes, she points out, the duty to handle the captain of a captured ship falls to her. She faces Crow straight on with a musket in slack grip and reminds the assembled crew, loud enough for everyone to hear, that they had signed on as pirates for the freedom of it, that the merchant ship has surrendered, and that there is no reason to put anyone else down.

Nobody moves. The Dougs keep their weapons on the prey ship and visibly try not to look like they are volunteering for anything. The narrator notes, drily, the practical calculation Crow is making: she could kill Salay outright the way she killed Weev, but a ship cannot be sailed by one woman, and how many crew she still has to lose is a moving number. After a long beat she settles for noise — she does not, she announces, appreciate the bilging her ship has just taken after a flare of surrender was already up, and that sort of indiscretion costs lives. Salay answers, calm, that the prey ship will pay more than the standard bounty. She makes sure of it.

The boarding proceeds the way honest pirate boardings do: more hooks across to keep the ships from drifting apart, Dougs hauling rolled rugs out of the prey ship's hold, Salay talking quietly with the merchant captain, and on the Crow's Song Tress sinking onto the steps to the quarterdeck and discovering the particular tiredness that comes of having held one's breath through everything one cares about. Crow passes her in the wake of it and tells her, more or less in passing, that not sinking means she did her job. Ann backs that up — a natural, sealed the hole on the second try, hardly afraid of the spores — and is sent below to fit wood over Tress's roseite patch, but not before Crow silently holds out a hand for the pistol she has acquired somewhere in the chaos.

Tress watches the prey ship, looking through the overgrown vines on its aft, and notices one man kneeling apart. He is holding the body of someone Crow shot at the start of the engagement — a friend, perhaps, the chapter does not say — and there is a quality to the way he sits that she does not like. She climbs the steps for a better look. He looks up, and his face does what no one else's on either ship has done all morning: it stops calculating.

The man, Smocke, comes off his knees with his friend's blood on him and a pistol in his hand. He levels it across the gap at Crow. Everyone freezes again except Crow herself, who looks down the barrel as a person might look at weather. The merchant captain shouts at his sailor not to be a lunatic. Smocke stands trembling and refuses to lower the gun and refuses to fire. Crow raises the confiscated pistol, points it at him — and then, while everybody is watching, turns it around and shoots herself in the head.

What comes out of her face is not blood. Green vines split her cheek and worm out around her eyes; one of them catches the bullet in the air; the skin of her face and hand ripples as if her muscles have been replaced with snakes. The vines twist for a moment longer and then withdraw back into her body. A bead of blood gathers at the corner of her eye and a slow leak comes from the rip in her cheek. She lowers the pistol, drinks long from her canteen, and waves Smocke forward — try it again, the gesture says — and his own crew bring him down before he can get a second shot off. The shot goes into the air.

Crow tells the prey ship's captain, in a voice meant to be heard, that the Crow's Song will sail in under an hour, laden with more than she has any right to carry, or every man and woman on the merchant ship will discover personally what crossing her means — and she invites him, if he doubts her sincerity, to ask the crew of the Oot's Dream how they are enjoying the bottom of the Verdant Sea. Then she walks into her cabin and closes the door. Tress slumps on the steps and shakes. The shape of the question she is now carrying is what, exactly, Crow is.