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Tress takes her question about Crow to Ulaam in the ship's surgery. Ulaam, holding up a bottled kidney as if she might want to buy it, gives her the long answer. The folk word spore eater is imprecise, he says — Crow is what he would call a gestator, host to an aggressive strain of the verdant aether living inside her body. To explain it he backs up. Where, he asks, do spores actually come from? Tress says the moons, and is gently mocked for assuming that is the end of the question.

The moons, he tells her, are home to a class of hungry living beings he calls aethers. On other worlds they pair with people in a working partnership. The kinds above this planet are the same family of being, but warped — bottomless in appetite, multiplying without restraint, each tied to a primal element such as vegetation or atmosphere or silicate. The unstable spore forms they shed are what people on the surface see: the moment water touches them they yank Investiture straight out of the Spiritual Realm and burst into growth. He says all of this in the tone of a man explaining how a bread oven works.

So how, Tress asks, did the captain end up with one of those things inside her? Ulaam admits he has never been able to settle it: some say it can happen to anyone who falls into the sea, others that you have to swallow a particular kind of spore. He pulls back his sleeve as he talks and shows her his forearm. There is an ear growing out of it. When she objects he explains, mildly, that his inner thigh had been a poor location because of the way his clothing kept brushing it.

The vines, he goes on, kept Crow alive when she shot herself in the head because they were keeping themselves alive. The prime aether up on the moon has no water of its own. So it lives by infecting hosts on the planet and pulling liquid out of them, Crow being one of perhaps many such hosts feeding the thing on the moon. The aether protects her because it is protecting itself. It is also, he says quietly, drying her out — the affliction is always fatal, exceptionally painful, and usually finishes a host inside a year. Crow has carried hers longer than that. He doubts she has months left. Possibly weeks, possibly days. The reason she is never seen without her canteen is that she will physically wither without near-constant water.

Tress sits with that — almost feeling sorry for Crow — and uses what she has learned to rebuild her picture of the captain's intentions. Crow is pushing her crew to ever more dangerous waters because she is dying and trying to get a last great something out of the time she has. Then she asks the question she actually came in with: what do midnight spores do? Ulaam frowns, leans down to look closely at her, and calls in the cabin boy. Did he give her any? *Nope!* Hoid reports, beaming — he gave them to Weev. He had thought they were a type of liquorice. The narrator's retrospective comment is in his own defence.

Ulaam sighs and gives Tress the proper warning. Midnight spores are a different sort of dangerous than the others; they need a continuous living water source, namely whoever germinates them. The thing they produce is midnight aether — also called Midnight Essence — a blob of black goo that imitates a nearby object or being and stays under its maker's control as long as they keep paying for it. It is, he says, more practical than the other spore creations and more nefarious. Most sprouters use it for spying. When she practises with it, he tells her, she should keep plenty of water within reach and a silver knife to hand, and never use more than four or five grains — a creation larger than her fist tends to escape its maker.

Half of which Tress understands. She refuses Ulaam's next offer (her brain, this time) and turns to Hoid. She needs to know how to reach the Sorceress — can he guide her? Ulaam cuts in: as long as the curse is on him, Hoid will never be useful for that. She will have to break it first. Hoid himself, with effort, forces out one of his coherent moments. He can talk, he says, but he cannot say anything; what she needs is to find a person who is not a person and can talk when they should not. The riddle hangs. Ulaam notes that it is the most coherent thing he has said in months.

Tress turns the phrase over and arrives at it: a talking animal. Hoid collapses onto the floor in relief and is immediately lost in thought again. Ulaam supplies the proper word — familiar — and explains. Powerful users of Investiture often keep associated talking animals; on other worlds, he allows, his own species is sometimes the source of those stories, but he does not think that is the case here. More likely the Sorceress and others like her have learned to Invest common animals to enhance their cognition. Familiars are small — birds, the occasional cat — and used for spying. *Or a rat,* Tress says quietly. Ulaam agrees, and proceeds to cut the ear off his forearm. Tress is out the door before he can offer it to her.