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Salay wants to know who Tress really is, which is, the narrator observes, a topic on which Tress herself has lately become uncertain — sailing with pirates, learning to use spores, pressing Ulaam for answers without bothering to be polite. She steps back from the door instead of speaking, gestures the helmswoman in, and offers her tea. Salay declines, shuts the door behind her against her instinct to give a sprouter's cabin a wide berth, and gets to her point: she is not buying Tress's act.

Tress, in a rare bout of pique, demands to know what she is supposed to be. Salay's answer is a royal inspector in disguise — the coat being the disguise, the theory goes, because no real inspector would walk around in one except while being an inspector. Tress points out that the suit she stole came with her by accident; Salay tells her she is alarmingly good at this and is not telling either tell. Then she lays out the rest: she watched Laggart when the prey ship failed to sink and saw a man who had wanted those people dead and did not know why he had been thwarted — and only one person on the ship has the access to his munitions to have thwarted him. Tress freezes. Salay notes the freeze.

Tress makes her decision. Salay stood up alone to Crow; if she is going to trust anyone on this ship, it is her. So she tells the helmswoman what she has figured out — that Crow wants to sink ships in order to brand the whole crew deadrunners, so they cannot ever leave her. Salay hears it and, with the kind of dry pleasure professional sceptics take in being correct twice in a row, tells Tress that a common girl could not have worked that out. Tress swears it was by accident. Salay decides she will believe her on that point and asks if she can prove what she just said.

Tress can — the rigged cannonballs are still in her cabin, swapped out from the false bottoms in Laggart's gunnery barrels. Salay does not want her to confront Laggart; she wants something to show the rest of her own cabal. Ann and Fort have agreed to meet in the quartermaster's room tonight after second mess and night watch, and a sabotaged ball laid on the table should be enough. Then she catches the trap — that Tress has now manipulated her into volunteering the meeting — and accuses her all over again of being too good at this. The cold steel behind the fake fear, et cetera. Behind the fake fear, the helmswoman concludes, is no royal inspector at all but a King's Mask. Real Masks are required to deny what they are; Tress's denial is therefore the proof of it. Salay tells her to bring the cannonball and not to assassinate anyone before mess.

Tress sits on her bed stunned. Huck emerges from under it, ribs her gently about the Mask misunderstanding, and explains what one supposedly is — a secret order of royal assassins, never more than five at a time, said to take youth potions for the cover — though he allows that no one really knows whether they exist or whether the King simply benefits from the rumour. He warns her, however, that the cabal meeting may be a trap: when he was spying for her earlier he caught Crow talking about secret meetings and being rid of them — finally. He worries that means Salay and Ann and Fort are on borrowed time.

Tress paces, listening to the spores scrape along the hull, and arrives where she has been heading all chapter. They do not know enough. They need to know exactly what Crow is up to, and going to a meeting blind is no way to find out. Huck grudgingly volunteers to spy again, and Tress catches herself — she has no right to ask him. She tells him to never mind, retrieves Weev's aluminum matchbox from the hidden compartment under the bed, and explains, while Huck urges her to please not try midnight spores as a beginner exercise, that she has nothing else to use. The only edge she has on Crow is that she is slightly less afraid of spores than everybody else aboard.

Huck mentions, while objecting, that one does not start one's training with a regalthon — a forty-mile birthday race for the King — which leads Tress to discover that some islands in the world are forty miles across, and some over in another sea sixty, and to wonder dazedly what it must look like to stand in the middle of so much land and not see the sea at all. She fishes a silver knife out of Weev's cabinet, lays out waterskins, picks three black grains out of the matchbox onto the mattress, takes a long breath, thinks of Charlie, lifts the eyedropper — and releases one drop onto the spores.