POV: tress
Summary
The narrator opens with a digression on a sort of bond the reader has likely never heard of, called the Luhel bond, and pleads not to be judged for the omission — at the equivalent point in his own life he had been preoccupied with which shades of orange he could wear at the same time. Most aether spores — verdant, zephyr and the rest — do not bond with anyone. They drop, they meet water, they burst into growth, and that is the whole of the transaction. Midnight spores are closer to how aethers are supposed to work; bringing one to life forges a temporary symbiosis between sprouter and aether. Unlike the Nahel bond, which trades in consciousness and anchoring to reality, the Luhel bond trades in physical matter — in this case water.
Tress feels the bond form as a sudden dryness in her mouth. She reaches for the waterskin and then forgets to drink because the three black grains on the bed have begun to boil. They melt, swell, and inflate into a fist-sized pool of glossy black goo, where the growth blessedly stops. A small face surfaces in the gloss, stretches a moment, and sinks back. A pressure in her mind asks her, in no words, to trade: water. Without quite deciding to, she agrees.
Midnight aether, the narrator notes, looks for a pattern to imitate. The pattern this one finds is Huck, who has retreated to the corner of the bed clutching his crust like a much-nibbled shield. The pool elongates, sprouts paws and a snout and a tail, smooths over into something almost like a rat dipped in black paint — but with the hair only suggested as a texture in the skin, and not quite enough detail at the toes or the face. It scuttles back and forth across the bed, trying out its legs. Tress watches it, increasingly thirsty, and finally lifts the skin to her mouth and drinks down the whole of it. The bond tightens. Her vision fuzzes. Then she is in the not-rat.
The first thing she does, possibly because it is funny, is pounce at Huck. He squeaks under the bed. Then she remembers the job, scrambles to the door, and oozes herself out under it as a thin slick of goo that re-forms on the other side. She likes shadows. The corridors and the steps are full of them, and even on the upper deck the sun is sinking towards the horizon. She picks her way across the planks behind the mast's shadow as the Crow's Song turns, leaping the veins of silver in the deck — they would still hurt her, even now, but in this form she can pass close without being killed by their presence.
She squeezes herself flat under the captain's door. Reinflating takes longer this time; her eyes come back before the rest of her does and she uses the lead to scan the room. Crow is at her desk in the failing light, writing in a small book, her canteen open beside her and her jacket hanging unbuttoned. The not-rat slinks under a bench in the deeper shadow there. Up close, Crow smells wrong — rotten weeds and burning flesh and something the aether cannot name. Not entirely a person any more. The parasite, the senses report, is winning.
The not-rat realises she should have waited for Crow and Laggart to meet rather than sneaking in on a writing session, but plans, the narrator notes, are for people who do not yet exist, and Tress exists now. The book is just out of reading angle. The aether wants very badly to bound across the floor, climb the desk and look, and Tress has to fight it down — the impulse, she notices, is the same kind of pull as hunger. She holds it back. The mess-call goes up. Crow closes the book, drinks, takes her hat, and locks the door behind her.
The not-rat goes for the desk. She climbs the leg with claws that are sharper than the rest of her is firm, springs onto the table-top in a tangle of half-grown extra legs budding from her sides, bites the book and tugs it open at the marked page. Inside, she discovers, are words — which the not-rat finds offensive on principle. She grows her eyes out larger anyway, until they bulge from her face, and forces herself to read.
The chapter on [[captain-crow|Crow]]'s desk concerns the dragon Xisisrefliel, who reputedly lives in a palace at the bottom of the Crimson Sea and has done for at least three hundred years. The author makes the case that, while most sensible people put the dragon down to the ravings of the half-mad crews who survive a Crimson crossing, his witnesses are trustworthy. He cites Delph of the Zephyr Islands, a respected scholar healed in 1104 of late-stage tumours, and — more startling — Queen Bek the Fifteenth, reportedly cured of a spore gestation in 1123, the only such cure on record in thousands of years. In the margin in Crow's hand: a way, finally, to be rid of the spores in her blood?
The aether wants to pounce on something living, and the Tress inside the aether will not let it. She bites further back through the pages and finds another note from Crow: her secret meetings with Weev had given her something on how to locate the dragon before he tried to turn it into blackmail; at least, the note says drily, he had shown some spine before she killed him. Tress flips back further to learn what Xisis actually *is* — and finds that he is a being, not a substance. A dragon. Crow believes the dragon is real. Crow intends to drive her crew across the Crimson Sea to find him and be cured. It is the first thing about her that has ever made complete sense.
Tress wants more — how does one find the dragon, does one pay him, do the wish stories have anything to them — but the aether is past the limits of what it will endure for words. The fight starts in earnest; the not-rat's form collapses to mush on the desk, slapping and writhing. Then footsteps in the corridor. Key in the lock. With a small detonation of black smoke, Tress is thrown out of the aether and back into her own body, collapsed sideways on her own bed, mouth full of sand, hands like twigs, her tongue an unrecognisable lump.
Huck is squatting before her face holding the silver knife awkwardly in his paws and saying her name. A line of darkness, he tells her, had been coming out of her mouth, and he had not known what to do. She rasps for water. He drags the second waterskin to her mouth in his teeth. The first touch of water on her tongue burns; she keeps drinking through the pain, choking it down, and the burning fades as her arms reinflate and the deathly part of the dehydration reverses. By any normal physiology she would be dead. The bond's damage runs in reverse the moment its trade resumes.
She lies on a soaking mattress and worries that the aether may have left a residue in Crow's cabin — she had felt herself evaporating to black smoke as the bond broke. She thanks Huck; he tells her, in the manner of Huck, that they are now even, his cage for her life. A headache she suspects will be substantial is coming on; she resolves to leave midnight spores alone in future. But she has what she went for. She also realises, replaying Huck's earlier eavesdropping in light of Crow's marginalia, that the *secret meetings* and *being rid of them, finally* he overheard had not been about Salay and the cabal at all. They had been about Weev and the spores in her blood. She bathes, dresses, and prepares to attend the meeting with Salay and Ann and Fort — hoping the others will not hold it too hard against her when they discover she is not, in fact, a King's Mask. The narrator notes, drily, that she has underestimated the human mind's willingness to believe whatever it has decided to.