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Tress finds Crow at the bow of the Crow's Song in the last of the daylight, leaning on the rail with a tin cup of water dangling off one finger as she watches the sun fall. The seethe dies as she stands there. The night helmsman — one of the Dougs — calls for the sails to be furled and the ship scrapes to a halt, leaving the deck in that unnerving silence the spore seas only know between seethes — no grinding under the hull, no wind on canvas, only Dougs going belowdecks for cards and a snack. The Verdant Moon hangs across a third of the sky, and the narrator wedges in one of his digressions about how strange it is that the people of the spore seas barely look up at the moons that loom that close — moons that, in his words, are already on the dance floor and dressed for the part.

Crow does not acknowledge Tress until she has finished her water; Tress knows better than to interrupt the captain drinking, and quietly hopes the captain will not toss the cup overboard at the end of it. When Crow does speak, she does not ask what Tress wants to say — she asks what Tress *wants*, full stop, why she is on these seas at all. Tress, who is trying to manoeuvre this conversation rather than have it, gives the standard sailor's answer: she left her island to see the world. Crow dismisses the cliché — every dockside bar looks the same, and as a deadrunner that is mostly all she will see. People are the same too, and as a deadrunner all she will see of them is their insides. She seems mildly disappointed by the answer, and the sun finishes setting.

Standing there in the half-light, Tress thinks about how many lies she has been telling lately. She is not worried about lying to Crow specifically — Crow being, as the narrator notes, the tiger gnawing on her leg — but she is starting to worry about how *easy* lying is becoming, in general. She comes to a discomforting conclusion the narrator endorses: people are not cleanly sorted into liars and non-liars; circumstance and upbringing produce the lies, and the lies produce the liars. Then, almost as a thought-experiment in the new theory, she upgrades the lie. She admits — truthfully — that there is more to the trip. Someone she loves was taken by the Sorceress and she intends to go to her island and bring him home.

Crow nearly drops the cup. The Midnight Sea, she repeats. Tress confirms: hopefully in a ship. Crow laughs — not pleasantly, the narrator says, but in the way a guard dog parodies a puppy. A straggly-haired washer-girl from nowhere is going to the Midnight. She cannot even finish the sentence. Something inside Tress flexes rather than breaks; she looks the captain in the eye and quotes her mother — that the hardest part of any task is making yourself begin it. Crow retorts that, as a woman who has climbed several mountains, she can confirm her mother is an idiot. Tress flushes with real anger.

Crow asks who, exactly, she expected to take her on such a mission. *Well*, Tress says, *I only really know the crew of one ship right now*, and provokes a second bout of laughter — louder this time, loud enough to draw Ulaam up onto the deck looking for whatever had happened (the last time he had heard Crow laugh like that, a sailor had managed to spear himself in the crotch with a boarding hook). What if Tress could pay her, Tress tries — and the captain laughs so hard she starts coughing. Even if Crow wanted to take the Song to the Midnight, the crew would never agree to it.

Then Tress springs the trap she has been laying since the bow. *You're probably right*, she says. *I would have to ease them in. Somewhere less dangerous first*. What about the Crimson Sea — which she would in any case have to cross to reach the Midnight. Crow notes the crew will never agree to *that* either; the Song's crew, she says, is as cowardly as the king himself. Tress hooks the line with a final, deliberately absurd argument: ships that dare the Crimson must be carrying their most valuable cargoes (logic the narrator deflates in passing — by the same reasoning, the most fit people would be those who live in the most distant kingdoms, since walking to them takes longest). Crow shrugs. *If you can persuade them, fine. But they won't. Not yet — they're not desperate enough*.

Tress thanks the captain and excuses herself, careful not to add a single sentence beyond what is needed. As she goes, the narrator notes, dryly, the structure of what has just happened: a straggly-haired washer-girl from nowhere has played the captain into agreeing to sail the Crimson — for a second time, if one counts the night the not-rat read her notebook. The convoy of lies is now under way and accelerating.