POV: tress
Summary
Crow escorts Tress out of the cabin and stays on her until the Crow's Song is safely away from port and on a heading that aims straight for the Crimson Sea. Only then is Tress allowed to go belowdecks. She passes the Dougs laughing on their way to the hold, and feels — concretely, the way one feels something physical — that she is trapped on a vessel pointed at an unpredictable rain-killing sea, at the end of which a dragon will buy her as a slave. The voice in her head reminds her that she really had thought she could rescue Charlie; the worst part, she decides, is that he will never know what happened to her. He will rot in the Sorceress's prison, or if some miracle frees him he will come home to learn she is no longer on the Rock and her ship has been destroyed by deadrunners.
She makes it as far as her own cabin and shuts the door before she fully loses control. Huck scrambles up onto the footboard alarmed and asking what happened, what was done to her, whose toes he should be expected to bite about it. *Toes?* she manages, through the tears, and he explains that toes are the third-most-stinky part of the human body and therefore a noble target. The image is ridiculous enough to soften her crying just slightly. She lies down on the bed and tells him the actual answer — that nothing was done to her, that she did it to herself: the captain plans to trade her to the dragon of the Crimson Sea as payment for a healing, and the Song is now sailing toward exactly that. She knew she was out of her depth, she says; why should she be surprised she has ended up trapped on a demon's ship sailing into her own doom? It is what she has earned.
Huck honours the promise about toes by biting her own — which makes her laugh in spite of herself, and then warn him not to make her laugh in case she shatters. He scrambles up beside her pillow and changes tactic. While she was at sea in the captain's cabin, he tells her, he had hidden himself in one of the bales Fort hauled ashore and made an escape into the town while the haggling was going on. (Fort, he reports in admiring detail, can haggle.) On the dock he watched Fort meet up with a community of Deaf islanders to talk with his hands rather than his board, and wondered how many such communities exist on islands he and Tress have never thought about. The town did not fly the King's flag, either — an actual rogue island, at the Verdant's edge, and not a peg-leg or eye-patch on it. *We're pirates now*, Tress notes, *and there's not an eye patch among us either. We're normal too, I suppose.* Funny to think about: every pirate in the world started out as someone normal.
Tress is not the wanderlust type, but a small piece of her — the same piece that has been collecting Charlie's cups for years — wants to know about the town. *What was interesting about it?* The first answer is the bell tower: Huck has always wanted to see one, this one has fifty-three bells (an odd number, he points out; a bell tower with fifty-three bells should really be a *bells* tower) and ropes you pull to ring them. He doubts the people would let rats pull the ropes even if rats could. He goes on — a garden of flowers that smelled good, a path of cobbles set into a spiral, a foot-pedal drinking fountain operated by a girl stamping on it to spray her brother — and the fact that he finds each of these unremarkable things interesting is itself what makes them so. The narrator notes the smile that follows is a small act, but moments earlier it had seemed as impossible to her as finding a rhyme for *bulb*.
The conversation slides into a quieter register. Tress suggests that Huck could go back — leave the Song, leave her, return to where he came from. He cannot, he tells her softly: there is no home to go back to. He does not elaborate, and she — with the markings of tragedy laid down clearly enough — does not press, partly because she also does not want to think about how unlikely it is that she will ever go back to her own. *Did life seem to make more sense when you were young?* he asks; she says yes, and remembers calm nights watching spores fall from the moon, lukewarm honey tea, the thrill of trying a new bake. He remembers not being afraid and waking to the familiar; not wonderful, but not terrifying. They agree, gently, that things probably were not really better — that memories sweeten and sour with the people doing the remembering, that they are ballads rewritten with each performance, that the past tends to age more like biscuits than wine.
Improbably, hearing about bell towers and drinking fountains has helped. Tress, being Tress, chooses to weaponise the moment of relief rather than ride it out. She sits up on the bed and faces the actual problem. She needs a way to defend herself; she needs a way to defeat Crow before the dragon's shore. The narrator notes, in closing, that this is convenient — because her cabin happens to contain five different varieties of the most dangerous substance on the planet.