POV: tress
Summary
Tress joins Fort at the prow of the Crow's Song for the border crossing, the rest of the Dougs sent up into the rigging to leave the rail clear. The narrator allows himself a small editorial: of the various ways the cosmere has of killing visitors, the spore seas are unfair in that they do it quietly — an unlucky breath, a few crimson spores in the lungs, and a person becomes a colander. Other deaths at least announce themselves; the spores do it with a whisper. That said, he grants, the seas do have a few sights for sale.
At sunset the geometry of the planet stages itself: the Verdant Moon sinking at the Song's stern, the Crimson Moon climbing at the bow with the sun perched above it. Where the Verdant meets the Crimson the spores mix into a brown gradient before the red opens out beyond, vivid as an ocean of blood — as if the moon overhead had been wounded and the ship were sailing toward its corpse. Tress had not anticipated how wrong the colour would feel. Green has been the colour of every sky she has ever stood under; a small superstitious part of her worries she might cease to exist the moment the Verdant stops watching her. The Song passes the border. Fort notes she is grinning. *Sorry*, she tells him, *it's just that this is terrifying.* She thinks her brain has been so overwhelmed by the seas that it has started smiling at things to try to fit in. Fort visibly thinks about her supposed King's Mask cover and writes nothing. The narrator notes the bitter irony — that there are musical geniuses out there who died as street sweepers because they never had the chance to pick up an instrument; the world is full of people who never get the chance to discover what they actually are.
A Doug in the rigging shouts and points: the sky has opened up and death is snaking toward them. Tress has never seen rain before — on her island, water came up out of wells — and the thing approaching is at least as much a story as a weather event. A knot of cloud trails a ribbon of rain that strikes the sea in front of them and throws up a wall of crimson spines thirty feet tall, interlocking with a clatter audible at distance. Salay, already moving on the captain's order, tacks the Song hard to port and lurches her back into Verdant. The rainline does not follow; it turns at the boundary and races ahead along it, leaving its wall to slump and be eaten back into the sea — a child stuffing a broken cookie jar under the counter and assuming no one will notice. Tress asks, late, what they would have done had the seethe stilled at the wrong moment. Fort shrugs. It is the kind of risk one takes, sailing the Crimson.
On the quarterdeck, Crow drinks from her canteen, looks thoughtful, and — to Laggart's undisguised dismay — orders Salay south along the border for now. It seems imprudent to enter the Crimson with that rainline in motion. She vanishes into her cabin and slams the door. Laggart nearly stumbles after her, recovers by shouting at Dougs, and the Song settles into a leisurely run along the border. Fort excuses himself to scrub pots; Ulaam calls out from somewhere offering to help her make sense of it all. Laggart passes Tress at the rail, then stops, asks what she makes of all this, and — when she says she does not know — jerks his head for her to follow.
He takes her up onto the aft cannon platform: a railed balcony slung off the very back of the ship, deliberately set outside the protective deck silver so that zephyr charges survive long enough to fire. Tress's pulse spikes when he reaches into the gunnery barrel — she is certain, for one bad second, that he is about to confront her with one of the swapped cannonballs. The narrator interjects to coin the transitive property of ineptitude: anyone bad enough at spy-craft to be visibly nervous is so obviously bad at it that they must be doing it on purpose, ergo brilliantly competent — and this is, he claims, the explanation for everything the reader has seen him do wrong. Laggart sees none of her panic; he is gingerly fetching a pouch of zephyr between two fingers. He pours one through a top hatch as a charge, rams a wad to fill the bore, and slides a cannonball down the muzzle, talking as he goes — the inner casing is aluminum to block the deck silver's influence, the cannon cannot angle too low or the round will roll back out. *Now that we're proper pirates*, he says, the Song needs more than two people who can fire a cannon; everyone else aboard is too afraid of spores for the job. Congratulations.
Tress asks, mildly, whether the captain knows about this. He snaps that he is the cannonmaster and she will not care; besides, he wants someone besides himself competent with zephyr in case he is wounded — he has no intention of dying because no one else aboard will touch the stuff. From which Tress reads, accurately, that he does not know Crow plans to sell her to the dragon — and concludes that he is being kept ignorant because Crow has earmarked him as the backup offering. He pitches a small wooden buoy overboard on a rope; it trails behind the Song like the most conscientious of stalkers. *Take five shots a day*, he says. *Best way to learn a cannon is to use one. Sink the buoy in two and we'll talk about real training.* He starts to walk off. Tress asks if she should not start with something cheaper than full cannonballs — a flare gun, say. He calls it the stupidest possible question; a flare gun is nothing like a cannon. He stalks away muttering.
Folded arms; intrusion on her evening; the dragon's shore an unknown number of days off — anywhere between a few hours and a few weeks, depending on where the dragon's den lies in the Crimson. Then it occurs to her that practising with a cannon is in fact excellent preparation for building her own spore weapon to use against Crow. She pushes the cannon out along its track, takes the firing rod, and — without ceremony — touches off her first shot. The cannon kicks back. It is less than a minute before Ann's head pops up over the platform rail, wide-eyed and visibly delighted.