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Tress has dragged Hoid up on deck to try, finally, to work around the curse that keeps him from saying anything sensible. She would rather have done it belowdecks, out of view, but he insisted on the open air — it turns out he wanted to watch the Crimson Moon heave spores down into the sea. The narrator, with the candour of a man writing about himself in the past tense, admits to having been an unreliable subject that day. He composes a poem comparing the lunagree to a god being noisily ill after a long night out, and confesses, with no small pride, that the assignment gave him one of his rare professional opportunities to make a really good rhyme for the word *scarf*. Privately the narrator also concedes that he had never taken proper measure of how beautiful Tress's world was. From his perspective the planet was a backwater, drowned in aether sludge that was easier to harvest at the moons themselves. But sailing the Crimson, with the moon hanging dark by day and glowing at night and pouring a lava-coloured fountain into the centre of the sea, even an unreliable witness could see what was in front of him.

Tress coaxes him down beside her on the deck and tries to explain that she needs to break his curse in order to find the Sorceress, whose island is nowhere on any map of the Midnight. Hoid leans in conspiratorially. He happens, he confides, to have one of those. *I know, Hoid,* she says, and then — patiently — sets out the rule the narrator has half-explained to her over their previous attempts: the curse only lets him discuss itself with someone who already knows it exists. He can't tell her things she doesn't know, only confirm things she does. *Oh!* he says, brightening. *A curse! I—* *—have one of those. I know.* The narrator notes, deadpan, that being intentionally irritating is one thing — within professional ethics — but he resents being irritating by accident; it's like a road crew operating heavy machinery in their sleep.

Tress tries her first prepared strategy. She has written out a list of words she thinks have to do with curses, and asks him to point out any he can't say. He studies it gravely, then announces that he has apparently forgotten how to read. With visible patience she reads the words aloud to him and he repeats them all without difficulty, then asks whether this is the game where he draws the word or the one where he acts it out. The narrator pauses for a self-portrait: he has blacked out one of his front teeth, on the theory that gap-toothed appears to be the new look this season, several of the Dougs sporting it.

She tries again. Maybe she could spell the words letter by letter and ask if each letter belongs in the answer; surely the curse cannot block a single letter at a time. The narrator informs the reader that no, it can — the Sorceress has anticipated this exact workaround and programmed the curse to forbid confirming words a letter at a time. In addition, he notes drily, in this particular instance there is the small matter that — *Letters,* he says aloud, looking at the page. *Spelling words. Reading.* In the moment, she does not catch what he is hinting at, but she takes the point and moves on. *Could you maybe lead me to the Sorceress without getting your curse broken?* she asks.

Hoid falls silent. The narrator notes, hopefully, that the silence is very loud. After a beat Tress sits up. Every time she has mentioned sailing to the Sorceress, he has had nothing to say — and Hoid never has nothing to say. She tests it: can he talk about the king's island? He launches into a half-remembered anecdote about the king's tosher that he is fairly sure is funny because it has poop in it. So talking about the king's island is fine; talking about the Sorceress's island isn't. *I need a map.* The narrator concedes, ruefully, that in a few days of trying she has worked out more about helping him than Ulaam managed in the year he had spent on the problem.

Up on the quarterdeck Salay is at the wheel, guiding the Song deeper into the Crimson. She has no chart of the Midnight with her at the helm but at Tress's request sends a Doug below for one. The chart is not detailed — none of the Midnight charts are — but its shape is roughly right, since all of the seas are pentagons. Tress sits down on the deck with him and starts pointing at locations. *I'd like you to guide us here. Could you do that?* For each place he cheerfully volunteers some interesting fact — that he had walked one of them wearing butter instead of shoes — until she points at a particular spot near the boundary of the Midnight Sea and the Crimson, perhaps half a day's sail inward. He falls silent.

Tress pulls the map tightly to her chest, her eyes brimming. People often celebrate when he stops talking — a hazard of his profession, the narrator allows — but this silence has just given her the first concrete piece of information she has unearthed about the Sorceress since she left the Rock. She knows where Charlie is being held. The first real step toward fetching him back. The narrator closes the chapter by noting that the beautiful moment is then ruined as a single line of rainfall appears at the horizon and shoots straight for the Crow's Song.