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Captain Crow authorises opening a keg after dinner, which Tress privately considers a decent gesture — proof, the narrator allows, that Crow has a conscience and chooses to ignore it most of the time, which is verifiably worse than not having one. Tress does not partake. She has only ever been drunk once, two years ago at a holiday gathering on the Rock where she failed to notice quite how much had been put into the punch, and had spent the rest of the evening telling Charlie about her favourite recipes. He had found it endearing; she is fairly sure that with any alcohol in her tonight she would tell the wrong person about her plans.

She gathers a plate of the night's meal — biscuits with a strong meaty gravy and vegetables, basically a stew you eat with your fingers — and the Dougs cheer her on her way out, not only because they are mildly drunk. Fort's food, after months of meals best described as edible only by the strictest reading of the word, has begun to contain food in a more meaningful sense since she started helping; the Dougs are not stupid and they have noticed. Tress feels undeserving — they are still in danger because of her — and the cheering only sharpens her worry about Salay, who skipped dinner. She heads for her cabin with the spare plate.

She has never been to Salay's door before and finds the right one by its number. Through it she thinks she hears her blow her nose. When Salay opens the door, she is in a robe over a nightgown — Tress has never seen her in anything other than her stiff naval coat and trousers — and her dark skin masks a red nose but not the red around her eyes. Inside, the room is startlingly small for the ship's third in command, barely half the size of Tress's own quarters, and almost devoid of personalisation. Map tubes in a bin. Neat chests under the narrow bed. One thing hanging over the porthole and lit by the desk lamp: a quick street-artist drawing of a tall, smiling man and a young girl who looks much like a younger Salay.

Salay takes the plate, immediately pushes it aside, and points instead at the unrolled chart of the Crimson on her desk. She keeps thinking, she says, that there must be some pattern to the rainlines she can read, some safe corridor she can plot — but the Crimson's rains do not have a pattern, and if anyone had ever found one, sailors would already know. Then she turns back to her with the appeal she has been holding all evening: Tress must know a way to protect them. She would not have brought them out here if she had not had a method.

Tress can only manage an apology for Pakson. Salay says — to herself as much as anyone — that it is her job to do what the captain and first officer cannot or will not, and pounds the table. Tress sits on the edge of the narrow bed and lets her talk. Asked about the picture, she explains it: her father. She had promised him she would pay his creditors and gone off to earn the money; while she was gone, the king's collectors had pressed him into ship's labour and dropped him at a debtor's prison whose name no one could later remember. From there, she explains, a warship can take a man up and drop him again at another port, and another — her father has bounced from island to island beyond her reach. Her only practical hope is to keep sailing, keep asking. The other possibility is that he was on a warship in one of the king's wars and is already dead.

Pressed again — *do you have a secret from the king that will let us survive?* — Tress is caught. She has just told Salay not to give up hope and cannot now snatch it back by confessing she is a fraud. *Hope in a lie — hope in me — is not true hope,* she thinks; unless she could actually do something. She remembers watching the rainline swerve and knowing she had no power over her own life. Salay turns away and concedes, painfully, that perhaps it is not fair to ask: Tress's real mission might simply have been to get a shipload of deadrunners out of the kingdom and let them be killed by the Crimson in service of saving more innocent victims. If she could at least say where Crow was taking them, she would at least know how long they had to endure.

*Oh*, Tress hears herself say. *I know that.* The captain is taking them to see the dragon. Salay spins in her chair. Xisis? Real? Ulaam says so, Tress tells her, and Crow has books that say the legends are real. Salay rubs her chin and works it out the rest of the way without help: Crow has outlived every other spore eater by sheer stubbornness, but the disease will eat her sooner or later, and she is going to the dragon for a trade. Their eyes meet. Salay laughs out loud at the obvious follow-on: *She thinks you're going to let her trade you for her life?* *Yes,* Tress says, *it's very funny.*

Salay is delighted in spite of everything. It will be rich, she says, watching Crow discover what she has actually brought aboard. Tress takes her cue and lays out what she will need: when she does deal with Crow, she would not want the crew to free her; she would need Salay's help to take her to face justice. Of course, Salay says. And then? *And then,* Tress says, *I have business with the Sorceress in the Midnight Sea.* Salay's eyes go wide; then she laughs again — sharp, controlled, like a bell calling sailors to muster — and accepts it: anyone who can sail the Midnight can deal with the Crimson easily.

But then her face turns serious again. The crew, she says. A pack of pirates worth nothing to the king, but no one else is going to look out for them. Even their captain does not care about them. Please, please, do not let them lose another friend. Tress shrinks under the weight of her hope — she is a fake, a liar, a — wait. The narrator notes drily that strange desperation is exactly the state of mind that often leads to genius. A very strange, very desperate idea has just landed in her head. *Be ready,* she tells her. *There is something I can try.*