POV: tress
Summary
Tress spends the next few days, the narrator says, alternating between fervent study and studious panic. Her budding plan — the desperate idea that came to her in Salay's cabin — is much larger and less safe than the flare work, and this time she has no helpful schematics to copy from. So she practises with verdant spores. She has never really understood the fruit of the Verdant Sea she grew up overlooking, and as she gives them careful attention the fear she has carried about them continues to bleed off. Fear and knowledge, the narrator observes, often play on opposite sides of the net — with exceptions: certain individuals you should be more afraid of the more you learn about them, the way certain sausages reward investigation with horror.
She finds the verdant aether almost playful. In exchange for the water she gives it, it answers her thoughts: tight spirals, tall strong stalks, slow growth held back from its full force. As before, she feels through the vines toward something larger — not a mind, only an impression. She wonders if it is the moon itself, or the great vines that grow forever on it.
Other than for sleep and her shifts helping Fort in the galley, where the faces of the crew sharpen her worry each time she sees them, she stays in her cabin. Three days after her meeting with Salay she is sitting at her desk encouraging a few vines to curl carefully around her fingers without crushing. Outside, through the porthole, she can see the Crimson's lunagree streaming down from the moon, grown bigger and bigger as the Song approaches; the dragon's lair must be near it or under it. She also notices that the items on her desk are in danger of sliding off, and that the horizon is tilted. The narrator stops to explain: at a lunagree the falling spores heap up like sand on the bottom of an hourglass. The spread is shallow enough across the scale of a sea to be invisible to the eye, but the Crimson is, in fact, a mountain the size of a kingdom — and they are sailing up it.
Huck is at her elbow, balancing on his hind legs to drip more water onto the vines from a small spoon — he has been having to use his hind legs more around her than he ever did before. She floats an idea. What if she learned to sail a ship by herself? Maybe a smaller one, something a single sailor could crew. She could take it into the Midnight Sea alone, and no one else would die for Charlie. *And how long would that take you to learn?* he asks her, especially on a sea like that — years, maybe. Maybe that is what she needs to do, she says. Or, he says — and the vines around her fingers tighten with her annoyance — maybe she needs to admit something harder: that Charlie is out of her reach, and she should give up the quest and take care of herself.
She forces the vines to relax. He dribbles more water. He does not, he says, like to see her sad; he would hate worse to see her dead. What she has already done on the Song is incredible, but it is leagues away from what the Midnight would throw at her. *Is it?* she snaps back. Nobody knows. She has asked Fort, Salay, and Ulaam; all of them say only that it is dangerous and that the Sorceress watches those spores, and ships that try to cross her sea disappear. Something about monsters, perhaps. Nobody can really tell her why.
Huck dribbles more water. Then he tells her about the rat. She remembers, of course, that he went ashore at their last port; she has heard six anecdotes about it by now. He left out the most important one. He had gone looking for the local talking-rat population — there are some on most islands now, he says, an aside that lands a little oddly — and found one who had ridden a ship that had visited the Sorceress's island and survived. The rat did not know the route. He did know exactly what had waited there. Huck had been keeping it to himself in the hope of not encouraging her. The four vines on her fingers stand up like spikes. The narrator notes parenthetically, on her behalf, that being told *I kept you in the dark for your own good* is among the most economical possible ways to demean a person — two insults for the price of one.
With some effort she lets him talk. Three trials, he says: she is the kind of person who likes things to come in threes. First the Midnight Sea itself: rain falls there the way it does everywhere, and the Sorceress has rigged some method to keep the resulting monsters continuously fed. They are ship-sized and they roam the sea, and the kind of thing Tress made on a small scale to watch Crow — would she fancy a hundred of them at once? The vines wriggle smaller and hide behind her palm.
Second, the metal men on the island: indestructible, impervious to weapons of any kind, relentless. They capture every visitor and imprison them, and the Sorceress does not bother with anyone foolish enough to be captured by them, so the obvious plan of getting captured deliberately to demand an audience is not a plan. (Yes, Tress had been considering it.) Third, the tower: a tower of indestructible metal so slick that nothing will stick to it and it cannot be scaled. She stands on top of it in the evenings to commune with the moons. Only two ways in — doors that are locked by means the informant could not name, and the small high window where her ravens come and go on her errands. *You'll get eaten by monsters,* he says. *If by some miracle you reach the island the guardians will lock you up forever. And if you somehow escape them you'll sit screaming at the tower until you lose your voice. There is no way to do what you want.*
Hoid did it, she says. He saw her. And so did Charlie. *Charlie was kidnapped on purpose because she hoped to ransom him to the king*, Huck answers, and who knows what was going on with Hoid — probably similar. She sits back. The information lands the way he meant it to: she sees, clearly, how impossible the task really is.
But she cannot afford to focus on it right now. The Sorceress cannot curse her yet if she is in a dragon's collection. And the dragon cannot collect her if a rainline kills her first. So Tress returns to her practice with the vines.