POV: tress
Summary
Tress reaches the upper deck to discover what the narrator says he will not belabour: two rainlines are bearing down on the Crow's Song at once, with the ship dead sporelocked on the slopes of the Crimson and her prow pointed straight at the moon's pouring column of spores. Two at once is too long an odds for chance; if the narrator has ever seen fate stack the deck against a vessel, it is now.
Salay is at her post on the quarterdeck, holding the wheel against the moment the seethe might resume. The Dougs shout half-formed ideas at one another, several proposing the suicidal expedient of running across the spores; the two lifeboats would only buy slow death by dehydration this far into the Crimson. Salay catches Tress's eye across the deck and mouths *it's time, please.* Tress grabs a passing Doug — a lanky woman with a long tail of hair — and sends her to Salay with an unlikely order: two very long ropes and the barrel of water from the cannon station.
The narrator pauses, in the way only he does, to consider what heroism actually is. Heroes are typically trained: their seemingly spontaneous courage is the residue of a lifetime of preparation. And the cause war heroes give for what they did, asked away from the medal-platform, is almost never country or ideal. It is consistently for their friends. The bond between people, he says, is stronger than steel; give a person someone to fight for and you make a hero.
Tress dashes past Laggart on the steps without listening to him, slams open her cabin door (sending Huck scrambling under the bed), and heaves up off the desk the secret she has been preparing for days: a child-head-sized sphere of roseite, waxed on the outside, packed with so many verdant spores that the rose around them is tinted faintly violet. She notes in passing that a few stray midnight spores have spilled on the desk — sloppy of her — and is out the door before she can think about it.
Back on deck, Salay has the rope and the barrel waiting. *Tie one rope to the barrel,* Tress says, *and lower it carefully over the side to the spores. Then tie the other rope around me and do the same.* Everyone stares. Then Salay barks orders and it is done: Ann lowers the barrel personally; Fort and a few Dougs ginger Tress down over the side. Her boots crunch into the sandy spores as she rolls the barrel against the hull and pries the lid off, hands shaking.
She drills a single hole through the top of the roseite sphere with a silver-tipped spike, exposing the verdant spores inside, and drops it into the water barrel. Vines explode forth — thick as arms, spiralling around one another, drinking eagerly and growing on, tentacles slamming against the hull. The mass tips the ship as it surges out of the barrel. Tress backs away instinctively, then forces herself forward; she made this, she will not run from it. She presses both hands against the swelling vines and wills them — *up. Please. PLEASE. UP.*
The vines reorient themselves into a many-fingered hand and lift, the ship rising with them. Without the seethe the ocean surface is firm enough footing for a spread-fingered base. Tress herself is dragged into the air, dangling by the rope, hoping Fort does not let go. Then the rain arrives, announcing itself with the sound of water hitting something hard — the crimson spines crashing up beneath them. Twin streams meet at the Crow's Song and wash the deck clean of dead spores, soaking everyone from the lowest cabin boy to the captain in her plumed hat. The nightmare of every sailor across the narrator's many worlds: rain on the deck, alone with the abyss.
On any other ship it would mean death. Not on this one, not today. Crow waits for the spike-shred that does not come — only cold rain like a thousand small punches — and pushes through her own Dougs to look over the side. Beneath the ship a colossal *tree* has grown: a trunk of interwoven verdant vines braced by a finger-fan of vine-roots, latched onto the hull, lifting the Crow's Song some forty feet above the thicket of crimson spikes that have grown beneath. The spikes have pierced the trunk, but the vines are elastic and still growing; if anything the spike-network stabilises them.
Dangling alongside the hull, a soaking-wet girl in a tangle of damp hair. The Dougs take a moment of existential whiplash to register the salvation, then start cheering. *Help us pull her up, you louts!* Salay shouts, grabbing the rope with Fort — whose quick thinking, hauling her up a few feet as the vines grew, has kept the spikes to nothing worse than touching her shoes. Hands all over the rope haul her back over the rail. They are cheering for the second time, the narrator notes, the way they did the day they first brought her aboard.
Crow watches in silence. The ship is unhurt; she had been telling everyone the dragon was two days away, but the lair is closer than that — she had not wanted them panicking. None of that is what frightens her now. She has spent her life teaching her crew to fear her, because fear obeys; but there is another emotion that makes people more loyal still, one she has never understood. It is standing on her deck in the form of a small shivering girl who has somehow earned the love Crow herself has never known.