POV: tress
Summary
The narrator opens with a meditation on time: people pretend the minutes and hours are equal cuts of meat when, in fact, some are prime and others are gristle. Tress understands this now. The few days after the dragon's lair pass quickly and lean, an ephemeral interval whose only interruption is one stilling during which she has to lift the ship above the Crimson. The rains miss them, and no Doug complains about the vines they have to chop free; this near miss is, if anything, a reminder that by any reasonable accounting they should not be alive. Tress feels a tailwind of momentum — the bow of the voyage long drawn, the arrow finally released — sailing now toward the Sorceress.
She decides to cast off some emotional ballast. With a frankness that the narrator concedes is inconvenient for a man trying to tell a story, she gathers Salay, Ann, and Fort and introduces them to Huck. He had agreed reluctantly, perhaps only because he had been so overjoyed when Tress stumbled into the captain's cabin that first night after the dragon and found him in a small cage with the cat pawing at the bars — a guilt she still feels for not thinking of him sooner, though her assumption that he was safe in her old cabin should at least have raised a fuchsia streamer when she remembered Crow had ransacked the place. Fort is delighted: Huck is a hero, the Dougs must be told so no one steps on him. Ann declares she will build a cage to keep the cat confined until the next port. Salay rubs her chin and gravely asks the rat's opinion on tiny pirate hats. (He turns out to be quite fond of them, which the narrator confides is honestly a little distracting.)
The second thing Tress does in the name of abject honesty is explain the dangers of the Midnight Sea — and from there who she is, why she left home, and what she is trying to do. Ann asks what is so great about this man she loves; Tress does her best to explain, certain world-traveled people will find her love plain and unremarkable. She underestimates the power of simple words spoken with passion. No one questions her after that.
Days fade behind the ship like the setting Crimson Moon, and ahead a jet-black moon breaks the horizon. The Midnight Moon reflects no light and seems more a void than an object, a tunnel into nothing. Tress briefly, irrationally fears it will keep growing — that it is not a moon at all but a darkness about to consume the sky. To escape it she retreats to her new quarters. The captain has much more space than she had been assigned, though she still uses her old room for spore experiments. She fills page after page of Crow's notebook with discarded ideas for getting the ship across the Midnight Sea.
Her mind is not working right. Where it once seized ideas with a predatory vigor, it now seems trapped in a room scratching uselessly at the walls. She grows more and more frustrated as each day vanishes with nothing to show but frazzled hair and another scribbled-out page. The narrator reassures the reader that nothing is wrong with her. She has not lost her creativity; she has not run out of ideas. She is simply tired. People, he explains, are as fluid as time — they ooze into the shape of the container they are told to inhabit, and the longer they hold an awkward shape, the more it wears on them, until even doing nothing takes all the effort in the world. There is much about being a pirate that suits Tress; she has learned and grown a great deal. But it has been a short time since she left the Rock, and she is tired in a way ten good nights of sleep cannot cure. She is three days from the Midnight and no closer to a plan.
She is dreading the conversation she knows is coming, and indeed it arrives with a polite knock. Huck — who has decided, for reasons of his own, that she requires a valet — has been counting the shoes she owns (a short count, as she is wearing both of them) and so scampers over to answer the door for her. *The captain bids you come in,* he announces, a service Tress reflects she could have managed herself, except that being in charge often means being too important to do things the sensible way. Salay, Ann, and Fort enter; Tress steels herself for their recrimination. What they see instead is that she has very nice penmanship — even backward on her forehead, where she has been pounding her brow into the ink.
*We've been giving this voyage some thought,* Salay says, *and the protections around the Sorceress seem almost impossible to overcome.* Tress braces — but Salay continues: *therefore, we've been working hard on ways to overcome them.* They have suggestions. Tress blinks the meaningful blink of someone certain she has misheard. They gather around her meeting table. Fort has been thinking about the machine men who guard the island. He had been working on a way to distract them, until he realized she had already solved the problem with her flare gun modifications: a legion that cannot be killed cannot hurt anyone if they are wrapped in vines. He shows her a schematic for a verdant-vine cannonball (labeled in places "sprouter mumbo-jumbo," since he does not grasp the finer points), using the same exploding-on-a-timer mechanism but bursting with vines instead of spraying water — bombard the beach, tie up the metal men, and slip past. The new board from Xisis is much improved: lines scroll past at the top so he can keep typing, and it can do different fonts. Tress tells him the plan is brilliant; Fort writes back *Fair trade!* — once she has her friend back, then they will be even, not before. She does not point out that she is the reason he lost his original board.
They have moved on to the second problem: the tower. Ann gestures at Tress's forehead and tries to puzzle out what is written there. (Technically, Fort notes, it says *ylecin ksA.* Actually, Salay corrects, it says *neither* — it's crossed out.) Tress has been thinking of growing a tree of verdant vines up the tower; the door, surely, is locked. *But not the window,* Fort writes — where she lets out her ravens. Far too small for a human. *For a human,* Fort adds. All three sets of eyes turn on Huck, who has finished counting her shoes and moved on to a mental list of all the types she will need to buy. He feels the stares as only a rat can. *What?* he says — and a moment later, *Oh. Rat. Right* — wringing his paws together. They need someone small to slip in through the raven window, and Fort reminds him gently of the debt he owes their captain. Tress tries to absolve him, but Huck objects on a different ground: vines will not work, because the tower is coated in silver, which she had never told her.
He had not. It is a problem, and Tress's face falls. Something in that expression pains him — he cannot stand how gloomy she has been — and something slips out. *I can get you through the door,* he says. *I have a way we rats know about. If you got me to the tower, I could open it.* But, he insists, all of this is irrelevant, because they would have to cross the Midnight Sea first, and they barely survived the Crimson. He is, unfortunately, correct. No one else has a quick solution.
The narrator aside: two heads are not always better than one — that rather depends on the heads. But when one person tries, it makes others more willing to try; a little vicarious success is a mental laxative, or, if you prefer, a bang on the front of the mental vending machine that jostles a stuck idea loose. Tress's eyes go wide.