(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Tress knows there are more holes in her plan than wholes — and even setting aside whether she has correctly guessed the island's location, the central one is this: she had been counting on Huck letting them into the tower, and that is no longer an option. The Crow's Song sails on toward the terrible moon anyway, until at last she reaches the border — black spores stretching to infinity beside the Crimson like a limb that has gone fully necrotic. The Dougs still. The sails seem to hold their breath. Tress orders Salay to drop anchor for the night and post a double watch. *Has anyone ever sailed it successfully?* she asks. Salay knows of none — the Verdant King's fleets sometimes survive the Crimson by random luck, but no ship has ever come back from the Midnight. Crews are overrun almost the moment they cross the border.

Tress suddenly feels like a sham of a captain playing dress-up, and flees below to find Dr. Ulaam — looking for the comfort of something familiar, which she finds in the form of him admiring a sixth finger he has grown for a new ring. *I can't defeat the Sorceress,* she tells him. *No, of course you can't,* he agrees pleasantly. He then reassures her that no one in the crew expects her to — they are all expecting to die, so she will not be disappointing anyone when the Sorceress inevitably murders the lot of them. He doubts she can kill *him*, mind, and certainly not Hoid, so really only most of the crew. The reassurance lands badly. Tress snaps; Ulaam — who occasionally manages to notice when a mortal is in distress — backs off, and as she paces a different thought catches: he has spoken of Hoid this way before, as someone greater than himself.

She apologises. Ulaam suggests she snap at him more often; it reminds him what stresses mortals live under. She tells him that Huck was willing to move against her, and even setting that aside, the tower is coated in silver, so she can no longer slip in as a midnight creature either. The mission is a bust. Ulaam points out that there is one person on the ship who is not bound, as he is, to remain neutral in matters concerning the Sorceress — and who owns a pair of bright red sequined briefs. *Hoid?* she asks. *Is he really something greater than her?* Ulaam says yes — that if a single person on this planet can defeat the Sorceress and get her crew out alive, it is that man. When he wants to, Ulaam says, very few people anywhere can sway events like him. As for how he ended up cursed: Ulaam's guess is that it was not an accident at all. He tends to overreach, and if Ulaam had to wager his favourite set of fingernails on it, Hoid arranged the curse on purpose and is now having more trouble than expected getting back out.

The idea shifts something. *So,* Tress says, *maybe I don't have to defeat the Sorceress. Maybe I just have to find a way to get Hoid to do it.* Ulaam thinks that yes, perhaps indeed. He has not yet been able to decide *why* Hoid would arrange this for himself, but the narrator concedes from the margins that the question was proving harder than he had anticipated, and that he was at least very close to working it out. Ulaam also reframes the crew: they are not being bullied into this. They walk and hold themselves differently now — they know they are partly to blame for the people Crow killed, and following her toward the Sorceress is their attempt at reclaiming a secondhand variety of valour.

Tress retreats to her cabin and digs out her cup collection from under the bed — she has hardly looked at them in weeks. She lays them out one at a time. Last out are the ones Charlie sent her, and she lingers on the one with the butterfly soaring across the ocean. She had always read it as a butterfly forced out over the spores. Now she sees it differently: not a suicidal butterfly, but a determined one — one that knows what it wants and is willing to try for it no matter the odds. She puts the rest away and keeps two on the counter: the butterfly cup and her pewter tankard — one a symbol of determination, one a solid practical weight that is almost a weapon. *I am these two cups,* she thinks. *Utilitarian and dreaming. Both serve the same function.*

The butterfly, though, had gone out alone. It had not dragged an entire crew along with it to die. Tress ties back her hair, takes the two cups, and stalks out onto the deck. *Set down the launch,* she tells Salay. She is taking it into the Midnight Sea. Alone.