POV: tress
Summary
The objections were mountainous. *Alone?* Salay demands; what moon gave her such a lunatic idea? Ann volunteers — six pistols on her, four eyes to aim them with now. Even Laggart, lurking at the back of the officers, looks unhappy. Fort holds up his board and asks simply *Why?* Tress explains: she means to test, on a single creature, whether she can actually control or destroy a midnight monster. If she can't, none of the rest of the plan matters — and there is no reason to expose anyone else to the experiment.
Salay takes her aside. She suggests an alternative: sail the Crow's Song along the border, lure a midnight creature close, trap it in verdant spores, haul it aboard, and retreat to the Crimson to experiment in safety. Too dangerous, Tress says — for the rest of them. Salay makes a different case: ever since Tress returned from the dragon's den, her long-buried hope of finding her father is alive again. She needs to survive what is coming. But she cannot leave until she has helped pull this crew back from what Crow made of them. They mutinied; if disobedience to a captain becomes normal now, things will go very badly very quickly. So she will defer. She is asking. Let her help.
Tress hears the part about protecting the crew and doubles down. Thank you, Salay, she says — now please prepare the launch. The narrator notes, sadly, that the *let me help you* speech almost never works the way you hope. Salay swallows something that wants to be a growl, and turns to give the order.
Tress returns to her cabin to fetch her hat. A voice speaks from the corner. *Take me,* Huck says. *Bring me. In the cage if you must — but bring me with you. You might need me.* Something in the tone of it gives her pause. She wavers, then grabs the handle of the cage on her way out.
Soon she is in a rowboat, the Midnight Sea in every direction, accompanied by a caged rat, a keg of water, and two cups. The dramatic moment the tar monsters were supposed to attend, however, does not arrive. She drifts. The sea is warm — gorged on sunlight — but the seethe sounds wrong here, on this expanse that swallows light, and her boat hangs in what feels like a void. She rows for an hour, until the Crow's Song disappears behind her. The sun sinks behind the moon on the horizon, a hole in reality. She tries to write in her notebook but can't focus.
Eventually she spots movement. A midnight creature has come almost up to the hull without her noticing — black on black, gliding through black spores — and only the gleam of her lamp on its surface gives it away. The thing moves through the spores like an eel through water, half as long as the Crow's Song, its spine bending in supple contours that read to her as wholly unnatural. (To you, the narrator notes, it might just look like swimming.) It circles. Confused. The narrator concedes that he can't truly say whether Midnight Essence is alive; assume for the sake of the story that it is. From the creature's point of view this is unsettling. People scream at it. They do not reach out to touch it.
Trembling, Tress reaches out and lays her hand on it. She had bet everything on being able to do what she had done with her own little creation in the bottle — push her mind against it and seize it. The bet was credible in principle, the narrator notes: there is too much sea for the Sorceress to actively direct every creature personally — to do so, even she would dehydrate and die — so she makes them in batches, gives them standing orders, and grants each just enough autonomy to choose in the field. That autonomy is the seam someone with sprouter talent could in theory exploit. So she has built every creature with complex internal mechanisms that recognise and reject outside attempts at control.
It works against Tress. The creature rears out of the spores at the touch of her mind, pulls back from her hand, and demands something with a wordless impression. She offers it water — more than the Sorceress gives, she hopes. It rebuffs her. She is determined, she is talented, but she has been sprouting only a couple of weeks; the Sorceress has not been new at this for a very long time. The thing rears with a hiss, opening its mouth, and Tress throws herself flat to the bottom of the boat.
A small, high-pitched voice speaks from the cage. *Stop,* Huck says. Then, more reluctantly: *Take us to your mistress. I have free passage.* The creature's standing orders converge on the rat. It had been told not to eat him, and to bring him to its master when commanded. Huck has returned, as instructed, to the place where the Sorceress made him.