POV: tress
Summary
The next morning, Tress arrives at the Sorceress's island. She has spent the trip wrapped in the coils of the midnight creature — allowed a drink and the use of a chamber pot, but otherwise immobile — while two more like it push the silver-lined launch through the spores with startling speed. Huck refuses to answer her demands for an explanation, but she does not need many. She voices the guesses to him as the island grows in front of them. *You've been here before. All that talk about a community of rats was lies. You belong to her. You're a familiar of the Sorceress, or something like one. You've always belonged to her.* *Yes,* he whispers, and *yes,* softer, and *yes* softer still — each answer like a barbed arrow.
She forces herself to admit, even so, that everything Huck had done short of jumping ship at port had been an attempt to keep her from coming this way. He is obviously terrified of the Sorceress. She can't blame him too much for how he has behaved here — only herself, for unwittingly delivering him back. She wonders now whether she should have listened to Salay and brought the crew in for the experiment after all. Big decisions, the narrator notes, sit atop mountains of smaller ones; do not ignore the heap behind them. Realisation has not quite dawned in Tress yet, but the glow is on the horizon.
The little boat takes an odd, zigzagging path as it nears land. Tress soon sees why. Long jagged lines of stone cut up through the spores here — sandbars with teeth, hidden mines just under the surface — and the midnight creatures thread through them on a path only they know. The Sorceress chose her island for this. Any sprouter who tried to sail the Crow's Song in blind would have died on the rocks before ever seeing the metal army. The mission, she realises, had been doomed before the midnight monsters ever entered the picture.
Eventually the boat reaches shore: a slate-grey rock skerry, suspiciously circular, perhaps two hundred yards across, with a few spindly trees that look as if they had been told about the concept of trees only by description. Around the tower at its centre stands a hundred golden metal men in ranks, with spears and shields and lowered faceplates — exactly like soldiers, except for the unnatural stillness. The tower itself, in inverse proportion to the island, is much bigger than Tress had imagined: wide and tall, peaked, and more silver in one place than she has ever seen. The silver is presumably there to wreck spores at an incredible rate — defence against enemy sprouters.
The midnight creature, now reshaped from eel-form into something resembling a centipede with tentacle feet, keeps her wrapped and lifts her bodily off the boat, carrying her in front of itself. Huck hops down separately and, for the first time since they boarded, looks her in the eye. She glares; he wilts like a thirsty vine — then perks up, as if deciding something. *Yes. Yes, that's it. Not doing what she asked at all.* He eyes the monster and scampers ahead before she can berate him again.
The metal men let them pass. The tower has a single door, also of silver. Huck stands up in front of it and announces, in a loud voice, that he has returned as commanded with a captive to present to the Sorceress — then begins improvising at the door itself when nothing happens. The door swings open on its own. He hesitates, then scurries through, then looks down at himself and back at her, uncertain what comes next.
The midnight creature cannot follow over the silver threshold. Instead it shoves her through the door — and tosses two cups in after her. The pewter one, and the one with the butterfly. It had found them in the boat and could not tell whether they mattered. As she fumbles to catch them, the door slides shut behind her, leaving her with only one direction left to go.