POV: tress
Summary
Tress keeps striding toward the Sorceress, reasoning aloud now. Each time she had tried to get Huck to talk about this place, his speech had faltered — because a spell was preventing him from saying anything that could identify him as Charlie cursed. *If that is so,* the Sorceress asks, *how did he tell you about the defences here?* Tress's eyes widen. He had told her, she realises, because he was trying to keep her away — because the only way to break his curse was to bring her here, to the Sorceress, and he was doing everything he could to stop the cure. Because he loves her.
The room falls quiet but for sniffling. Tress goes around the desk and finds the rat huddled and crying, eyes red. Unlike the cheerful doppelganger she has just been offered, he is a wreck. She kneels and picks him up. *Charlie,* she whispers, and cradles him as he trembles.
He apologises into her palm. He hadn't wanted her to be right. She had told him the prophecy — that he would, in the end, bring Tress back here for her to play with — and he had tried not to follow it, and had still failed. He calls himself stupid and worthless. She deserves so much better; look at what *she* has done, and he could not even manage one thing to keep her safe.
The Sorceress rolls her desk aside with an offhand wave and steps into the centre of the room. The fake Charlie in the doorway drops the Lightweaving disguise, revealing a reptilian creature with golden eyes and a toothy grin underneath. The narrator's best guess, from the margin, is that she had meant to place that creature aboard the Crow's Song to deal with him more permanently — and is beginning to worry about a bet the two of them once made. She shows none of that on the surface; her amiable air is gone, her eyes hard as stones, her lips a flat line. She does not like having been seen through. Something else bothers her, too, that may already be obvious.
*Charlie*, Tress whispers, *you sent me cups.* *That was a lifetime ago,* he says. *I love them,* she says. *Particularly the butterfly one — like us, soaring over places we never thought to go. And the pewter one. Like us, stronger and more straightforward than we have a right to be.* *She has us though,* he says. Because of him. The only way to free himself, she had told him, was to bring the person he loved to her — and then give that person to her, to curse. She had told him she would make him watch. It had been excruciating, he says, watching her sail closer and closer; he should have thrown himself overboard. Then she would never have learned how to get in.
Tress holds him up so they are eye to eye. *I want this,* she whispers. *To be with you.* He hesitates. She invokes what he told her on the Rock before they parted — *always what you want* — and he meets her eyes and finds in them strength enough for the two of them. And then the same thought catches them both at once. *Charlie,* she says, *if the way to break the curse was to bring the person you love to the Sorceress — why are you still a rat? Is there someone else you love?* *No,* he says. *It's you. But —*
*Because,* the Sorceress cuts in from behind them, *I haven't cursed you yet. His torment only ends if he brings you to me for that specific purpose.* Tress rises, Charlie in her palm, and looks at her — and finds a different woman wearing the same body. The jovial playfulness has gone; in its place is a cold thing. The narrator notes, drily, that some scholars say what replaces a soul in an immortal of her kind is something like ice, kept frozen by the heart.
Charlie — who has himself been changing on this voyage, day by day — speaks up. *You're wrong,* he says quietly. *I'm still a rat, and will remain one. Because for the curse to break I have to bring her to your home in trade for my freedom. I realised on the way in I haven't done that. I brought her, Sorceress — but not in trade. Not to be cursed. I brought her to defeat you.* *Remarkable,* the Sorceress says. *I didn't give you the intelligence of a rat, but it seems you've adopted it willingly. I can't be defeated by —*
A red light flares on her desk. Then several more along the walls. She spins, surprised, and orders the tower's mind to show her what tripped her alarms. A large screen materialises beside one wall, and on it is the Crow's Song crashing through the seething midnight spores toward the island. The narrator notes only that, had she been paying attention as she ought, she would have seen this coming. The Crow's Song has arrived.