POV: salay
Summary
The Sorceress is not angry yet; she is annoyed. She had assumed the narrator dealt with from the moment he set out into the Crimson — she had kept tabs on the Crow's Song's run not from any belief it would actually reach her, but because watching him struggle was its own entertainment. Now they are at her gate. She assumes he must somehow have engineered the vessel's passage through every sea between her and home; the narrator notes, in passing, that his real advantage has never actually been his cleverness. It has been his knack for picking the right companions and sticking by them.
On the quarterdeck he hangs from the rigging in a tiny pirate hat he has pinched, eyes wide into the wind on the theory that they will dry out and stop demanding he blink. Salay has the wheel. The narrator pauses to introduce her properly: a woman piloting today with her father's last letter folded in her pocket, knowing his debts keep him jailed if she dies on this water, who has lately found a captain worth keeping alive. The narrator pays her the compliment of recommending the reader hope to encounter someone like her once in their life — and to know enough to clear out of her path quickly when they do. Ann climbs the steps to ask the narrator why the captain thinks he is going to be any use; he replies with a stream of nonsense about painting dogs in hats on velvet, and the narrator concedes drily that there is little point asking a question of stupidity.
Salay hears none of it. She is deep enough inside her own focus that the ship seems for a moment to ignore wind and wave alike and obey her directly, leaning to the rails, slipping between stones by inches, riding her sheer will into the bay beyond the rocks. The Sorceress, watching from her tower, shifts from annoyed to genuinely worried and orders her metal men forward — burnished brass, seven feet tall, impervious to every weapon a preindustrial fleet has ever brought against them. They have always been her surest defence.
Salay calls for arms. Ann hurries to the cannon. The verdant rounds Tress designed are the answer to the metal men; what Ann is not is a good shot. Her first round ploughs into a tree. The narrator interrupts the action to explain why. Her eyes are not really the problem and her aim is not really cursed. What she has is the opposite of Tress's avalanche — a slow mountain of failure built one missed shot at a time. Each miss stays put; each hit slips off. Sooner or later your hand shakes and the sweat drips into your eyes not because you cannot shoot, but because by now missing is simply what you do.
Laggart, of all people, steps up behind her, takes hold of the forestay, and feeds her corrections in a calm steady voice — three off the stern, one up, hold, hold, fire. The shot strikes a metal man square in the chest and lays it out flat, and the vines that erupt from the ball entangle every guardian inside reach. The narrator notes that the Sorceress built her constructs to ignore weapons and to call for support when they could not move. Neither instruction is any help when the support that arrives is wrapped in vines as well. They cycle between marching, trying to free each other, and freezing in place trying to choose; in the end they just freeze.
Ann reloads. Laggart calls the next correction; she repeats it back, and adds one of her own — a point to port. He pauses, surprised, then accepts it and calls hold. She gives the order to fire in the same breath he does. The shot flies true. She has the next round seated before he can call for it. He gives her the only piece of unqualified praise the chapter has heard from him, and names her Assistant Cannonmaster on the deck. And standing for a moment on the peak of her mountain, she finds that it has somehow shrunk beneath her.