POV: tress
Summary
Still pinned to the wall by the Sorceress's bands of light, Tress watches the screens with something close to relief. From the moment she had pushed off from the Rock she had expected to fail outright; the streak of things going right had been starting to feel like loaded dice. Captivity, immobility, no help to give — this was, all along, what she had assumed would happen. She is no King's Mask and no pirate; she is a window-washer who really does need to tie her hair back. Then the cannonballs start landing and the metal men freeze in their vines. Despite herself she grins. Her designs work. The narrator describes the bursting vines as something between a sea-creature and a tangle of cut grass; Tress simply finds them beautiful.
Charlie climbs her leg, winded from the cat, and tells her he is having less luck with the beast than he had hoped; she tells him it is fine. He scolds her gently for crying — there are surely rules against it on a ship — then spots a pewter tankard on the floor and asks her to keep the Sorceress talking while he tries something. She obliges by inviting her captor to lecture her on stories of captured maidens. The Sorceress cannot resist. She stalks forward, ignoring a metallic clinking from the stairs behind her, and walks Tress through her own helplessness, building up to a curse she has been keeping in reserve for a special occasion. Behind her, Charlie is already inside the tankard, rolling end over end down the steps after the cat's parting swat puts him on his way.
Tress keeps her talking. The stories all leave the same thing out, she says: needing rescue is not the disgrace; everyone needs rescue at some point. What matters is everything that came before — whether you have spent your life being the kind of person worth rescuing in the first place. From the hallway below, a small voice asks the door to open. The Sorceress casts her finishing curse on Tress; it strikes a shield and detonates into white light that blots the room out.
When the light clears, the narrator is standing between them with the Crow's Song's officers behind him and a rat on his shoulder, his hands forward, the shield woven from Aons. His outfit defies polite description: a floral shirt buttoned over much-too-short shorts, with sandals worn over socks. *Hello, Riina,* he says — naming her aloud for the first time the book has heard — and acknowledges that his clothes are awful, apologises for raising politics over dinner with the relations-by-marriage, and informs her she is living proof that humourlessness and clownishness are not in fact incompatible. A glow pulses under his skin. The narrator turns aside to explain, in passing, that this particular set of powers cannot simply be imitated; the abilities he wanted require adoption into a small chosen circle, and his only real chance had ever been to locate someone inside it bright enough to belong, gullible enough to play with, and cruel enough to trade the invitation for the joy of cursing him. She swears. His curse is broken, his senses returned. He has won the bet.
Tress, still pinned, congratulates the *cabin boy* and informs him he is being promoted. Salay asks, dazed, whether they have actually won and what exactly he is. *Sorcerer* will do, he says. Charlie asks, from his shoulder, whether the bet was really all this was; the narrator notes that nothing they have just done was actually simple. The Sorceress waves a hand; Tress falls from the wall and Fort catches her. *Go,* she says — quickly, before she reconsiders.
Tress tells her first to lift Charlie's curse. She says she cannot — curse terms cannot be undone outside their own logic. The narrator gives Tress a small nod: true enough for the present argument. Then her face hardens. They are not leaving, she says. The Sorceress is. She enumerates the woman's crimes — cursing people who only wanted an audience, taking captives, robbing merchants, sinking fleets — and orders her off the world for good. Salay, Fort and Ann level pistols at her, Ann somehow with three of them; the rat growls earnestly from the narrator's shoulder. Tress nudges him: *zap her or something.* He sighs and raises his hands.
Her sort, the narrator notes, are unusually good at risk-versus-reward maths. Riina had come to this planet in the first place because nothing on it could threaten her; then a dragon had turned up living here, and then he had; she has not stayed alive as long as she has by routinely accepting one-in-five odds of losing. A short while later the crew gathers at the rail watching a small point of light go out in the sky above the bay. The tower has departed with her. The narrator notes drily that he tends to have this effect on people; spend too long around him and one starts envying those who never crossed his path.
Fort breaks out something he has been keeping back for an occasion like this. Ann decides the cannons need names, to Laggart's loud regret. Salay touches her father's letter and lets herself, for a change, enjoy the celebration. Tress comes to the narrator with the rat in her hands and asks whether there is anything at all he can do. He cannot undo the Sorceress's curse; no one can, not at his skill. But he inspects the runes round Charlie and allows that he might be able to alter the parameters a little.