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Five months after the tower, a ship makes the Rock and bumps the dock as it slows, the new apprentice helmsman still learning. Salay's father looks abashed; Salay smiles and offers him a few quiet pointers. The ship is not the old one — the Crow's Song has been sold and replaced. The crew had wanted a clean line under their old lives, and their captain had wanted a couple more cabins than the Crow's Song could offer. Tress comes up on deck in a long captain's coat and a plumed hat, signs a congratulations to the helm in Fort's sign-language now spreading through the crew (handy, the narrator notes, for talking over wind to the rigging or to the helm), and drinks from the mended butterfly cup at the rail. Chips, dings, and cracks all give a cup a story; she likes the one this one tells.

Salay presents the dockmaster and inspector with a royal writ that does considerably more than pardon them. For stopping the Sorceress, the crew has been granted, in perpetuity, the sole right to trade across the Crimson and the Midnight; the narrator notes that every Doug aboard will be wealthy beyond his guild's grade inside a few years. The king is of course now insisting he meant for all of this to happen, and that he had believed in Charlie and the bride he chose right from the beginning. The narrator concedes others would call that hypocrisy; locally, they go with politics.

While the writ is being re-read, Charlie comes out on deck as a man again. The narrator explains his work-around to the Sorceress's curse: he could not erase the terms, but he could re-rhyme them. The original trade had bound Charlie's freedom to delivering Tress for the cursing; the narrator's edit swapped *cursed* for *versed,* and the trade was satisfied by a poem he had written for her. Tress had cleared the cabin so the change could happen out of sight. He steps out with poem in hand, a stupid grin, and (as she has to gently remind him) nothing else on but the tiny pirate hat. He excuses himself for clothing. The narrator confirms what the rest of the book has been telling: they stay together. Tress remains captain and expert sprouter, Charlie turns out a competent valet and a passable storyteller and musician aboard — in his own phrase, a well-versed man. She reads the poem that broke the curse and finds it is hers alone.

Down the dock, her parents stumble into view, her little brother trailing them. Her mother had passed most evenings since the day she left scanning the spores for any sign of her ship; even after the letters had finally started reaching home, neither parent had quite believed she would actually come back. They embrace, and ground that had been feeling foreign under her feet quietly becomes familiar again. They have brought their luggage; the cabin on board is waiting. As she ushers them toward the ship, the duke arrives red-faced, brandishing the writ, in his only scowl. The narrator notes Tress has long since concluded that while a person needs a different smile for every occasion, one all-purpose scowl will see them through anything. He has not read far enough to see the king's stipend clause — twenty years' residence on the Rock earns a generous retirement — which is about to turn the island's open positions into the most competitive in the kingdom. She tells him to keep reading, sips her tea, and walks off without waiting for him to catch up.

On the deck the newly-dressed Charlie declines to greet his father. He has slipped a letter from his mother into the writ-stack: she had left both the island and the duke in the same motion some months earlier, and the note is for him to find if he keeps reading. Sending your only child off to certain doom, the narrator observes drily, is not a recipe for a healthy marriage. Charlie watches the duke scowl below — life is simpler that way, he says; one expression is easier to maintain. Tress muses about whether there is a maritime law forbidding a captain from dating her valet; what people will say, he replies, is that he is an extraordinarily fortunate man.

They do not linger — long enough to lay in supplies, and for her to thank in person a few of the people who had helped her get clear of this same island months earlier. Then the ship casts off and stands out into the spores with a young woman and a rodent aboard. The narrator notes that the rodent is not, in several senses, a rodent; the young woman is, regardless of age, seven kinds of woman; and the ocean by now is — with luck — exactly as the reader has come to picture it. Emerald, spore-borne, and open in every direction.