“I didn’t want to lead you into danger,” Huck said. “The Sorceress is a horrible person, Tress. You shouldn’t want to know anything more about her, and you definitely shouldn’t be trying to get to her island.”
Tress stalked over to the bed and knelt beside it, at eye level with the rat. “You,” she said, “are going to tell me everything you know about the Sorceress. Or else.”
“Or else what?” he squeaked.
“Or else”—she took a deep breath, nervous, as she’d never made a threat as dire as this in her life—“I will stop talking to you.”
“…You won’t throw me overboard or something?”
“What?” she asked, horrified. “No! That would be awful!”
“Tress, you make a terrible pirate.”
“Please, Huck,” she said, “tell me what you know. Can you guide me to the Sorceress’s island?”
He considered, then began to speak, but cut off. He rubbed his head with his paw. “No,” he said. “I can’t, Tress. I’m not what you think I am. I’m…not a familiar. Well, I guess I kind of am, but not in the way you’re thinking. My whole family can talk. I grew up on a lonely island far, far from the Sorceress’s realm.”
“So you’re what? A descendant of familiars?”
“A good explanation,” he said, then sighed. “If you really want to get to the Sorceress, your best bet is to break Hoid’s curse. I can’t lead you to her. About that, I’m telling you the truth. I promise.”
“Can you at least help me break Hoid’s curse?”
He thought for a moment. “I… Maybe? I mean, I’m not supposed to talk about this. But so long as it’s about Hoid… All right, so here’s the problem. The Sorceress’s magic forbids a person from talking about the specifics of their curse.”
“I knew that already,” she said.
“But I’ve heard—from my family, you see—that one can sometimes get a cursed person to reveal things anyway. The curses aren’t alive; they are static, like the rules in a contract. That means, despite how much work the Sorceress puts into them, every curse has holes.”
“I don’t understand,” Tress said, still kneeling beside the bed.
“All right,” Huck said, “let’s pretend you had a friend who was cursed. If you went to them and said, ‘Are you cursed?’ they wouldn’t be able to say yes. But the fact that they can’t is itself kind of a confirmation, you know? So in a way, you’ve tricked the curse into giving you new information.”
“But how does that relate to undoing the curse?”
“Every cursed person hears the spell being said, and therefore knows the method of their salvation. The Sorceress…Tress, she’s evil. Sadistic. When she curses someone, she wants them to know the path to their freedom, then not be able to tell anyone.”
“That sounds horrendous,” Tress said, again glancing toward where she’d left Hoid.
“Yeah,” Huck said. “I warned you. Look, even talking about her is dangerous. You shouldn’t keep trying to get to her.”
“I’m going,” she said. “So I can either go armed with your information, or I can go ignorantly and be more likely to die. Your choice, Huck.”
“Ouch. No need to step on the trap after it’s already around my neck, Tress. I’m trying to help, but there’s not a lot I can say. You have to find a way to circumvent the curse. Like…assume you asked that friend, ‘How do I undo your curse?’ once you know there is a curse. That friend won’t be able to tell you.
“But say you told your friend a story about someone else who was cured of their curse, and asked, ‘What do you think?’ They might be able to talk to you about the story, since it’s about someone else—and therefore not about their specific situation. You might be able to sneak useful information out.”
“That sounds like it would involve a lot of guesswork,” Tress said. “And confusion.”
“And frustration. And pain. Yeah. But it’s all I have for you, Tress. I’m not an expert. I think you should focus on keeping yourself alive, not on this mad quest to visit the Sorceress. Crow has it in for you. I can feel it.”
“I thought that at first too,” Tress said, letting herself be distracted. She needed time to process what he’d said before pushing him further anyway. “But Crow has turned around. She seems happy to have me on board.”
“And that doesn’t worry you more?” Huck asked.
“Now that you mention it…I should be suspicious, shouldn’t I?”
“Sporefalls, yes,” Huck said. “I mean, Crow eats bullets, hates everyone, is determined to give her own crew a death sentence. Yet she—casually—has decided she wants you to stay on board. For reasons.”
Tress shivered. “We might need you to spy on her again.”
“Uh…” Huck wrung his paws a little, then started nibbling on the book again.
“Stop that!”
“Sorry,” he said as she snatched it away. “Chewing makes me feel better. I will spy on her if you want, Tress. But…I mean, I don’t think I’m very good at it. Last time I’m sure they spotted me. That porthole has been kept tightly closed ever since. Plus there’s the cat…”
Tress tapped her finger on the book. The captain was wily, and even Hoid—an obvious idiot （ouch）—had figured out Huck was a familiar. A girl spending time with a rat that seemed too well-trained? Crow probably had her suspicions as well.
But perhaps there was another way. What was it Ulaam had said about midnight spores? They were useful in spying…
She was interrupted by a knock on her door. Tress glanced at Huck, who—with an abundance of caution—grabbed his bread crust in his mouth and hid under the bed. When Tress answered the door, she found Salay standing outside.
“Tress,” the helmswoman said, “we need to talk about who you really are.”
THE KING’S MASK
Salay wanted to know who she really was.
Unfortunately, that was a topic of some confusion to Tress herself. In her youth, she’d thought she understood who she was. Now she was sailing with pirates and learning to use spores. She found herself demanding answers of Ulaam, and not caring if it was polite.
She wasn’t even certain she was Tress anymore, or if she’d become someone else. You could say, in other words, that her state at the moment was distress.
“Well?” Salay asked.
Tress didn’t have a lot of experience with lying, but paradoxically, the ones who are most successful at it are those who don’t do it very often. So when Tress remained quiet but stepped back and gestured for Salay to come in, it was exactly the right thing to do.
Salay hesitated. Despite her no-nonsense attitude, she was nervous about entering a sprouter’s room. You got used to the idea of silver being around. It let you ignore, to some extent, the spores—like how you can usually ignore your nose always being in view. Or like how people ignore the existential horror that comes from knowing their body is slowly deteriorating every day, time itself marching them toward oblivion to the cadence of their beating hearts.