“Well,” Tress said. “I wanted to discuss something.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Crow said. “I want to know why you are here on these oceans. What do you want?”
As if that were a simple question to answer. People generally don’t know what they want, though they almost uniformly hate being told what it should be. Plus, Tress had lived her entire life feeling she shouldn’t ask for the things she wanted.
“I left my island to see the world,” she said.
“People often say that about becoming a sailor,” Crow said. “It’s a pretty little aphorism, isn’t it? With a dainty bow. Travel the seas, see a hundred different islands. Problem is, each dockside bar is frighteningly similar—and that’s basically all you’re going to see.”
“At least I’ll get to meet a lot of different people.”
“Well, yes,” she noted. “That is true. Problem is, their insides also all look frighteningly similar. And as a deadrunner, that’s basically all you’re going to see of them.”
Tress glanced away from Crow. She wished the ship would move again. All this standing still made her nauseous.
“So that’s it?” Crow said. “Just some childish desire to be someplace else?”
“Yes,” Tress said.
The captain seemed disappointed. In the distance, the sun finally sank into the sea, fully extinguished. Only the afterglow persisted to give evidence of the crime.
It bothered Tress how much she’d had to lie lately. Certainly, one shouldn’t feel bad about lying to someone like Crow. One shouldn’t hit people either, but such social conventions don’t apply to the tiger gnawing on your leg.
So Tress wasn’t worried about this lie. She was more concerned by the general density of lies emerging from her. They were all for the greater good, yes, but the aforementioned tiger might also believe that said gnawing was for the greater good. Specifically its good.
Tress was coming to realize a discomforting fact: people are not separated into simple groups of liars and non-liars. It is often the situation, and one’s upbringing or genetics, that makes the lies—and therefore the liars.
“Actually,” Tress found herself saying, “there is more. Someone I love was taken by the Sorceress. I intend to travel to her island and confront her to get him back.”
Crow nearly dropped the cup. Tress reached out, anxious.
“The Midnight Sea,” Crow said. “You intend to travel the Midnight Sea.”
“Well, hopefully not alone,” Tress said. “Ideally I’d like to do it in a ship.”
Crow laughed, and it was not a cheerful sound. Antagonistic and mocking, it was to ordinary laughter what a guard dog is to a puppy.
“You?” Crow repeated. “A straggly-haired washer girl from nowhere? You’re going… I can’t even say it!”
Something in Tress changed at that sound. It didn’t quite snap, but it certainly bent—and found that it was able to flex far more than it had in the past. She looked Crow in the eyes and said, “I don’t think that’s fair. I have gotten this far. My mother always told me that the hardest part of any task is getting yourself to start it.”
“As someone who has climbed several mountains,” Crow said, “I can confidently say your mother is an idiot.”
Tress felt herself flush with anger. Some things were uncalled for, even among pirates.
“Who,” Crow said, “did you think would take you on this impossible mission?”
“Well,” Tress said, “I only really know the crew of one ship right now. I was kind of hoping—”
She was interrupted by another bout of laughter. She had expected this one. She’d provoked it on purpose. Because she was growing less and less embarrassed about lying, at least to Crow.
And she had just thought of quite the majestic one.
“What if I found a way to pay you?” Tress said.
Crow laughed so hard she started coughing. Ulaam even came up and peeked about the deck at the sound, as the sole previous time he’d heard Crow laugh like that was when one of the sailors had managed to spear himself in the crotch with his own boarding hook.
“Even if I wanted to go to the Midnight Sea,” Crow said, wiping her eyes, “and even if you could pay me, the crew would never agree to it.”
“You’re probably right,” Tress said, pretending to think. “I’d have to ease them into it. Send them someplace menacing, but less dangerous at first. What about…the Crimson Sea? I’d need to cross the Crimson to get to the Midnight Sea anyway. So we could go there first.”
“They’d never agree to it, girl,” Crow said. “This crew is as cowardly as the king himself.”
“But say I could get them to agree,” Tress said. “Would you allow it? Very few ships sail the Crimson, so the ones that do must be the richest and most valuable to loot!”
That, it should be noted, made about as much sense as assuming people who live in distant kingdoms must be the most fit, since it takes so long to walk to those places.
Crow shrugged. “If you can persuade them, fine. But they won’t agree. Not yet. They’re not…desperate enough.”
Tress thanked the captain and excused herself. She didn’t want to say anything more, and didn’t need to. Because the captain had effectively just been played by a straggly-haired washer girl from nowhere.
Again.
THE TOSHER
There’s a story from Tress’s land that I’m quite fond of telling. You see, in the palace of the king, the lowliest servant is the tosher—the man who goes through the castle’s sewage to make certain nothing useful has been lost or discarded.
No one wanted to be the tosher, for obvious odoriferous reasons. Worse, no one listened to the tosher, because wherever he went, people were either too busy moving upwind from him, or they were preoccupied by trying to remember how to get vomit out of carpet. （Soap, vinegar, and warm water.）
The tosher in our story had a great many items to complain about, some related to the lack of fiber in the royal diet. One thing he didn’t complain about was his dinner. Each day he got the same thing. A baked potato with lard.
The tosher loved baked potatoes. So much so that he decided to begin asking for a second one at dinner. He was given it, mostly to get him to go away, and then it became a habit. Two potatoes. Each day.
This continued until the lesser servants were instead served something different for dinner: cornbread with lard. And the tosher hated cornbread. He waited for the potatoes to return, but they never did.
One day, while doing his daily work—after remarking that someone must have dyed the punch green again at the latest ball—a thought occurred to him. His life in the palace was miserable, but surely he could do something to better his station. He determined to speak to the cook and get potatoes for dinner again.
So the tosher set out on a quest. He found the cook, apologized for making the milk curdle, and made his plea. Potatoes, please. Less cornbread.
The cook was sympathetic, judging by the tears in her eyes. But unfortunately, she couldn’t change the menu. She explained that the palace butler set the meal plan; the cook simply made the food.