“What?” Tress said. Unfortunately, she was limited by her anatomy. She couldn’t disconnect her ears unless she wanted it to be permanent.
“There once was a farmer with a tulip bulb,” I said. “Who had nowhere to plant it. He found a place to sit. He then threw a fit. And accidentally mashed it into pulp. The end.”
Oh, gods.
Oh, Shards within.
What had I become?
“That’s…nice,” Tress said. And for a girl who claimed she was bad at lying, she pulled that one off swimmingly.
Ulaam returned to sensibility a short time later. “Ah!” he said. “You’re not bleeding from your ears, Tress? Remarkable. Is that all you’ll be needing from me today?”
“I suppose,” Tress said. “But…are you sure you won’t help? In our mutiny?”
“Alas,” Ulaam said. “I can offer only medical attention, should you require it. More interference would not be proper.”
“If we don’t get out of the Crimson soon,” Tress said, “the ship could end up sinking. That would kill you too.”
“Assumptions, assumptions,” Ulaam said, walking to the steps. “Hoid is immortal, and I am nearly so. While I don’t relish the idea of walking across the bottom of the spore sea to reach safety—partic ularly with him tagging along in his current state—that is not outside my abilities.”
I stood up to go after him, as a part of me—that piece that was slightly self-aware—kept trying to ambush him with bad poems.
I stopped next to Tress, however, who now sat with her flare gun in her lap. Staring at the floor. Outside, the soft hiss of spores rubbing along the hull was a steady companion. A reminder that we were moving inevitably toward the dragon’s lair.
Captain Crow estimated it was only two days away.
“I’m worried,” Tress said softly, looking up at me. “I’m…I’m terrified.”
I put my hand on her shoulder and managed to keep myself from vomiting forth another poem. She must have seen something in my eyes, the fragment of lucidity I still possessed.
“I’m terrified,” she repeated. “Not only for everyone else, though I do feel that. I’m scared for myself and what Crow is going to do to me. I can’t beat her. Deep down, I know it.”
I raised my other hand, lifting a single finger. “You have,” I whispered, “everything you need, Tress.”
“The flare gun? But what if I fail?”
“You have everything you need.” I squeezed her on the arm, then started up after Ulaam. Then I slowed. Something was wrong, wasn’t it? Other than the fact that I wasn’t currently launching into an epic ode to the beauty of calluses?
Oh. The hissing on the hull had stopped. The seethe had paused, and the ship was slowing. Well, nothing to worry about there. That happened all the time, and wasn’t dangerous.
Unless rain was near.
You can probably guess what happened next.
THE NIGHTMARE
I have nightmares. My unique state of being doesn’t prevent that, though I don’t need sleep nearly as much as ordinary humans do.
My worst recurring nightmare—the one that grabs me by the throat and shakes me until I wake, raw and steaming in my own sweat—is not that I am being chased by a monster. It’s not that I’m lost, or that I’m unloved.
No, my greatest nightmare is the one where I learn I’ve been repeating myself for years, telling the same tired jokes, the same stories—energetically wearing a path through people’s patience and fondness until even the weeds upon it are dead.
So I’ll refrain from repeating my suspicions and fears regarding the rains upon the Crimson. But if ever there were proof that Fate herself had placed long odds against the Crow’s Song, it would be the fact that there were not one, but two separate rainlines heading straight for the ship.
Two at once. With the ship dead on the slopes of the vast crimson mountain, prow pointed toward the column of particles streaming from the angry moon.
When Tress reached the upper deck, she saw Salay standing on the quarterdeck, holding firm at her post in case the seethe began again and she had a chance to steer them to safety. The ship remained still, damningly so. All her skill, all her passion, meant nothing when the ship was sporelocked. She was helpless.
Dougs shouted ideas at one another, several suggesting they run across the spores to safety. That was, of course, stupidity. If the ship were destroyed, they’d die the moment the seethe began again. There were two lifeboats, yes, but what would that offer? Slow death by dehydration. They were upon the Crimson. Few sailed here.
With very, very good reason.
Salay looked past the Dougs and met Tress’s eyes.
It’s time, she mouthed. Please.
Tress grabbed one of the Dougs, a lanky woman with her hair in a long tail. “Go to Salay!” Tress shouted at her. “Tell her I need two very long ropes and the barrel of water from the cannon station. Go! Go!”
Tress went running for her room, shoving past Laggart on the steps. He bellowed after her, but she wasn’t of a mind to listen. She had minutes, maybe, until the rain arrived and their story ended. Unless Tress could add another chapter through sheer force of will.
Heroism is a remarkable thing, oft misunderstood. We all think we understand it because we want to see its seed inside ourselves. That is part of the secret, really.
If you gather together stories of heroes—those who have risked their lives for others, those who have stood against overwhelming odds, those who have barreled heedlessly into danger with the aplomb of a champion diver leaping from the highest platform—you find patterns. Two of them, in fact.
The first is that heroes can be trained. Not by a government or a military, but by the people themselves. Heroes are the ones who have thought about what they’re going to do, and who have trained to do it. Heroism is often the seemingly spontaneous result of a lifetime of preparation.
But if you ask these heroes why they risked their lives, don’t do it on a stand in front of a crowd while you give them their medal. Because the truth is, they likely didn’t do it for their country. Or even for their ideals. Consistently, across cultures, eras, and ideologies, war heroes report the same simple motivation. They did it for their friends.
In the frenzied anarchy of destruction, loyalty to causes and kingdoms alike tends to fall to the chaos. But the bond between people, well, that’s stronger than steel. If you want to create heroes, don’t give them something to fight for. Give them someone to fight for.
Tress unlocked the door to her quarters and slammed it open, sending Huck scrambling under the bed. She rushed to her desk, where she found a large ball of roseite, grown and shaped over the last few days. It was the size of a child’s head and was waxed on the outside, and it was filled with an enormous charge of verdant spores, colored faintly violet by the roseite around it.
Tress barely had time to note that she’d apparently spilled a couple midnight spores on the desk, a sloppy move on her part. She heaved the roseite “cannonball” off the desk, then dashed out into the hallway.
On the deck, the Dougs had gathered around Salay. Captain Crow was out of her cabin, standing on the quarterdeck and drinking from her canteen with an air of fatalism. She had hoped not to die here, of course, but she was already terminal. There was only so much a new form of demise could move the proverbial needle, once you’ve stared down your own mortality every day for over a year.