“Thank you,” Tress whispered, trying to maintain her composure. She wasn’t certain if captains should cry in front of their crew. Seemed like there’d be a maritime law against it. “Thank you so much! I’ve been trying and trying to think of a way through this.”
We’re here for you, Fort said. We’re your crew, Tress. Your friends. Let us help.
“Yes, of course,” Tress said. “But…thank you.”
She looked at them each in turn, beaming.
“I’m trying to figure out why it says ‘Ask nicely’ on your forehead, Tress,” Ann said.
Technically, Fort added, it says “ylecin ksA.”
“Actually it says neither,” Salay said. “Because it’s crossed out. See?”
“Oh yeah,” Ann said. “Anyway, we might have a solution to the other problem on the island: getting into the tower. You gave us the clue to this one too.”
“Growing a tree of verdant vines?” Tress said. “To reach the top, and get in that way? I thought of that, Ann, but surely the Sorceress keeps the door locked.”
But not the window, Fort said. Where she lets out her ravens.
“Far too small.”
For a human, he wrote.
Their eyes turned toward Huck, who stood before the room’s wardrobe. He’d finished counting the shoes Tress owned. That hadn’t been difficult, as she was wearing both of them presently. So he’d moved on to making a mental list of the different types she’d need to buy.
He felt the stares. It’s a thing rats learn. So he turned, feeling like the only piece of cheese left in the larder. “What?” he said.
“We need someone small,” Salay said, “to sneak into the Sorceress’s tower through her raven window.”
“Tricky,” Huck said, “since I don’t think any human could fit through… Oh. Rat. Right.” He wrung his paws together.
We need to do this for the captain, Fort said. And the debt we owe her.
“Huck owes me no debt,” Tress said. “He wouldn’t be on this ship except for me.”
Which means he’d be on the bottom of the Verdant Sea.
I doubt he’d have made it to the bottom. Rats are rather low in body mass. He’d almost certainly have ended up wrapped in a vine ball, drifting through the middle depths of the ocean until he decomposed. But as no one in the room was versed in spore depth density and relative fluidized viscosity, they took Fort’s words as fact.
“It’s all right,” Tress said to Huck. “You don’t need to do it if you don’t want to. I’d hate to force you into anything. But…it is a good solution. You’re good at sneaking, Huck.”
“But how will I reach the window?”
“On verdant vines, which I’ll grow upward for you.”
“No good,” he said. “The tower is coated in silver. Didn’t I tell you that?”
He hadn’t. And that would cause a problem. Tress sat back, her face falling. Something in that expression pained Huck. He couldn’t stand how gloomy she’d been feeling lately. Like smog over an island, he thought. So something slipped out.
“I can get you through the door,” Huck said. “I…have a way we rats know about. If you somehow got me to the tower, I could open it. But Tress, isn’t all of this irrelevant? We would have to cross the Midnight Sea first. And we shouldn’t do that. We’ve barely survived the Crimson!”
He was, unfortunately, correct. Tress looked to her friends, hoping they knew a quick solution to this problem as they had the first two. No one spoke up. The other three might not have been marked, both literally and literately, by the fruits of their frustration on this point, but they were equally stymied.
Curiously though, there is a feature of collaboration that is often misunderstood. Two heads are not necessarily better than one （no matter what Dr. Ulaam might say）。 That rather depends on the heads in question.
However, when someone tries, it makes others more willing to try. And when you taste a little success—even vicariously—it can act as a mental laxative.
Or if you prefer, a little success is the metaphoric bang on the front of the mental vending machine that jostles loose the stuck ideas.
Tress’s eyes went wide.
THE HYPOCRITE
Tress placed exactly two midnight spores on the table. The other officers shied back noticeably, though there wasn’t a lot of room in the captain’s cabin for shying. She’d spent a little while preparing this experiment, which had given Huck time to scamper off, not wanting to be in the room with more active midnight spores.