Charlie squeezed her hands. “Listen, Tress. I promise you. I’m not going to get married. I’m going to go to those kingdoms, and I’m going to be so insufferably boring that none of the girls will have me.
“I’m not good at much. I’ve never scored a single point against my father in sparring. I spill my soup at formal dinners. I talk so much, even my footman—who is paid to listen—comes up with creative reasons to interrupt me. The other day I was telling him the story of the fish and the gull, and he pretended to stub his toe, and…”
The duke shouted again.
“I can do this, Tress,” Charlie insisted. “I will do this. At each stop, I’ll pick out a cup for you, all right? Once I’ve bored the current princess to death—and my father has decided we need to move on—I’ll send you the cup. As proof, you see.” He squeezed her hands once more. “I’ll do it, not only because you listen. But because you know me, Tress. You’ve always been able to see me when others don’t.”
He began turning to finally respond to his father’s shouts. Tress held on, clinging to his hands. Unwilling to let it end.
Charlie gave her one last smile. And though he was plainly trying to act confident, she knew his smiles. This was his uncertain one, hopeful but worried.
“You are my gloves too, Charlie,” Tress said to him.
After that, she had to let go so he could jog up the plank. She’d imposed enough already.
The duke forced his son belowdecks as the ship slipped off the dead grey spores nearest the Rock and into the true verdant ocean. Wind caught the ship’s sails and it struck out toward the horizon, leaving a wake of disturbed emerald dust behind it. Tress climbed up to her house, then watched from the cliff until the ship was the size of a cup. Then the size of a speck. Then it vanished.
After that, the waiting began.
They say that to wait is the most excruciating of life’s torments. “They” in this case refers to writers, who have nothing useful to do, so fill their time thinking of things to say. Any working person can tell you that having time to wait is a luxury.
Tress had windows to wash. Meals to cook. A little brother to watch. Her father, Lem, had never recovered from his accident in the mines, and though he tried to assist, he could barely walk. He helped Tress’s mother, Ulba, knit socks all day, which they sold to sailors, but with the expense of yarn they turned only a meager profit.
So Tress didn’t wait. She worked.
Still, it was an enormous relief when the first cup arrived. It was delivered by Hoid the cabin boy. （Yes, that’s me. What tipped you off? Was it perhaps the name?） A beautiful porcelain cup, without even a single chip in it.
The world brightened that day. Tress could almost imagine Charlie speaking as she read the accompanying letter, which detailed the affections of the first princess. With heroic monotony, he had listed the sounds his stomach made when he lay in various positions at night. As that hadn’t been quite enough, he’d then explained how he kept his toenail clippings and gave them names. That had done it.
Fight on, my loquacious love, Tress thought as she scrubbed the mansion’s windows the next day. Be brave, my mildly gross warrior.
The second cup was of pure red glass, tall and thin, and looked like it could contain more liquid than it actually did. Perhaps it came from a particularly stingy tavern. He’d put off this princess by explaining what he’d had for breakfast in intricate detail, as he’d counted the pieces of the scrambled egg and categorized them by size.
The third cup was an enormous solid pewter tankard with heft to it. Perhaps it was from one of those places Charlie had made up, where people always needed to carry weapons. Tress was reasonably certain she could knock out an attacker by swinging the tankard. The latest princess hadn’t been able to withstand an extended conversation about the benefits of various punctuation marks, including a few Charlie had invented.
The fourth package’s card included no letter, only a small drawing: two gloved hands holding to one another. The cup had a painted butterfly on it with a red ocean underneath; she found it odd that the butterfly wasn’t terrified of the spores. Maybe it was a prisoner, forced to fly out over the ocean to its doom.
The fifth cup never arrived.
Tress tried to play it off, telling herself that it must have been interrupted in transit. After all, any number of dangerous things could happen to a ship sailing the spores. Pirates or…you know…spores.
But the months stretched long, each more tedious than the one before. Every time a ship arrived at the docks, Tress was there asking for mail.