Tress of the Emerald Sea (The Cosmere)(95)

Spoiler: he turned out to be quite fond of them. It was honestly a little distracting.

The second thing Tress did in the name of abject honesty was explain the challenges that would face them in the Midnight Sea. This, in turn, led her to explain who she was, why she’d left her home, and what she was trying to do.

Afterward, Ann did ask what was so great about this guy she loved. Tress did her best to explain, though she was certain world-traveled people like them would find her love plain and unremarkable.

She underestimated the power of simple words spoken with passion. No one questioned her after that.

So, the days faded behind her like the setting Crimson Moon. And ahead, a jet-black moon broke the horizon. It reflected no light, and seemed more a void than an object. A tunnel to nothing. As it emerged from the horizon Tress feared, irrationally, that it would keep growing—that the Midnight Moon wouldn’t be the size of the others, but would turn out to be a vast darkness that consumed the entirety of the sky.

To escape it, she spent time in her new quarters. The captain had far more space than Tress had been assigned, though she still used her old room for spore experiments. She filled page after page of the captain’s notebook with discarded ideas for how to protect the ship as it crossed the Midnight Sea.

Trouble was, her mind didn’t seem to work right anymore. Where it had once seized upon ideas with a predatory vigor, now it seemed trapped in a room, scratching uselessly at the walls with nothing to show for the effort.

What had happened to her ingenuity? Her self-defining thoughtfulness? She grew more and more frustrated as each day slipped away from her, leaving no further progress than frazzled hair and another scribbled-out page in the notebook. What was wrong with her?

Nothing.

Nothing was wrong with Tress. Her mind was functioning properly. She hadn’t lost her creativity. She hadn’t run out of ideas. She was simply tired.

We want to imagine that people are consistent, steady, stable. We define who they are, create descriptions to lock them on a page, divide them up by their likes, talents, beliefs. Then we pretend some—perhaps most—are better than we are, because they stick to their definitions, while we never quite fit ours.

Truth is, people are as fluid as time is. We adapt to our situation like water in a strangely shaped jug, though it might take us a little while to ooze into all the little nooks. Because we adapt, we sometimes don’t recognize how twisted, uncomfortable, or downright wrong the container is that we’ve been told to inhabit.

We can keep going that way for a while. We can pretend we fit that jug, awkward nooks and all. But the longer we do, the worse it gets. The more it wears on us. The more exhausted we become. Even if we’re doing nothing at all, because simply holding the shape can take all the effort in the world. More, if we want to make it look natural.

There was a lot about being a pirate that did suit Tress. She’d learned and grown a great deal—but it had still been a relatively short time since she’d left the Rock. She was tired in a way that a good night’s sleep—or ten of them—couldn’t cure. Her mind didn’t have any more to give. She needed to allow herself a chance to catch up to the person she’d become.

She was now only three days away from the Midnight Sea, and she was no closer to thinking of a way through it. And pounding her head against the page wasn’t accomplishing anything more than getting ink on her forehead.

Tress was dreading what would happen next. And indeed, it arrived with a polite knock on her door. She nodded to Huck, who had—for some strange reason—decided she needed a valet. Did captains have valets? She thought those were for gentlemen with so many pairs of shoes they needed someone to organize them all.

Huck scampered over to the table beside the entry and called, “The captain bids you come in!”

Tress figured she could have done that herself. She was not yet accustomed to the finer points of being in charge, which often involve being too important to do things the sensible way.

Salay, Ann, and Fort entered. Tress steeled herself for their recrimination. Here, today, they would see the truth. That she had no plan. That she was an unfit captain.

In actuality, all they saw was that she had very nice penmanship. Even written backward on her forehead.

“All right, Captain,” Salay said. “We’ve been giving this voyage some thought. And the protections around the Sorceress seem almost impossible to overcome.”

“I know,” Tress said, bracing herself. “Salay, I…I don’t…”

“Therefore,” Salay continued, getting out some papers, “we’ve been working hard on ways to overcome them. We’ve got some pretty good suggestions here, if you want to see them.”

Tress blinked.

Well, she often blinked, as people do. In this case, it was a meaningful blink. It was the kind that said, Wait. What did I just hear?

“You have…suggestions?” Tress asked.

“Here, let’s get to it,” Salay said, each of them grabbing a chair and settling down next to Tress’s meeting table.

Tress drifted over, then looked with amazement as Salay laid out the first set of plans. “This was Fort’s idea,” she said. “He should explain.”

Huck says, he wrote on his board, that the island is protected by machine men, an entire legion of them, who can’t be harmed in any way. I started working on a way to distract them, until I realized you already solved this problem, Tress.