I wonder if that's an omniscient narrator talking about Sherbet's intelligence . . .
The timeline of all this is hard to know - how long has Sherbet been there? Granita? Kishiel and her family/friends/etc? Do the loops that Sherbet's been living through happen consecutively as far as the outside world is concerned? Is there even any kind of definite relationship between the passage of time on the ghost ship and in the outside world?
There are no clear anachronisms in the various backstories that we've seen, nothing to definitively say that one of them is from a different period in history to the others, so I doubt that we'd be talking about centuries of looping or anything like that. But if Sherbet has been through nine iterations on her attempt to be with Granita it definitely starts raising questions . . . aside from the obvious "why so many times through?", I'd also ask when Mors joined them - before the first loop? Sometime in the middle? What happens to Mors when Sherbet fails her romance check and pays the price (whatever it is) yet again? And what about Kishiel's group - did they only show up for this last iteration? Maybe each time there's been someone like them that's come along to give the ghost ship a way to present The Little Box(tm) to her so she could make her wish?
This is such a good story . . .