Kit came to find him the next morning.
Jason was down at the lagoon, checking the fish weirs, and he heard the boy long before he saw him: bare feet slapping on the wet rocks, a breathless tuneless whistle, and then a yelp as he slipped on a patch of weed and nearly went into the water.
"Morning!" Kit called, once he had recovered. He came picking his way along the rocks toward Jason with his arms out for balance. "The captain says you're thinking. Are you still thinking? Can I watch you think? Brask won't let me near the pot, and the twins are arguing about whose turn it is to clean the rifles, and Hollis just looks at me."
Jason looked at him. He had meant to say no.
"Hold this," he said, and handed him the end of the weir.
Kit held it. Kit held everything Jason gave him that morning, and asked a question about every single one of them. What the weir was for, and how the fish got in, and why they couldn't get out again. How long it had taken to build. Whether Jason had ever caught a shark. Jason told him that he had once ridden one, and Kit laughed so hard he had to sit down on the rocks, and then looked up at Jason's face and stopped laughing and said, in a very small voice, "Wait. Really?"
He was from an island called Tallow, far to the south, he said. His mother kept goats there, and his two little sisters. The Republic had burned the harbor when he was nine, because the Tallow fishermen had been selling fish to the Free Fleet, and his father had gone out in his boat the next spring to join the free captains and hadn't come back. So when Kit turned fourteen, he had gone to join them too.
"To find him," he said, very matter-of-factly. "Or to find out what happened. The captain says he'll help me look, when the war's done."
He was quiet for a moment, pulling at a strand of weed.
"Do you have family?" he asked. "Wherever you're from?"
"I did," Jason said.
Kit nodded slowly, as if that were an answer.
At midday, Jason went back to the cave and came out with a small white fish he had carved years ago from a scrap of pale driftwood, for no reason except that he had had an evening to fill. He gave it to Kit without saying anything. Kit turned it over in his hands, and looked up at him, and grinned so widely that Jason had to look away.
* * *
That evening, Wren invited him to the bonfire.
Jason almost refused. But the grotto was the only place on the island where he could hear what they said to each other, and he had not stopped thinking about Hollis's pale eyes resting on the knot at the edge of the cistern. So he went.
The fire was enormous, built high inside the mouth of the grotto, so that the whole cave was full of leaping orange light and shadows that danced across the high, dripping roof. Jason could see the pond at the back, black and still, catching the firelight on its surface. He sat on a rock with his back to it and didn't look at it again.
The men had been drinking since sundown. They were loud and cheerful and a little ragged, the way men get when they have been at sea too long and suddenly have solid ground under them and fresh water and a fire. Brask passed around bowls of his salt pork stew, thick and greasy and much better than it looked. The Farrow twins, lanky and red-haired and impossible to tell apart, were still arguing about the rifles, and had moved on to arguing about which of them had been born first, which they seemed to have been arguing about for their whole lives. Someone produced a battered squeezebox and played a song that everyone knew but Jason, and they all sang it very badly, and Kit sang loudest of all.
It was the first time in thirty years that Jason had sat at a fire with more than one other person.
He had forgotten how it felt. The noise and the warmth, and the easy, careless way people talked over one another. He watched them, and something in his chest ached, and he didn't let any of it reach his face.
Only Hollis didn't sing. He sat on the far side of the fire with his bowl untouched on his knee, and every time Jason glanced up, Hollis was looking at him.
* * *
It was Wren who started it.
He was sitting on a barrel near the fire, his scarf loosened, a tin cup in his hand. He had been telling stories all evening, one after another, and he told them well, with his narrow face alive in the firelight and his free hand shaping the air. He told them about a raid on a Republic coaling station, and about a storm off the Shelf that had nearly sunk them, and about a Republic captain who had surrendered his ship to the Cormorant in his nightshirt.
And then, when the laughter had died down, he said, "But none of that's anything, is it, lads? Not next to the Resolute."
A cheer went up around the fire, loud and ragged.
Jason held his bowl very still.
"Tell him, Captain," someone shouted. "Tell him about the Resolute."
Wren smiled. He looked across the fire at Jason with his eyes shining.
"You won't know the name," he said. "You've been on this rock for thirty years. But I'll tell you this, Jason. There isn't a sailor anywhere on the whole wide sea who doesn't. The Resolute was the biggest warship the Republic ever built. Flagship of the Admiralty's First Fleet. Three funnels and twelve great guns and a hull like a mountain. For thirty years she hunted the Free Fleet across every ocean in the world, and for thirty years nobody could touch her."
He paused, and took a sip from his cup.
"Five weeks ago," he said, "we sank her."
The cheer this time was deafening. The twins were pounding each other on the back. Kit was on his feet, his face glowing.
Jason sat very still.
"Eight of us," Wren said, over the noise. "Eight ships of the Free Fleet, and a fog bank off the Shelf as thick as porridge, and the old man sailing home to the capital for the last time. He'd done his fifty years. They say he was going to retire." He shook his head, almost admiringly. "Bad luck, that. We came at her out of the fog from both sides at once, and it still took us half a day. The Cormorant was in the thick of it. That's how we lost our mainmast, and half the engine. But when she finally went down, we were the ones alongside her."
He set down his cup.
"Show him, Brask."
The cook heaved himself to his feet and went to the back of the grotto, where the men had stacked their gear, and came back holding something folded over his arm. He shook it out in the firelight, and held it up for Jason to see.
It was a coat.
It was a long coat of dark blue wool, heavy and fine, with two rows of brass buttons down the front and thick gold braid on the cuffs and collar. Along the left breast, it was stained stiff and dark. There were holes in it. Jason counted four. They were small and round, with scorched edges, and they were grouped close together over the place where the heart would be.
On the collar, on either side, gleamed a tiny silver lighthouse.
"Admiral Edmund Morgan's own coat," Wren said. "He wouldn't strike his flag. Stood on his bridge with a pistol in his hand when we boarded, with his ship going down under him, and shot two of my men before we got him." He looked at the coat, and something complicated passed over his face. "I'll say this for him. He was a hard old bastard, and he hanged more of us than any man living, but he died well. The Congress of Captains will want to see that. It's going in the great hall at Freeport, next to the flag."
Around the fire, the men had fallen a little quieter. Brask was folding the coat again, carefully, almost gently.
Jason didn't move. He had learned, over twenty years of stalking birds in the long grass, how to be still. How to keep every muscle soft and every breath slow, while his heart went on beating somewhere far away, very hard and very fast.
He thought about an old man wading waist-deep into the lagoon in his coat, without noticing. You gave me back my son. I don't know how a man repays a thing like that.
"And that's not the best of it," one of the twins said.
"No," said the other, grinning. "Tell him the best of it, Captain."
Wren laughed.
"The best of it," he said, "is that we got the son, too."
* * *
Jason felt the words go into him like cold water.
"Captain Alexander Morgan," Wren said, with relish. "The old man's only son. Flag captain of the Resolute, if you please, commanding her under his father's eye. Rumor has it the Admiralty was going to make him an admiral himself in a year or two." He shook his head. "Well. They'll have to find someone else. We pulled him out of the water with a hole in his shoulder, cursing us all in the name of every god in the sky. And the wife, too. She'd come aboard to be there for the old man's homecoming. Glorianna, her name is. Glorianna Morgan."
He said it the way you'd say the name of a fine ship.
"You should have seen her," he went on. "Middle of the battle, and she's on the deck of a sinking ship with a boathook in her hands, keeping three of Corvin's men off her husband. Broke one of their arms. We had to throw a net over her in the end." He laughed. "The Congress is going to love her. They'll love them both. They'll make a fine show, at the end of a rope in the square at Freeport."
Kit was laughing too, his freckled face bright in the firelight. The white driftwood fish Jason had given him that afternoon was hanging from a string around his neck.
"Where are they?" Jason asked.
It came out calm. He was faintly surprised by how calm it came out.
"On the Black Tern," Wren said. "Esme Corvin's ship. She took the prisoners, and we took the coat, and we'll meet her at Scald Rock in ten days, if this engine of ours holds out, and sail into Freeport together." He picked up his cup again. "I'd have liked to keep the Morgans myself, to be honest. But Corvin's not a woman you argue with over prisoners." He grinned. "Not if you like your ship afloat."
The men laughed. Someone started up the squeezebox again.
On the other side of the fire, Hollis had not laughed. He was looking at Jason, and his pale eyes were very narrow.
* * *
"I've been thinking," Jason said, a little later, when the song was over and the fire had burned down.
Wren looked over at him. So did several of the others.
"About your offer," Jason said. "I'm still thinking. But I've been eating your food for two days now, and it's good food. And I haven't given you anything but water." He looked around the circle of faces in the firelight. "Let me cook for you. Tomorrow evening. There are birds on the plain you've never tasted, and fruit you won't find anywhere else on the sea. A proper meal, the way it's done on this island."
A cheer went up. Brask looked mildly offended, and then shrugged, and laughed.
"Well," Wren said, delighted. "How could we refuse? Tomorrow evening it is."
Kit was grinning at him across the fire.
Jason smiled back at him. It was the hardest thing he had ever done.
* * *
He walked back along the beach to his cave alone, in the dark.
He didn't light the fire. He sat for a long time in the black mouth of the cave, listening to the singing that still drifted along the beach from the grotto, and the waves, and his own heart.
He thought about the admiral. He thought about the coat with four small holes in it, and about the other coat, the one folded in the crack in the wall behind him, with the same little silver lighthouses on its collar. He thought about Alexander in the dark hold of a ship, with a hole in his shoulder, and a woman beside him who had fought off three men with a boathook. He thought about a rope, and a square in a city he had never seen.
And he thought about Kit, laughing, with a white wooden fish around his neck.
He sat there until the singing had stopped, and the fire in the grotto had burned down to a red glow, and the only sound on the whole island was the sea.
Then he got up, and went to the back of the cave, and pulled aside the woven screen. He reached into the deepest shelf of the rock, past the folded coat, and brought out a small gourd sealed with wax.
He broke the seal with his thumbnail. Inside, dry and pale and light as paper, lay a handful of mushrooms.
Even dried, even after all this time, they still smelled faintly of fruit, and of meat roasting over a fire.