The guns went on for most of the afternoon, and then they stopped.
Jason sat in the dark with the crest in his hand and listened to the silence come back, a little at a time. The groaning of the storm had faded too, somewhere in the middle of it, without his noticing. Now there was only the faint drip of water somewhere in the chamber, and his own heartbeat, and, far away through the rock, a sound he didn't recognize at first.
Birds.
He crawled back through the narrow opening, and down the long room of empty niches, and through the low passage into the first chamber. Gray light was coming down through the cracks in the roof. Real light, steady and pale. He sat by the pond for a long time, gathering what was left of his strength. Then he tied the crest into the corner of his shirt, and breathed, five times, and went into the water.
He barely made it. He came up in the grotto choking and half blind, and dragged himself out onto the stone, and lay there on his back, gasping, with the daylight pouring in through the grotto mouth.
The grotto was wrecked. The sea had been through it and left it strewn with weed and driftwood and dead fish, and a great slab of rock had come down from the roof near the entrance and lay across the floor in pieces. But the storm was over. Outside, the sky was a pale, washed blue.
In a hollow of the fallen rock, a pool of rainwater had collected, clear and still.
Jason crawled to it and drank until he was sick, and then drank again, slowly, and lay down beside it with his cheek on the cold stone, and slept.
* * *
When he woke, it was evening, and he could hear engines.
He climbed to the clifftop the long way, through the forest, because the path along the ledge was gone. It took him a long time. He had to stop every hundred paces to rest. The forest was half flattened, great trees lying uprooted across the paths, the ground littered with branches and fruit and dead birds. His firing posts were gone. The wires were gone. The pits were full of water. Five years of work, swept away in three days.
He didn't care. He climbed.
When he reached the top and looked out, he stopped.
The sea was full of ships.
There were dozens of them, spread out across the water for miles in every direction, and the sea around them was littered with wreckage: planks and spars and barrels, and great slicks of black oil catching the evening light in rainbows. Some of the ships were burning. Three of them, low and dark and small, were burning fiercely, sending up tall columns of black smoke, and another was on its side, half sunk, with men clinging to its keel. They all flew black flags. Or had. Most of the flags were gone.
The others were gray, and huge, and flew blue flags with a white circle in the center.
They lay in a long, orderly line outside the reef, dozens of them, turrets turned, perfectly still. Small boats were moving among the wreckage, picking men out of the water. And in the middle of the line, larger than all the rest, lay a ship that made Jason's breath stop in his throat.
It wasn't the Resolute. The Resolute was at the bottom of the sea, off the Shelf, where the Free Fleet had sent her. But it was her sister, or her daughter. Three funnels, twelve great guns, a hull like a mountain. The same long gray shape that had come out of the dawn smoke twenty-five years ago and made the island look small.
At her masthead, a long blue pennant was streaming in the evening wind. There was something on it, small and white and bright. He was too far away to see what it was.
He didn't need to see it.
* * *
The boat came through the gap in the reef at sunset.
He was waiting on the beach. He had come down the cliff path slowly, holding on to the rocks, and he stood now at the top of the sand, by what was left of the lines of sticks. The storm had taken most of them. The old gray line was a scatter of broken stumps. The short line after it was gone. At the edge of the forest, the graves had been churned up and covered in weed and wreckage, and he couldn't tell anymore where one row ended and the other began.
The boat ran up onto the sand. Sailors in blue jumped out into the shallows to hold it steady.
A man stood up in the stern.
He was in his fifties, tall and lean, in a long dark blue coat heavy with gold braid, and he held his left shoulder a little stiffly, as if it had been hurt once and never quite healed. His hair had gone almost completely gray. There was a thin white scar running up into it from his forehead.
He stepped out of the boat into the water, up to his knees, coat and all, without seeming to notice.
Then he stopped, and looked up the beach, and saw Jason.
For a long moment, neither of them moved.
"You're still here," Alexander said.
His voice carried across the sand, not very loud. It sounded as if it didn't quite believe what it was saying.
"Where else would I be?" said Jason.
Alexander laughed. It was the same laugh. After all those years, it was exactly the same, and it went through Jason like the first drink of water in the grotto.
Then Alexander was coming up the beach, not running, because he was an admiral now and there were forty sailors watching him, but walking very fast, and Jason was walking down to meet him, and they met in the middle, on the wet sand, below the broken stumps of the old sticks.
They didn't say anything. They didn't need to. Alexander grabbed him by both shoulders, the way Lieutenant Ames had grabbed Alexander in the boat twenty-five years ago, and looked into his face, and Jason looked back.
"You look terrible," Alexander said finally.
"I spent three days in a tomb with no water."
"That would do it."
* * *
They sat on the rocks above the beach, where Alexander's father had sat twenty-five years before, and Alexander told him.
He had become a vice admiral three years ago. The Admiralty had given him command of the First Fleet, his father's fleet, and a new flagship, the one riding outside the reef, and he had spent those three years hunting the free captains the way his father had, patiently, across every ocean in the world. And for years, he had been listening to the rumors.
"The ghost of the southern sea," he said. He shook his head. "That's what they call you, in the Free Ports. Did you know that? The ghost who guards an island no one can find. Who poisons ships' crews with soup that smells like paradise, and kills men in the dark, and can't be killed. Every free captain from here to the Shelf knows your name."
"I don't have a name."
"You do now." Alexander was quiet for a moment. "Three weeks ago, our spies in Freeport reported that Commodore Brannock had sailed south with a single ship, to hunt the ghost. Two weeks ago, they reported that the whole southern squadron had put to sea after him. Eleven ships. To finish it, whether he came back or not." He looked out at the burning wrecks. "I didn't need spies to tell me where they were going."
"How did you find it?" Jason asked. "The island. You said you couldn't. You said there was only fog."
Alexander didn't answer right away.
"I don't know," he said at last. "I followed them south. The storm caught us both, and we lost each other in it. It blew for three days, and when it cleared this morning, we were twenty miles from here, and so were they, and there was the island, right in front of us. Clear as day. As if it had been waiting." He glanced at Jason. "I had a feeling. Before the storm. That you were still here. That if I came, this time, I'd find it."
Jason looked at the sea for a long time.
"They were sheltering in its lee," Alexander said quietly. "Eleven ships. They'd come to burn you out. They never saw us coming."
* * *
He came up to the cave with Jason at dusk, while the sailors made camp on the beach.
The cave was a ruin. The storm had swept through it and taken almost everything. The racks were gone, and the gourds, and the woven wall. The cistern was full of salt and sand. The charcoal drawings on the walls were streaked and blurred where the sea had reached them, half the map washed away, the skulls and crosses running together into long gray smears.
Alexander stood in the middle of it and looked around, slowly, and didn't say anything.
Then he looked up at the back wall, and stopped.
The coat was still there. It hung on its spur of rock, high above where the water had reached, faded and patched and soaked through, the gold braid on the cuffs gone dark brown. The little silver lighthouses on the collar caught the last of the light from the cave mouth and shone.
Alexander walked over to it. He stood looking up at it.
"You kept it," he said. His voice was very quiet.
"You left it."
Alexander reached up and touched the sleeve, the way Jason had touched it on the night he left. Then he turned away, quickly, and wiped his face, and pretended he hadn't.
Jason unwrapped the chessboard from its strip of sailcloth and set it down on the flat rock by the dead fire, and began to set up the pieces he had saved. He set them up the way they had been. Every one, in its place. The white knight, forward. The black bishop, pinning it.
Alexander came and knelt on the other side of the board, and looked at it.
"I hate it," he said at last.
"I know."
"It's a very good move."
"I had twenty years to think about it."
Alexander laughed, and wiped his face again, and didn't pretend this time. "One of your knights is missing."
"The one that looked like a dog. The storm took it."
"Good. I always hated that one too."
* * *
They ate on the beach, with the sailors, around a great fire of storm wood. The admiral's cook had brought fresh bread from the flagship, and cheese, and a whole side of salted beef, and a crate of oranges, and something in a covered dish that Alexander uncovered himself, with great ceremony, in front of Jason.
It was a flaky pastry, still warm, cut open to show the inside.
"Sweet fish paste," Alexander said solemnly. "And coldroot. From the dock steps in the capital. The cook made it this morning, from my mother's recipe. I told him it was for a very important guest."
Jason looked at it. Then he picked up a piece and bit into it.
It was, without question, the most disgusting thing he had ever put in his mouth.
"Well?" said Alexander.
"It's wonderful," said Jason, and ate the whole thing.
* * *
Later, when the sailors had gone to their tents and the fire had burned low, they sat together on the rocks and looked at the sea. The burning wrecks had gone out. The great gray ships lay in their line outside the reef, lit up with lamps, and the water between them was black and still.
Jason had been thinking about it all evening. He had been thinking about it since the moment he saw the boat come through the reef, and the tall figure stand up in the stern.
Alexander had come back. With a fleet, and a flagship, and the Free Fleet's southern squadron sunk behind him. He had come back, the way he had promised on this beach, on the morning the boat sailed, with his arms around Jason's shoulders. And Jason knew, with a tired, aching certainty, what he was going to ask.
He had his answer ready. He had had it ready for twenty-five years.
"Alexander," he said. "If you've come to take me with you—"
"I haven't."
Jason stopped.
Alexander wasn't looking at him. He was looking at the sea, at the dark line of the forest above the beach, at the island. His face in the firelight was calm and grave and much older than Jason remembered.
"I know you won't come," he said quietly. "I've known for twenty-five years. I'm not going to ask you. I promised you I never would again."
He was silent for a long moment.
"That's not why I came back," he said.