For the first few weeks after Jason woke, Alexander had the uncomfortable feeling of being studied.
It wasn't anything he could have pointed to. Jason barely spoke. He answered questions with a word or two, or a nod, or nothing at all, and he spent long hours sitting at the mouth of the cave with his arms around his knees, staring out at the sea. He ate what Alexander brought him without seeming to taste it. Alexander talked often, because somebody had to, and Jason listened to him with the same flat, patient attention he gave the waves.
But he watched. Alexander would look up from splitting fruit and find that one pale blue eye fixed on him, steady and unblinking, as if Jason were waiting for something to happen. At night, he would wake and see the eye open across the embers, turned toward him in the dark.
Once, lying still and pretending to be asleep, he felt fingers touch the sleeve of his coat.
They didn't grab or pull. They just rested on the wool for a moment, very lightly, the way you might touch a wall in the dark to make sure it was still there. Then they went away again, and after a long time, Jason's breathing slowed into sleep.
Alexander lay awake until dawn, wondering what that had been about.
A few days later, he saw something else that he would only understand much later. He had fallen asleep in the afternoon under one of the fruit trees at the edge of the plain, full and lazy in the heat, and when he woke up, Jason was standing a few paces away, looking down at the ground. He was looking at Alexander's footprints, the trail they had left across the soft earth from the forest. His face had an expression that Alexander couldn't read at all.
Then Jason looked up at him, and back at the footprints, and something in his shoulders seemed to loosen.
"What?" Alexander said.
"Nothing," Jason said, and walked away.
* * *
It went on like that for a while. Jason watched, and said almost nothing, and Alexander filled the silence the only way he knew how.
He talked. He talked about the capital and its canals, about the floating markets and the lighthouse on the Admiralty steps, about the ships he had served on and the sailors he had known. Jason never asked for any of it. But he never told him to stop, either, and sometimes, in the middle of a story, Alexander would glance over and find that the flat look had gone out of Jason's eye for a moment, replaced by something almost like interest.
One evening, he was describing the pastries they sold on the docks in winter.
"Flaky," he said, with his eyes half closed. "Layers and layers of it, and inside, sweet fish paste and coldroot, all hot enough to burn your mouth. They wrap them in paper, and you eat them on the dock steps with the snow coming down on the water. Gods, I'd give anything for one right now."
He opened his eyes. Jason was staring at him.
Not the usual stare. This one was sharper, almost startled, as if Alexander had said something extraordinary.
"You're real," Jason said.
Alexander blinked. "I'm sorry?"
For a moment, Jason didn't answer. Then he looked away, back toward the fire, and the ghost of something crossed his face, so faint and brief that Alexander almost missed it.
"Nothing," he said. "The pastry sounds disgusting."
Alexander sat bolt upright, deeply offended. "It is the finest food in the entire Republic."
"Fish paste."
"Sweet fish paste!"
Jason didn't smile, not quite. But the corner of his mouth moved, and Alexander, who had spent weeks talking to a man who barely answered, felt something warm and ridiculous rise in his chest. It was the first joke Jason had made. He was almost certain it had been a joke.
He decided to take it as one.
* * *
He talked about his father most of all.
He didn't mean to. The admiral simply came up, the way the tide came in, whenever there was a pause long enough to hold him. Mostly, though, he came up at night, by the fire, when there was nothing left to do but talk.
"He once searched for a lost frigate for three months," Alexander said one evening. He was lying on his back with his hands behind his head, watching the smoke curl toward the ceiling. "Straight through the southern storm belt, in the worst season. Everyone told him the ship was gone. The whole Admiralty told him to turn back. He didn't listen to any of them."
Across the fire, Jason was sitting against the wall with his eyes half closed. "Did he find it?"
"Dismasted, drifting, half the crew down with fever. He brought every one of them home." Alexander said it with a pride so simple it almost embarrassed him. "He knows the name of every sailor on his flagship. All three hundred of them, down to the boys who scrub the decks. When one of them dies, he writes to the family himself, by hand. It takes him whole nights sometimes."
"He sounds like a good man."
"He is." Alexander was quiet for a moment. "Everyone says so."
The fire popped. Outside, the sea breathed in and out against the rocks.
"He wasn't home much, when I was small," he went on. He hadn't planned to say it. It simply came out, softer than the rest. "He was always at sea. He'd come back twice a year, maybe, for a few weeks, and the whole house would change. My mother would laugh more. The servants would stand up straighter. And I'd spend the whole time trying to think of something to say that would make him look at me the way he looked at his charts."
Jason didn't answer. Alexander took that as permission to go on.
"He taught me to swim off the harbor steps when I was six. Threw me in and told me to come back up. When I did, he said good, and nothing else, and I thought about that one word for a year."
He laughed a little, and the fire popped, and the laugh faded.
"When I was fourteen he put me on an escort ship. Not his own. He said I had to earn my place like anyone else, and he was probably right. But the first time I froze on watch, the whole crew knew within the hour, and all I could think was, he'll hear about this. Someone will write to him. And I never knew whether he'd be angry, or disappointed, or whether he'd just nod, the way he does, as if it was exactly what he'd expected." He stared at the ceiling. "Sometimes I think that would be the worst of all. If he'd never expected anything else."
He wasn't sure why he was saying any of this, except that the fire was warm, and the cave was quiet, and Jason didn't seem like someone who would ever repeat it.
"I've never told anyone that," he said. "I don't know why I'm telling you. I suppose it's because you're—" He turned his head. "Jason?"
Jason was asleep.
He had slid down the wall a little, his head tipped against the stone, his hands loose in his lap. His face had gone slack and smooth in a way Alexander had never seen it. Every night since he had woken, he had slept badly: twitching, muttering, jerking awake with a gasp and a hand already reaching for the spear. Alexander had grown used to it. He had stopped noticing.
He noticed now, because it wasn't happening. Jason was simply sleeping, deeply and quietly, with the firelight moving over his face.
He wasn't even listening, said the cold voice at the back of Alexander's mind. You poured your heart out, and he fell asleep.
Alexander looked at Jason's peaceful face for a long moment, and found that for once the voice had missed the point entirely.
He laughed very quietly, under his breath. Then he got up, put another piece of wood on the fire so it would last the night, and lay back down on his side of it.
"He'll come," he told the ceiling softly. "He'll turn the whole ocean over if he has to."
Across the fire, Jason slept on.
* * *
On the fourth day after Jason could walk properly, Alexander started carrying wood up the cliff.
It took him the whole afternoon, bundle after bundle, and he fell off the lower rocks twice. By evening, he had built a pile at the top as tall as a man. When the sun went down, he lit it, and stood back to watch it catch. The flames climbed high into the dark, bright enough to throw his shadow halfway across the plain.
He looked down. Far below, at the mouth of the cave, a small figure was sitting with its knees drawn up, watching the fire.
Jason never came up to see it, that night or any other. Alexander asked him once, and Jason said something about his side, and Alexander didn't press. But he climbed back up the next evening, and the one after that, and sat beside the fire every night until it burned down, watching the dark water for lights.
On the sixth night he came down quieter than usual. He sat by the cave fire for a long time, turning a stick over in his hands, and finally asked the question that had been sitting in his stomach for days.
"How long have you been here?"
Jason didn't look up. "On the island? A little more than three years. Before that, about a year on the raft."
Alexander's hands stopped moving.
"Four years," he said.
"A little more."
"And in four years—" He stopped, and tried again. "You've never seen a ship? Not once? Not even smoke on the horizon?"
"Not once."
For a moment, the cave seemed very small, and the sea outside very large. Then Alexander set his jaw and shook his head.
"Then we're far from the shipping lanes," he said. "That's all. Farther than I thought. Father will widen the search. He'll send scouts to every rock in every sea until he finds me." He threw the stick into the fire. "It's only a matter of time."
Jason said nothing.
It was the kind of nothing Alexander had learned to recognize over the last weeks, and he didn't like it. It wasn't the empty silence of a man who wasn't listening. It was the careful silence of someone deciding not to say something.
"You don't think so," Alexander said slowly. "Do you?"
Jason didn't answer.
"You don't think anyone's coming. Not my father, not anyone." Alexander leaned forward. "Why? Why are you so sure?"
Jason looked past him, out through the mouth of the cave, to where the signal fire burned on top of the cliff. It was already starting to die.
"Because of what it told me," he said.