The bad season came in their second year together, and it came slowly, the way the worst things on the island always did.
At first it was only the fruit. The great trees on the far side of the forest, which had fed them both so faithfully, began to drop their fruit early and small. The skins were dull, and the flesh inside was dry and faintly bitter. Then the birds on the plain grew fewer, and warier, and harder to catch, until some days the traps stood empty from dawn to dusk.
Jason knew this pattern. He had lived through it once before, in the long, slow years before the cliff, when the fruit had gone tasteless and the birds had grown scarce and he had ended up drinking their blood because there was nothing else. He watched it happen again with a cold, familiar weight settling into his stomach, and said nothing to Alexander about it.
At least they had water. The cistern was full, and it stayed full, and more than once Jason caught himself standing beside it at dusk just to look at it. Without it, this would already have been much worse.
But water didn't fill a stomach.
By the second month, they were both thinner. Alexander had stopped making jokes about pastries. Jason had started waking at night with the old hollow ache under his ribs, and lying there in the dark listening to Alexander's stomach growl across the fire, and wondering whether the island had decided that two was one too many.
* * *
"Look," Alexander said.
He had come back from one of his wanderings on the north shore, late in the afternoon, and he was holding his coat bundled up in front of him like a sack. He knelt by the fire and opened it with the air of a man presenting treasure.
Inside were mushrooms.
There were perhaps a dozen of them, big and plump, with smooth caps the color of pale gold and thick white stems. They looked, Jason had to admit, extremely appetizing.
"No," he said.
"You haven't even—"
"No. Absolutely not."
"They were growing in a hollow under the rocks," Alexander said, ignoring him entirely. "Dozens of them, in the shade, where the stream comes down. Look at them, Jason. They're perfect."
"On Earth," Jason said, "there's a rule. You don't eat wild mushrooms you don't know. Ever. Half of them will make you sick, and some of the ones that look the nicest will kill you. My dad used to say that there are old mushroom hunters and bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters."
Alexander considered this.
"We're not on Earth," he said.
"That's not the point!"
"It's partly the point." Alexander picked up one of the mushrooms and turned it over in his fingers. "You don't know what grows here. Neither do I. So your rule doesn't tell us anything about these, does it? Maybe they're perfectly safe. Maybe they're the finest thing on this entire island, and they've been growing under those rocks this whole time while we starved."
"Or maybe they'll kill us."
"Or maybe they'll kill us," Alexander agreed cheerfully. "But the fruit is going to kill us too, eventually, the way things are going. Slower, that's all."
Jason opened his mouth, and found that he had no good answer to that.
His stomach made the decision for him. It let out a long, loud, desperate growl that echoed off the walls of the cave, and Alexander looked at him with his eyebrows raised, and Jason put his face in his hands.
"Fine," he said through his fingers. "Fine. But we cook them. Properly. And we eat a little first, and wait, and see what happens."
"Of course," said Alexander. "Very sensible."
* * *
They cooked them on a flat stone over the fire, sliced thin, the way Jason's mother used to cook mushrooms in a pan with butter on Sunday mornings. There was no butter, but there was fat from the last bird they had caught, and Jason spread it over the stone and laid the slices out in careful rows. At the last moment, he put three of the mushrooms aside, uncooked, just in case.
The smell hit them almost at once.
Jason had expected the damp, earthy smell of mushrooms cooking. This was something else entirely. It was sweet, like ripe fruit warming in the sun, the rich, heavy sweetness of the great trees in a good season. And underneath the sweetness was something deeper and more savory, the smell of meat roasting over an open fire, fat crackling, the kind of smell that drifted out of a kitchen on a winter evening and made your whole body turn toward it.
Alexander made a small, helpless sound.
"Oh," he said. "Oh, gods. What is that?"
Jason didn't answer. His mouth was flooding with saliva so fast that it almost hurt. He had not smelled anything that good in more than five years. Maybe in his whole life.
"We said a little first," he managed. "A little, and then we wait."
"Yes," said Alexander, who was already reaching for the stone. "Absolutely. A little."
They ate a little.
It tasted even better than it smelled. Jason would never be able to describe it properly afterward. It was the juice of a perfect fruit and the heart of a perfect roast at the same time, soft and rich and warm, and it filled his mouth and then his whole body with a deep, glowing contentment he had forgotten was possible.
They looked at each other across the fire.
"We should wait," Jason said.
"We should definitely wait," Alexander agreed.
They ate the rest.
* * *
For the first little while, it was wonderful.
The cave was warm and full of that incredible smell. Their stomachs were full for the first time in weeks. Alexander leaned back against the wall with his hands on his belly and started to laugh at nothing in particular, and after a while Jason was laughing too, though he couldn't have said what at. The firelight seemed very bright and very beautiful, and the shadows on the walls moved in slow, lovely patterns, like weed swaying in the current of the lagoon.
"You were wrong," Alexander said. "About the mushrooms. Admit it."
"I was wrong," Jason admitted happily.
"Your father was wrong."
"My father was very wrong."
Alexander laughed so hard he slid sideways down the wall. Jason watched him go, and thought that it was funny, and then thought that it was taking Alexander a very long time to finish sliding. He seemed to be sliding through something thick, like honey. And the shadows on the wall had begun to move faster, and the firelight had gone from beautiful to much too bright.
"Alexander," Jason said. His own voice sounded far away. "I think—"
Alexander didn't answer. He had stopped laughing. He was lying on his side on the leaves with his eyes open, looking at nothing.
Jason tried to stand up. The floor of the cave tilted gently beneath him, exactly the way the raft used to, and he sat down again much harder than he had meant to.
Old mushroom hunters, said his father's voice, very kindly, from somewhere inside the fire. And bold mushroom hunters.
Then the firelight folded in on itself like a closing hand, and everything went dark.
* * *
Jason woke up to a gray, cold light and the worst headache of his life.
He lay very still on the floor of the cave and took stock. His mouth tasted like something had died in it. His stomach felt as though it had been scrubbed out with sand. The fire was completely dead. The ashes weren't just cool, they were cold all the way through, the cold of a fire that had gone out a long time ago.
He turned his head, very carefully. Alexander was lying where he had fallen, on his side on the leaves. For one terrible second, Jason couldn't tell whether he was breathing.
Then Alexander groaned.
"I'm dead," he announced to the cave floor. "I'm dead, and this is my punishment for every sin I've ever committed."
Jason let out a breath he felt all the way down to his feet.
"How long?" he croaked.
Alexander dragged himself up onto one elbow, squinted out through the cave mouth at the sky, and then, with obvious effort, at the pale ghost of the moon still hanging over the sea.
"The moon was nearly full when we ate," he said slowly. "Now it's past full. Two days." He let his head drop back onto the leaves. "Maybe a little more. We've been lying here for two days."
They looked at each other.
Neither of them could have said who started it. But a moment later they were both laughing, weakly and painfully, curled up on the floor of the cave with their arms wrapped around their aching stomachs. It hurt terribly. They couldn't stop.
"Very sensible," Jason wheezed. "A little first, and then we wait."
"You were right," Alexander gasped. "You were right, your father was right, all the old mushroom hunters were right. I'll never doubt them again."
* * *
When they could stand again, Jason went to the back of the cave with a stick of charcoal from the dead fire.
He had been thinking about it while he lay there waiting for the world to stop spinning. For five years, everything he knew about what grew on this island had lived in his own head, learned the hard way, one bad mistake at a time. He knew which fruit was safe and which sap burned the skin. He knew which leaves were soft enough to sleep on and which ones left a rash. But he had never written any of it down, because there had never been anyone else to write it for.
Now there was.
On the smooth stone wall at the back of the cave, near the empty ledge where the mask used to lie, he drew a mushroom: a round cap and a thick stem, and next to it, a small, careful skull. Beside the skull he wrote 2 days, in the neat, blocky letters of someone who had spent years labeling engineering drawings.
Then, underneath it, he started drawing everything else he knew.
Alexander came and stood beside him and watched for a long time without saying anything. Then he picked up a piece of charcoal of his own, and added a drawing of the bitter fruit, and a small skull next to that as well, only half the size.
"The wall of things that want to kill us," he said.
"Things that want to kill us, and how badly," Jason corrected, and kept drawing.
* * *
That evening, Alexander found Jason by the fire with the three mushrooms he had set aside. Jason was slicing them thin and laying them out on the drying rack beside the fish.
"You're keeping them?" Alexander said, appalled. "After that?"
"So we'll always know them," Jason said. "What they look like, dried and fresh. So we never make that mistake again."
Alexander sat down across the fire, frowning at the rack.
The cave still smelled faintly of that impossible sweetness, fruit and roasting meat, lingering in the stone even after two days. It hung in the air like a memory. Every so often, Jason caught Alexander breathing it in with his eyes half closed, and had to look away quickly, because he had caught himself doing exactly the same thing.
"I'll never forget that smell as long as I live," Alexander said quietly.
"No," said Jason. "Neither will I."