The cut on Alexander's forehead healed into a thin pink line that ran up into his hair. He said it made him look distinguished. Jason said it made him look like a man who had lost an argument with a boat, and Alexander laughed, but not for as long as he used to.
He was quieter after the storm. Not sad, exactly, or not only sad. He still talked, still teased, still left the good rope in places where no rope had any business being. But sometimes, in the middle of a sentence, he would stop and look out at the sea, and forget to finish.
They salvaged what they could from the wreck. Pieces of the hull washed up along the beach over the following days, and the outrigger arm, and a tangle of the braided sail wrapped around a rock. Jason dragged them all above the tideline and stacked them neatly, the way he stacked everything, and neither of them talked about what the stack was for.
Alexander didn't mention building another boat. Jason didn't ask.
But every evening, just before sunset, Alexander still climbed the cliff path to the top and lit the signal fire. He had done it every day for five years, in rain and wind and heat, and he went on doing it now, even though he no longer seemed to expect anything from it. He would build it up, and watch the smoke rise, and then come back down to the cave in the dusk with his hands smelling of ash.
"Habit," he said, when Jason asked. "A ship's boy lights the lamps at dusk. He doesn't ask whether anyone's looking."
* * *
It was Jason who saw it first.
He had gone down to the fish traps at dawn, the way he did every morning, and he was crouching in the shallows at the edge of the lagoon, untangling a weir, when he looked up to rest his neck and saw a gray thread on the horizon.
He didn't think anything of it. Clouds gathered out there all the time. He went back to the weir.
When he looked up again, the thread was still there, and it had moved.
Jason straightened slowly, water running off his hands. It was thin and gray and slightly bent at the top, the way smoke bent in a high wind, and it was sliding across the edge of the world from left to right, steadily, at a speed no cloud ever moved.
He watched it. He was aware of his heart beating, slow and heavy, and of a strange stillness spreading through the rest of him. He had seen smoke on the horizon before. In the first year, and in the second, and many times since, he had seen smoke, and ships, and sails, and every single one of them had turned into a cloud or a wave or nothing at all when he looked closer.
This one didn't.
"Alexander," he said, not loud enough for anyone to hear.
Then he was running.
* * *
Alexander was still asleep, face down on the leaves with one arm over his head. Jason grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him so hard that he came up swinging.
"What? What is it? Is it the knife?"
"Smoke," Jason said. "On the horizon. Moving."
Alexander stared at him. For one long second, his face didn't change at all, as if the word hadn't reached him yet.
Then he was out of the cave so fast he left one of his boots behind.
They took the cliff path at a run, Alexander in front, half-hopping, jamming his foot into the boot as he climbed. At the top, the wind hit them full in the face. The sea spread out below them in every direction, blue and glittering, and there, to the northeast, was the gray thread, clearer now, and at the bottom of it, a small dark shape.
Alexander stopped dead. His hands had started to shake.
"Green wood," he said. "We need green wood. Leaves. Anything wet."
They tore branches from the stunted trees along the clifftop and dragged them to the old fire pit. Alexander blew the embers of last night's fire back to life with his whole chest, and fed it dry grass until it roared, and then they piled the green branches on top of it, armful after armful. The fire choked and hissed, and a column of thick white smoke went boiling up into the morning sky, bending toward the sea.
Then there was nothing to do but wait.
They stood side by side at the edge of the cliff and watched the dark shape. It didn't turn. It went on sliding across the horizon from left to right, as slowly and steadily as before, and Jason felt the old, familiar certainty settle into his stomach. It was going to pass. It was going to slide over the edge of the world like everything else, and in an hour there would be nothing left of it but a stain in the sky, and Alexander would stand here until dark.
"Come on," Alexander whispered. "Come on, come on. Look up. Somebody look up."
The dark shape turned.
Jason didn't believe it at first. It was so small, and so far away. But the gray thread above it was bending now, curving back on itself, and the shape beneath it was growing a little longer, and then a little taller, and then it was pointing straight at them.
Alexander made a sound Jason had never heard a human being make, something halfway between a laugh and a sob. He put both hands on top of his head and held it there, as if it might come off.
"It's turned," he said. "Jason. It's turned."
"I see it."
"It's coming."
"I see it," Jason said again, because he couldn't think of anything else to say.
* * *
It was a small ship, when it finally came close enough to see properly. It was long and narrow and gray, with a single tall funnel breathing black smoke, and it cut through the swells so fast that white water curled up on either side of its bow. A flag snapped at its stern: deep blue, with a white circle in the center.
"A scout," Alexander said. He hadn't stopped staring at it. "A fast steamer. They run ahead of the fleets and look for trouble." He swallowed. "That's the Republic's flag. That's our flag."
The ship stopped well outside the reef, where the water turned from turquoise to dark blue, and its engines fell silent. The quiet afterward was enormous. Jason could hear voices across the water, faint and small, men shouting to one another on the deck. It had been so long since he had heard more than one voice at a time that he flinched.
A boat came down on ropes from the ship's side and began to row toward the island.
Alexander was already going down the cliff path.
Jason followed more slowly. By the time he reached the beach, Alexander was knee-deep in the lagoon, then waist-deep, then swimming, straight toward the gap in the reef, and the boat had turned to meet him. Jason stopped at the top of the sand, near the old line of sticks, and didn't go any further.
He watched the sailors haul Alexander into the boat. He watched them all start talking at once. He watched one of them, a young officer in a dark blue coat, lean forward and grab Alexander by both shoulders and stare into his face.
Then the officer stood up in the boat, turned toward the ship, cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted something that carried all the way across the water.
Jason couldn't hear the words. But he heard the answer. It came from the ship's deck, a long, ragged roar from dozens of throats at once, and it went on and on.
* * *
The officer was a lieutenant named Ames. He was very young, with a sunburned nose and an earnest, rather anxious face, and when the boat ran up onto the sand he jumped out into the shallows and saluted Jason before he had quite worked out who Jason was.
Then he looked at him properly, and his hand faltered.
Jason knew what he was seeing. A man with one eye and a beard down to his collarbone, burned dark by the sun, thin and hard as a piece of driftwood, in the rags of what had once been a shirt. And his left arm, bare to the shoulder, covered from fingertip to just below the shoulder with fine black lines.
The other sailors had stopped too. They were staring at him from the boat, and some of them had stopped rowing with their oars still in the air.
"This is Jason Keller," Alexander said. He was standing beside Ames, dripping wet, and he had put himself slightly in front of Jason without seeming to notice he had done it. "He pulled me out of the sea when I washed up here. He saved my life. Twice."
Ames lowered his hand slowly. Then he did something Jason didn't expect. He took off his cap, and held it against his chest, and bowed.
"Then the Republic owes you a debt, sir," he said. "And so does every man aboard the Kestrel."
Jason didn't know what to say to that. He nodded, and found that his throat had closed up.
* * *
They sat on the rocks above the beach while the sailors unloaded the boat, and Ames told them everything, too fast, tripping over his own words.
The admiral had never stopped looking. Five years, and he had never stopped. Every scout in the fleet carried a description of Alexander, pinned up beside the chart table, with orders to search every rock and sandbar they passed. The Admiralty had declared the ship lost with all hands at the end of the first year, and held a service in the capital, and struck Alexander's name from the navy lists. The admiral had not attended the service. He had been at sea, widening the search.
"He said you swam like a fish," Ames said, "and that until he saw your body, he'd go on believing you'd swum somewhere."
Alexander had gone very quiet. He was looking down at his hands.
"The fleet's two days east of here," Ames went on. "The admiral's aboard the Resolute. You'll come aboard, sir, both of you, and we'll run back to him at full steam—"
"No," said Alexander.
Ames stopped.
"Not like that." Alexander was still looking down at his hands. "I'm not going to leave him standing on this beach watching your smoke, Lieutenant. Not after five years. And he won't come aboard your ship in a hurry, with a crowd of strangers staring at him." He looked up. "Go and fetch my father. We'll be here. We've had a good deal of practice at being here."
Ames hesitated. Then he nodded slowly. "He'll want to come himself anyway, sir," he said. "If I'm honest, I think he'd want to be the one who finds you."
Alexander nodded without answering. He didn't seem able to speak.
The sailors had carried the boat's cargo up onto the sand: a crate of ship's biscuit, a barrel of fresh water, a round of hard yellow cheese wrapped in cloth, a bag of something that smelled like coffee, a bundle of blankets, and a sealed tin box. Ames handed Alexander the tin box with some ceremony. Inside, packed in straw, lay a long cardboard tube with a string dangling from one end.
"Signal rocket," he said. "If anything goes wrong before we're back, fire it. And keep your fire going on that cliff, sir. Day and night. We'll see it a long way off."
Then he looked at Jason again, at his eye and his arm and the long line of gray sticks at the top of the beach behind him, and something changed in his young, anxious face.
"How long have you been here, sir?" he asked quietly.
Jason thought about it. He had stopped counting, and then Alexander had come, and after that the years had blurred together into something else.
"Nine years," he said. "About. And a year on a raft before that."
Ames opened his mouth, and closed it again, and didn't ask anything else.
* * *
The Kestrel left an hour later, its funnel pouring smoke, and the roar of its engines carried back across the water long after it had shrunk to a dot.
Jason and Alexander sat on the sand among the crates and watched it go.
After a while, Alexander reached into the crate of biscuit and broke off a piece and handed it to Jason without a word.
It was hard as a roof tile and tasted of flour and salt and nothing else at all. Jason put it in his mouth and let it soften on his tongue, and chewed, slowly. He had not eaten bread in ten years. He had not even thought about bread in so long that he had forgotten there was such a thing.
He didn't notice he was crying until Alexander put an arm around his shoulders.
* * *
The two days passed in a fever.
Alexander couldn't keep still. He climbed the cliff a dozen times a day to feed the signal fire, and came back down, and went up again. He talked without stopping: about his father, about the Resolute, about the capital and its canals and the pastry sellers on the dock steps, about Glorianna. He wondered aloud whether she had married someone else, and then said that of course she had, it had been five years, and then said that she would never, not Glorianna, and then laughed at himself and started all over again.
And over and over, like a man pressing on a bruise, he came back to the same thing.
"You'll come," he said, on the first night, lying awake by the fire. "There's room on the Resolute for a hundred of you. My father will give you a cabin of your own, and a surgeon to look at that eye, and more food than you've seen in your whole life."
Jason said nothing.
"You don't have to decide now," Alexander said quickly. "Just think about it. That's all I'm asking."
Jason lay on his back and looked at the dark roof of the cave, and thought about it.
He thought about it all that night, and all the next day. He thought about it while he checked the fish traps out of habit and found them full, and while he sat with the coffee Alexander had brewed in a gourd, bitter and scalding and so good it made his eye water, and while he watched Alexander climb the cliff path again with an armful of green branches.
Nothing leaves, he had said, only a few weeks ago, on this very beach.
But that had been about a boat made of palm leaves and bark, pushed out alone into an empty ocean. This was a steel ship, with a navy behind it, and an admiral who had spent five years searching every rock in every sea. Maybe the island had never wanted to keep Alexander. Maybe it had only wanted him to leave the right way, when the right ship came.
And maybe, said a small, tired voice somewhere at the bottom of him, a voice he had not heard in a very long time, maybe it didn't have to be forever. Maybe he could go, just for a while. See the capital, and the canals. Sleep in a bed. Eat something that wasn't fish. And then come back here, when he was old, and do what the voice had asked of him.
He didn't know whether that voice was hope or weakness. After ten years, he wasn't sure he could tell the difference anymore.
* * *
On the morning of the third day, Jason woke to find Alexander standing in the mouth of the cave, perfectly still, looking out at the sea.
He got up and went to stand beside him.
The whole eastern horizon was dark with smoke. Not a thread this time, but a wall of it, a long, low bank of black and gray stretching across the edge of the world, and beneath it, growing larger with every minute, were ships. Jason counted six, then eight, then stopped counting. They were spread out across the sea in a long line, gray and low and bristling with guns, and the sun flashed on their steel sides.
And in the center of them, moving ahead of the rest, came something so big that at first Jason's mind refused to understand it as a ship at all.
It was a mountain of gray metal. Three enormous funnels rose from it, pouring out smoke that climbed and spread until it darkened half the sky. Turrets crouched on its long deck like sleeping animals, each with a pair of guns as long as trees, and its bow cut through the swells as if they weren't there at all, throwing up great curling sheets of white spray. It was bigger than anything Jason had seen in this world. It was bigger than the grotto, bigger than the cliff. It made the whole island look small.
A deep, booming note rolled across the water toward them, so low that Jason felt it in his chest before he heard it. The ship's horn, sounding once, then again, then a third time.
Beside him, Alexander had started to cry without making a sound.
"That's the Resolute," he said. "That's my father."