The sea was kind to him, mostly.
It gave him steady winds out of the southeast for the first five days, and long, easy swells that the boat rode like a gull. On the sixth day it sent a squall down on him out of nowhere, and he spent a wild hour with the sail reefed down to a rag and the boat half full of water, bailing with one hand and steering with the other, until it blew itself out as quickly as it had come. After that the wind dropped, and for a day and a half he barely moved at all, and sat in the bottom of the boat under the flapping sail and ate dried fish and watched the horizon.
He slept in snatches, an hour at a time, with the tiller lashed and the rope tied around his wrist. He marked his position on Wren's chart every noon, and every night he found the Anchor and checked his course against it. He talked to nobody. He had had thirty years of practice at that.
On the evening of the tenth day, a little later than he had hoped, he saw Scald Rock.
It rose out of the empty sea exactly the way Wren had drawn it in the margin of the log: a single black spur of stone, jagged at the top like a broken tooth, with white water churning around its base. There was no beach, no tree, nothing living on it at all except the seabirds wheeling above.
And anchored in the lee of it, long and low and black against the sunset, was a ship.
* * *
The Black Tern was nothing like the Cormorant.
She was sleek and narrow and fast-looking, with a hull painted black from waterline to rail and two raked funnels that leaned back like the ears of a running animal. There was no rust on her anywhere. Her guns were covered in neat canvas hoods. Her decks were scrubbed, her brass polished, and the men moving on them moved quickly and quietly, without shouting. She looked like a knife laid on the water.
Jason took down the sail while he was still well out of range, and tied a strip of pale cloth to the top of the mast, and sat down in the stern with his empty hands in plain view. Then he let the wind carry him in.
They saw him long before he reached them. By the time the boat bumped against the black hull, there were a dozen rifles looking down at him over the rail.
"Who are you?" a voice called down. "Where's the Cormorant?"
Jason looked up at them. He had thought for ten days about what he would say, and he had decided that the best lie was the one closest to the truth.
"She's gone," he said. "Blew her boilers at anchor, off an island to the southeast. I'm what's left."
* * *
They took him aboard and searched him, roughly and thoroughly. They found the two steel knives wrapped in cloth, and took them. They found the chart and the logbook and the compass, and took those too, and they turned out the lockers of the boat and found the admiral's coat folded under the stern seat and whistled when they saw it. They found a small white chess pawn in his pocket, worn smooth, and looked at it, and tossed it back to him with a laugh. They didn't find the old knife, because Jason had hidden it inside the lining of the boots he had taken from the Cormorant's stores, with the wooden handle wrapped tight against his ankle. And they didn't find the small gourd, or the pouch of bark, because both were tied inside his shirt, under his arm.
Then they took him to the captain.
Esme Corvin was waiting for him on the quarterdeck, alone at the rail. She was a woman of perhaps fifty, small and straight-backed, with dark hair streaked iron-gray and pulled back tight from a thin, pale face. A fine white scar ran from the corner of her mouth down to her jaw. She wore a plain dark coat with no braid on it at all, and she was holding Wren's logbook open in one hand.
She didn't look up when they brought him to her. She went on reading for a long time, turning the pages slowly, while Jason stood in front of her between two sailors with rifles and waited.
"Tobias Wren," she said finally, still looking at the page, "never let anyone touch his logbook. Not even his mate. He used to say it was the only thing aboard he'd written himself."
"He's dead," Jason said. "He doesn't need it."
She looked up at him then. Her eyes were gray, and very steady, and they went over him slowly, the way Wren's had on the beach: the beard, the eye, the old weathered skin. Then they found his left arm, and stayed there.
"That isn't Freeport work," she said.
"No."
"I've never seen anything like it. Where was it done?"
"On an island," Jason said. "A long time ago."
She looked at the lines for a moment longer. Then she closed the logbook with a snap.
"Tell me what happened to the Cormorant," she said.
* * *
He told her.
He told her about an island in the empty sea to the southeast, with a cistern and fruit trees and a lagoon full of fish, where the Cormorant had put in to take on water and patch her engine. He told her that he had been living there alone when they found him, that Captain Wren had taken him on because he knew the island and the reefs, and that he'd been ashore with a water party on the night the boilers blew. He told her about the fire, and the smoke, and the ship settling at her anchor, and the bodies washing up on the beach for days afterward. He told her that he had buried them all, in a row at the edge of the forest. Twelve of them.
That part, at least, was true.
Corvin listened without interrupting. When he was done, she was quiet for a while.
"Who was Wren's cook?" she asked.
"Brask," said Jason. "A big man. He sang."
"What did Wren wear around his neck?"
"A red scarf. It had faded almost pink."
"Who was his quartermaster?"
"Hollis." Jason held her gaze. "He'd been in the Republic navy for twenty years. He never smiled."
Corvin looked at him. Then something in her face eased, very slightly.
"No," she said. "He never did." She tapped the logbook against her palm. "The coat. Where did you find it?"
"In a chest in the Cormorant's forecastle. Wren said it was going to the great hall at Freeport. He'd have wanted it to get there." He hesitated, and then went on, carefully, because this was the part he had thought about most. "I have something else, too. For the Congress. Or for you."
"Go on."
"Wren took a Republic dispatch boat, three weeks before he died. He told me what was in it. Convoy routes, and the stations of the southern squadrons. Where the Republic's ships will be, for the next two months." Jason kept his voice flat and steady. "I didn't write it down. It's in my head. I'll give it to you, but not here. Not in front of your crew."
Corvin said nothing for a long time.
"You understand," she said finally, very quietly, "that if you are lying to me, I will have you thrown over the side with a shot tied to your feet, and I won't even stay to watch you sink."
"I understand."
She studied him a moment longer. Then she turned to the rail and looked out at Scald Rock, black against the dying light.
"Tomorrow evening," she said. "After the crew has eaten. You'll dine with me in my cabin, and tell me everything you know, and then we'll see what you're worth." She glanced back over her shoulder at the sailors. "Put him in the galley. Old Garnet's been complaining about his hand for a week. Let this one peel his potatoes, and keep an eye on him."
* * *
The galley of the Black Tern was a hot, cramped space below the forecastle, full of steam and the smell of onions, with a great iron stove bolted to the deck and pots hanging from hooks overhead. The cook, Old Garnet, was a small, bent, bald man of about seventy, with a bandaged left hand and a cheerful, toothless face, and he was very glad of the help.
"Burned it on the stove," he said, holding up the bandage. "Seven weeks ago, in the fight with the Resolute. We took a shell through the forecastle and it knocked the soup pot right over on me. The captain says it'll heal. The captain says a lot of things." He handed Jason a knife and a sack of potatoes. "There's sixty-four mouths aboard, not counting the prisoners. You'd better start peeling."
Jason peeled.
He peeled all evening, and all the next morning, and Garnet talked. He talked about his grandchildren on Marrow Key, and his bad knee, and the captain, whom he seemed to regard with a mixture of terror and fierce pride. He talked about the fight with the Resolute, and the old admiral on his bridge. And he talked, when Jason asked him carefully, about the prisoners.
"Down in the aft hold," he said. "Behind the cable tier. The captain won't let anyone near them but the guard and me. I take them their soup twice a day." He shook his head. "The husband's bad. Took a bullet through the shoulder when they boarded, and it's gone hot. The wife does what she can. Tears up her own petticoats for bandages." He clicked his tongue. "Fine woman, that. Nearly took Gully's head off with a boathook. I don't hold with hanging women, myself. But the Congress will do what the Congress does."
Jason peeled another potato, and said nothing, and his hands were perfectly steady.
* * *
In the afternoon, he offered to make the evening soup.
"The Cormorant's crew used to beg me for it," he told Garnet. "Captain Wren said it was the finest thing he'd ever eaten. Better than the Congress table."
Garnet looked delighted. "Did he now? Well, I won't say no to an evening off my feet." He lowered himself onto an upturned barrel with a groan. "Mind you use the salt pork in the blue barrel, not the green. The green's for Freeport."
Jason made the soup.
He made it in the biggest pot in the galley, with the salt pork from the blue barrel, and onions, and the last of the fresh potatoes, and a handful of the dried fruit that had come up from the hold. He made it slowly and carefully, tasting it as he went, the way his mother had made soup on Sunday evenings. Garnet dozed on his barrel with his bandaged hand in his lap.
When the cook's head had fallen forward onto his chest and he had started to snore, Jason reached into his shirt, and untied the gourd from under his arm.
He looked into it.
There was less than there had been on the island. Much less. Twelve men had eaten half of it, and there were sixty-four mouths aboard this ship. He did the sums in his head, the way he had done them on the beach thirty years ago, and didn't like the answer. It would be enough to put them down. He thought it would be enough. It would not be enough to keep them down for two days.
It would have to do.
He crushed the dry, pale pieces between his palms, over the pot, and let the powder fall into the soup, and stirred it in. Then he washed his hands in a bucket of seawater, and scrubbed them, and scrubbed them again.
The smell came up out of the pot almost at once.
Garnet woke with a snort. He sat up on his barrel, and blinked, and sniffed the air. His whole wrinkled face changed.
"By all the gods of the deep," he said slowly. "What have you done to my soup?"
"Island recipe," said Jason.
* * *
The crew ate at the change of the evening watch, all of them together, sitting on benches along the mess deck with their bowls on their knees. Jason ladled it out with Garnet beside him. He watched each bowl go past him, and each face change as the smell reached it, and heard the mess deck, which had been noisy with talk, go quieter and quieter until there was nothing but the sound of spoons.
Then someone laughed, and said, "Garnet, you old dog, you've been hiding this from us," and the whole deck roared.
The captain's steward came down to say that the captain would dine later, in her cabin, with her guest, and that her soup was to be kept warm. Jason filled a small covered pot for her and set it at the back of the stove, and felt his heart beating slowly and heavily in his chest. She would eat it in front of him, across her own table. Or she wouldn't eat it at all.
He would find out which soon enough.
"The prisoners," Garnet said beside him, a little dreamily. He was holding his own bowl in his good hand, and smiling at it. "Got to feed the prisoners."
He filled a second, smaller pot from the big one, and set it on a tray with two tin bowls and a ladle, and handed it to a young sailor with a lantern.
"Aft hold," he told him. "Behind the cable tier. Tell the guard it's a good one tonight."
Jason watched the sailor go. He watched him cross the mess deck, carrying the pot carefully in both hands, and duck through the low doorway aft, and start down the ladder into the dark, the lantern swinging, and the warm, impossible smell of fruit and roasting meat trailing behind him down into the belly of the ship.