The ship dropped anchor outside the reef in the middle of the afternoon, in almost exactly the place where the Resolute had anchored twenty years before.
It was nothing like the Resolute. It was a narrow, low-slung gunboat, perhaps a third the size of the great flagship, and it had been through a war. Its gray hull was streaked with rust and patched in a dozen places with plates of mismatched metal. One of its two masts had been shot away halfway up and never replaced. Its single funnel was dented and scorched black, and the smoke it gave off came out in ragged, coughing puffs, as if the engine beneath it were very tired.
Along its bow, in flaking white letters, was a name. Jason couldn't read it. He found, watching it, that he could hear it anyway, the way he heard Alexander's words, somewhere at the back of his mind: Cormorant.
He watched from the clifftop, lying flat on his stomach in the long grass at the edge, the way he lay when he stalked birds on the plain. He had seen the black flag an hour ago. He had not lit the signal fire, and he had not gone down to the beach.
He had gone into the cave instead, and taken the coat down from its spur of rock at the back, and folded it, and put it in the deepest crack in the wall behind the woven screen where he kept his gourds. Then he had pulled the screen across and stood in front of it for a moment, thinking. He didn't know yet what these people were. But he knew what Alexander's father had said about the black ink, and the free captains, and the men he had hanged.
A boat came down from the gunboat's side, heavily loaded, and started pulling toward the island.
* * *
There were twelve of them.
Jason counted them as they splashed ashore through the gap in the reef, hauling the boat up onto the sand. They were thin and sunburned and ragged, with the hard, watchful look of men who hadn't slept properly in weeks. Most of them carried long rifles slung across their backs, and some had pistols at their belts, and almost all of them had black ink somewhere on their skin: bands around the wrist, lines up the side of the neck, a pattern of dots across the back of a hand.
The one who came ashore first, and stood looking up at the cliff with his hands on his hips, wore a long red scarf wound twice around his neck, faded almost to pink. He was tall and lean, perhaps forty, with a narrow, clever face and a short black beard cut to a point.
"Well," he said, loud enough that it carried all the way up to Jason. "Somebody's been busy."
He was looking at the beach. At the long gray line of old sticks along the top of the sand, and the shorter one beyond it that ended after a single year. At the fish weirs in the lagoon, and the drying racks on the rocks, and the thin trickle of smoke still rising from the embers of the cooking fire at the mouth of the cave.
The men spread out along the beach, rifles unslung now, looking up at the cliff and the forest with narrowed eyes. Two of them started up the path toward the cave.
Jason watched them go. The screen was drawn. The coat was hidden. But the cave was full of everything he had made in thirty years, and he did not want these men walking through it alone.
He got up and went down.
* * *
He came out of the trees at the bottom of the cliff path without a sound, and walked across the rocks toward the cave, and nobody saw him until he was ten paces away.
Then someone shouted, and suddenly there were rifles pointed at him from every direction.
Jason stopped. He held his hands out to his sides, empty, and waited.
"Easy," said the man in the red scarf. He didn't raise his voice. He came up the beach slowly, looking at Jason with frank, open curiosity. "Easy, lads. He's not armed. Are you, friend?"
Jason didn't answer. The old knife was in his belt, and they could all see it, and he didn't think it counted.
The man in the red scarf stopped a few paces away and looked at him properly, the way Lieutenant Ames had looked at him twenty years ago. His eyes went over the gray beard and the missing eye, the weathered skin and the thin, hard arms.
And then they found the black lines on Jason's left arm, and stopped there.
For a long moment, he said nothing. Then he let out a long, low whistle.
"Now that," he said softly, "is the finest work I've ever seen."
The men had seen it too. The rifles were drifting down, one by one. Someone laughed, a startled, delighted sound, and then several of them were talking at once.
"Look at that—"
"All the way to the shoulder—"
"—never seen anything like it, not even on old Garrow—"
"Who did those?" A boy pushed his way to the front of the group, and stood staring at Jason's arm with his mouth open. He couldn't have been more than fifteen. He was small and freckled, with a shock of straw-colored hair and a rifle nearly as tall as he was, and there was a single thin black band inked around his left wrist, very new. "Who did those? Did you do them yourself? How long did they take?"
"Kit," said the man in the red scarf mildly. "Manners."
"Sorry, Captain." The boy didn't look sorry. He went on staring. "They're beautiful, though. Aren't they? Like lightning. Like the cracks in ice." He looked up at Jason, his eyes shining. "I want a pair just like them. Where do I get them done?"
Jason looked down at the boy. He was a year older than Alexander had been when he first went to sea.
"You don't," he said. It was the first thing he had said to another human being in twenty years, and his voice came out cracked and strange. "Trust me."
The boy's face fell a little. But the man in the red scarf was smiling.
"He speaks," he said. "Good. That makes things easier." He swept a small, ironic bow, one hand on his chest. "Captain Tobias Wren, of the Free Fleet, at your service. Master of the Cormorant, and of these eleven fine gentlemen, and of absolutely nothing else in the world at the moment. And you are?"
"Jason."
"Just Jason?"
"Just Jason."
"Well, Just Jason." Wren looked past him, up at the cave, at the woven wall across its mouth and the cistern gleaming beside it and the racks full of dried fish. "It looks to me as if you've been here quite a while."
"A while," Jason said.
* * *
He gave them water, because they asked for it and he couldn't think of a reason not to. They drank from the cistern in long, desperate gulps, one after another, and filled every barrel and bottle they had brought, and looked at the gutters and the clay basin with something like reverence.
"Who built this?" asked one of them. He was an older man, gray-haired and square-shouldered, with a weathered face that looked as if it hadn't smiled in a long time. He was crouching by the edge of the cistern, running his fingers over one of the bark gutters where it joined the next. It was lashed tight with a length of rope, tied in a neat, small knot. "This is good work. Proper work."
"I did," Jason said.
"You." The man looked up at him. He had pale, narrow eyes, and they rested on Jason's face for a moment longer than was comfortable. "Where'd you learn to tie a bowline like that?"
Jason's heart gave a single slow thud.
"Here and there," he said.
The gray-haired man looked at him a moment longer. Then he stood up and walked away without a word.
"Don't mind Hollis," Wren said cheerfully. "He was a quartermaster in the Republic navy for twenty years before he saw the light. He thinks everyone who ties a decent knot must have learned it from the Admiralty." He grinned. "He's usually right, which is the annoying thing about him."
* * *
They didn't stay at the cave. Jason didn't ask them to, and Wren, to his relief, didn't seem to expect it. Instead they went looking for somewhere to camp, and before long one of the men came back down the beach shouting about a big cave at the end of the rocks, a whole grotto, dry and high-roofed, with a pond in the middle of it and a stream close by.
They moved everything there by sundown. They built a great bonfire just inside the grotto's mouth, and hung their hammocks from the rocks, and set a sentry on the beach. Their cook, an enormous, jolly man named Brask with a belly like a barrel and a voice to match, set a pot of something on the fire, and soon the whole beach smelled of salt pork and smoke.
Jason watched them from the rocks outside his own cave, and felt something cold settle in his stomach.
The grotto. The pond. The only place on the whole island where he could have disappeared, and they had put their bonfire right beside it. Even if he had wanted to hide, he couldn't. Not while they were here.
* * *
Wren came to find him after dark.
He came alone, strolling up the beach with his hands in his pockets and his red scarf loose around his neck, and sat down on the rock beside Jason without asking, as if they were old friends. He had brought a bottle. He uncorked it and offered it to Jason, and when Jason shook his head, he took a long pull from it himself and set it between them.
"Kit counted your sticks," he said. "Did you know that? Took him all afternoon. A little over three years in the long line, he says, and one more in the short one." He looked out at the sea, where the Cormorant's riding lamp swayed gently beyond the reef. "But the long line's gone gray as bone, and there's a tree growing out of your drying rack, and the steps up to that cave of yours are worn smooth. So I don't think it's five years."
Jason said nothing.
"How long?" Wren asked.
"Thirty years," Jason said. "About. I stopped counting."
Wren let out a long breath, and didn't say anything for a moment. "You know, I've met a lot of men who've been marooned. It's something of a custom in my line of work. Most of them are mad within the year. The rest are dead." He turned his head and looked at Jason. "You're neither. You've got a cistern that would make an Admiralty engineer weep, and a cave you could live in for a century, and you walked up to twelve armed men this afternoon as quietly as a ghost and didn't even blink when they pointed their rifles at you."
He picked up the bottle, and turned it in his hands, and put it down again.
"The Free Fleet could use a man like that," he said. "Badly. We're losing, Jason. I won't lie to you. We've been fighting the Republic for fifty years, since before I was born, and for fifty years they've been grinding us down. They take our sons for their navy at fourteen. They tax our islands until we starve. They hang any man with ink on his arm." He glanced at Jason's arm, and smiled. "Which, I'm sorry to tell you, now includes you."
Jason said nothing.
"Come with us," Wren said. "I'm not asking you to fight, not yet. Just come. See the world again. You'd have a berth on the Cormorant, and a share of whatever we take, and more respect than you'd know what to do with. Half my crew already thinks you're some kind of sea-spirit." He grinned. "Kit certainly does. He's going to be unbearable about it."
It was the second time in Jason's life that someone had sat beside him on this island and offered him a way off it.
He thought about the admiral, in his soaking coat, with his hand on his son's knee. He thought about a white face turning toward him in a frozen world. Once you leave, you will never be able to come back.
And he thought, very clearly, about the coat folded in the crack in the wall behind him, with its little silver lighthouses, and about what these men would do if they found it.
"Give me a day," he said. "To think."
Wren looked at him. Then he smiled, and stood up, and picked up his bottle.
"Take two," he said. "We're not going anywhere until that engine stops coughing. Good night, Jason."
He went off down the beach toward the glow of the bonfire, whistling. Jason sat alone on the rock and watched him go, and didn't go to sleep for a long time.