"Do you remember," Alexander said, "the morning I came back from the beach with the mask in my hands?"
Jason looked at him.
"I'd thrown it into the sea the night before," Alexander said. "And there it was on the sand, without a drop of water on it. And I accused you of swimming out to get it, because I couldn't stand to believe the other thing." He was still looking at the sea. "And then I buried it. Alone, where you'd never find it. And I told it to stay."
"I remember."
"I've thought about that morning for nearly thirty years." Alexander turned his head at last and looked at Jason. "I've thought about the fog, and the three days I spent sailing back and forth over deep water where your island should have been. I've thought about the Cormorant finding it, and the rebels finding it, and my father's scout finding it, and me not finding it, until today. I've thought about the voice that stopped you getting into the boat. And about you, sitting on this rock, choosing to stay." He paused. "And I've thought about that mask. The sea wouldn't take it. It kept giving it back to you. And I took it away from you, because I was afraid of it. Because I couldn't sleep with it in the cave."
He was quiet for a moment.
"This island keeps you," he said. "I don't understand how, or why. I don't think I'm meant to. But it keeps you, and it kept that mask for you, and I had no right to put it in the ground. It was never mine to bury."
Jason didn't say anything for a long time.
"I don't know where it is," he said at last. "I told you not to tell me."
"I know," said Alexander. "I do."
* * *
He went alone, at first light.
He left the camp on the beach while the sailors were still asleep, and walked up into the forest with a spade over his good shoulder, borrowed from the flagship's carpenter. His flag lieutenant had followed him to the edge of the trees, anxious, asking whether the admiral wanted an escort. The admiral did not.
The forest was a ruin. The storm had torn through it like a fist through paper. Great trees lay across the paths with their roots in the air, and the ground was littered with broken branches, and whole slopes had been swept bare, down to the rock. Alexander walked through it slowly, looking around, and for a while he was afraid he wouldn't find it. It had been nearly thirty years. He had been young, and frightened, and he had walked a long way without choosing where, until the ground felt right.
He found it anyway.
He knew it the moment he saw it. It was a small clearing on a slope above the stream, between two great gray rocks, and the storm had not touched it. Everywhere around it, the trees were down and the earth was torn up. But inside that small space between the rocks, the ground was smooth and green and undisturbed, covered in a soft carpet of moss and fallen leaves, exactly as he had left it.
Alexander stood at the edge of it.
Then he knelt, and began to dig.
* * *
It was harder than it had been. He was fifty years old, and his left shoulder had never been right since the Black Tern. After a few minutes it was burning, and he had to stop and rest, and after a few minutes more he put the spade down and dug with his hands, the way he had the first time, because it seemed right.
The earth was soft and dark and cool. Roots had grown down through it over the years, thin and white, and he had to pull them aside. His fingernails broke. His hands bled.
He thought, as he dug, about the things he had thought about the first time.
He thought about the night of the storm on the white beach, when he had carried the mask down from the ledge and seen the rain bead on its surface and slide away. About laying it over Jason's face in the cave, and waiting, and the blood stopping. About the black lines climbing Jason's arm a little higher every day, toward his heart, and then stopping, the night he woke.
Last night, by the fire, he had seen those lines again for the first time in five years. There was a new scar across them now, above the elbow, a long pale furrow where Brannock's bullet had grazed the skin. The lines ran through it without a break. They hadn't moved. They hadn't faded. They were exactly as they had been on the morning Jason first opened his eyes.
He thought about the mausoleum, with its twenty empty niches. He thought about the tale the old sailors told the new boys on their first voyage, about the black shore and the silent sea and the someone who waited there, for the drowned, to play a game.
He still didn't say any of it out loud. There was still no one to say it to.
His fingers touched cloth.
It was the old sailcloth he had wrapped around it, nearly thirty years ago. It had rotted almost completely away. It came apart in his hands like wet paper, black and soft, and fell away in pieces.
Underneath it, the mask was white.
Perfectly, spotlessly white. There was not a grain of earth on it, not a single stain, not a root. It lay in the bottom of the hole with its narrow eyes looking up at him, as clean and cold and flawless as the day Jason had lifted it from the pedestal in the dark.
Alexander knelt there, looking down at it, with his bleeding hands resting on his knees.
"You waited," he said quietly.
The mask said nothing.
He lifted it out. It was cool in his hands, and lighter than he remembered, and a little bit of the old cold crept up his fingers into his wrists, the way it always had. He didn't flinch. He wasn't twenty-two anymore.
He sat back on his heels for a while, holding it.
Then he filled the hole in, and packed the earth down, and scattered leaves over it, the way he had the first time. He wasn't sure why. It seemed like the right thing to do.
* * *
Jason was sitting on the flat rock in front of the cave when he came back.
He watched Alexander come down the path with the spade over his shoulder and something white held against his chest with his other hand, and he stood up slowly. He didn't say anything.
Alexander stopped in front of him and held it out.
For a long moment, Jason didn't take it. He looked at it: the narrow eyes, the fine carved lines, the perfect, untouched white. He hadn't seen it in nearly thirty years. He had nearly forgotten how it felt, just to look at it.
Then he took it.
It was cold, the way it had always been. Not the cold of stone or metal. Something older than that, that went up through his fingers and into his arm, the left one, where the black lines lay, and settled there.
"It's yours," Alexander said. "It always was."
Jason looked down at it.
"I don't know what it is," he said.
"Neither do I." Alexander's voice was very gentle. "But I think it knows what you are."
* * *
Jason carried it into the cave, and went to the back wall, and set it on the ledge where it had lain for so many years, before Alexander had taken it down and thrown it into the sea. The ledge had been swept bare by the storm. The mask fit into the shallow hollow in the stone exactly, as if the hollow had been waiting for it.
Then he reached into his shirt, and untied the knot at the corner, and took out the crest.
He set it on the ledge beside the mask.
Alexander had followed him in. He came and stood beside Jason, and looked at the crest: at the dark, pitted metal, and the salamander coiled in a circle with its tail touching its head, and the three small stars around it.
"Where did you find that?"
"In the mausoleum. In the dark, during the storm." Jason paused. "There's a room behind the niches. A small one. It was lying on the floor, in the middle."
Alexander frowned at it. "It's not a crest I know. It isn't the Republic's, or any of the great houses'. It isn't the rebels'." He was quiet for a moment. "There's no such creature in any sea I've ever sailed. A lizard of fire. My grandmother used to tell stories about them. They lived in the hearts of volcanoes, she said, and couldn't be burned, and when the world ended, they'd be the only thing left."
He looked at the mask, and then at the crest, side by side on the ledge. Then he looked at Jason's arm.
He didn't say anything else.
* * *
The fleet sailed at noon.
Alexander stayed until the last boat. He left more than Jason wanted him to leave, and much less than he tried to: a crate of tools from the flagship's carpenter, and a coil of new rope, and a tin of lamp oil, and a good telescope, and a small chessboard of dark and pale wood with a full set of pieces, carved by a master in the capital.
"Replacements," he said. "For the dog."
He had also, Jason learned later, ordered his flag navigator to burn every chart in the fleet that marked the island's position, and to strike it from the Admiralty's records, and to tell anyone who asked that the ghost of the southern sea had died in the great storm, with the rebels' southern squadron, and gone down with them.
They stood together on the beach, at the edge of the water, where the boat was waiting.
"I'll come back," Alexander said. "Not to take you. I won't ever ask you that again. Just to see you. To play chess, and lose, and eat your terrible fish."
"You'll have to find it first."
"I'll find it." Alexander smiled. "I think it'll let me, now."
He put his forehead against Jason's, and they stayed like that for a moment.
Then he climbed into the boat, and it pulled away through the gap in the reef, and he did not look back, and Jason didn't expect him to. He stood at the edge of the water and watched the boat reach the great gray flagship, and watched the flagship's anchor come up, and her funnels begin to smoke, and the long line of ships turn slowly, one after another, and steam away toward the east.
He watched until they were gone.
Then he went back up to the cave. The sun had moved, and a long bar of light was falling in through the mouth, across the ruined floor, all the way to the back wall.
It fell on the ledge. On the white mask, lying in its hollow in the stone, with its narrow eyes turned up toward the ceiling. And beside it, dark and dull and very old, the salamander crest, with its three small stars.
Jason stood and looked at them.
Then he picked up a broom of twigs, and began to sweep out the cave.