He came back the following year, in the dry season, with a single cruiser and a boat full of oranges.
He found the island without any trouble at all. It was there on the horizon at dawn, green and low, with the dark hump of the cliff at one end, exactly where he had left it. No fog. No deep water. He stood on the cruiser's bridge and looked at it through his telescope before he gave the order to anchor, and the young officers on the bridge glanced at one another and wondered why their admiral looked so relieved.
He stayed four days. They fished, and argued, and played chess on the new board by the fire. Alexander lost every game and complained about all of them. On the last evening, he tried to leave behind a crate of salted beef, a new blanket, and a cook, and Jason accepted the beef and the blanket and sent the cook back to the ship.
"Alone," Jason said. "That's the rule. I don't make it."
Alexander looked at him for a moment, and then nodded, and didn't argue.
The year after that, he came again.
* * *
He came nearly every year after that, for thirty-five years.
Sometimes he came in the dry season and sometimes in the wet. Sometimes he came with a cruiser and sometimes with a whole squadron, lying in a long gray line outside the reef while its admiral went ashore alone. Once, in the fourth year, he came with Glorianna.
She stepped out of the boat into the shallows with her skirts hitched up to her knees, and walked up the beach, and stood in front of Jason with her hands on her hips, looking at him. Her red hair had gone mostly gray. She looked around at the cave, and the cistern, and the charcoal drawings, and the beach, and the lagoon, and the long gray stumps of the old sticks that the storm had left.
"So this is it," she said. "The island."
"This is it."
"He talks about it in his sleep. Did you know that? Nearly thirty years married, and he still talks about it in his sleep." She looked at the cistern. Then she walked over to it, and crouched down, and ran her fingers along the joints of the gutters where they met, the way Hollis once had.
"This is very good work," she said.
"He helped."
"He told me he built it." She stood up, and looked at Jason, and her clever eyes creased at the corners. "He told me he built the boat, too."
"He helped with that, too."
Glorianna laughed, and it echoed off the cliff. She stayed three days, and beat both of them at Tides on the beach, and on the last evening she took Jason aside and told him, very quietly, that she kept a boathook by the door of their house in the capital, and that if anyone ever came to that door looking for the ghost of the southern sea, she would know what to do with it.
She didn't come back. The voyage was long, and hard on her, and the years went by. But every time Alexander came, he brought something from her. A jar of the dark sweet jam she made from the fruit of the trees in their garden. A letter that Jason couldn't read, until he looked at it long enough, and the words came to him anyway. A drawing, very good, of the island from the sea at dawn.
He pinned it to the wall of the cave, next to the map.
* * *
The war went on.
Alexander talked about it by the fire, the way he had once talked about his father. Not all at once, and not easily. He talked about convoys and squadrons, about the Free Ports and the Congress of Captains, about battles fought in fog on the other side of the world. He was a full admiral now, and then, in the twelfth year after the storm, he became Lord High Admiral, first officer of the Republic, and commanded every ship that flew the blue flag with the white circle.
He came to the island that year in a flagship so large that it could not come within two miles of the reef, and was rowed ashore in a boat with twenty oars, and sat down on the flat rock in front of the cave, and put his face in his hands.
"I don't know how to end it," he said.
Jason sat down beside him and waited.
"We're winning," Alexander said, through his fingers. "We've been winning for years. Their fleets are sinking. Their ports are burning. In ten years, maybe less, there won't be a free captain left on the whole wide sea." He lifted his head. "And every one we catch, the Admiralty hangs. My father hanged them. I've hanged them. That's the law, and that's the war, and I don't know how to stop it."
Jason was quiet for a long time.
Then he told him about Kit.
He told him all of it. The boy from Tallow with a straw-colored shock of hair and a single new black band around his wrist, who had wanted to go to sea to find his father. Who had held the end of the fish weir and asked a question about everything. Who had worn a white wooden fish around his neck, and laughed about ropes and squares in Freeport, and lay now under a flowering tree at the edge of the forest, a little apart from the others.
Alexander listened, and didn't interrupt.
"He was fifteen," Jason said. "A year older than you were when you went to sea. His father went to fight because the Republic burned his harbor. And he went to fight because his father never came home." He looked out at the sea. "I don't know how you end a war. But I know that you don't end it by hanging boys like that. You just make more of them."
* * *
Three years later, the Admiralty declared an amnesty for every free captain under the age of twenty who surrendered his ship. Every one of them was sent home to his island, with a pardon under the Lord High Admiral's seal.
It didn't end the war. But it broke something in it. Alexander told Jason, years later, that in the first year alone, more than four hundred boys had come in off the free ships and gone home. In the Free Ports, the old captains cursed his name. On the islands, the mothers lit candles for it.
They called it, among the sailors of the fleet, Kit's Law. Alexander never told anyone where the name had come from.
* * *
The rebellion ended in the thirtieth year after the storm, on a gray morning off the Shelf, not far from where the Resolute had gone down. The last free captains struck their flags to the Lord High Admiral himself, and he accepted their swords on the deck of his flagship, and sent them home.
He came to the island a few months later, and told Jason about it by the fire. He didn't sound triumphant. He sounded very tired.
"Eighty years," he said. "My father's whole life. All of mine."
"It's over."
"It's over." Alexander looked into the fire. "I keep waiting to feel something."
"You will," said Jason. "It takes a while."
* * *
They got old.
It happened slowly, and then all at once, the way it had for Jason in the years alone. Alexander's hair went white, and then thin, and his bad shoulder stiffened until he could no longer lift his left arm above his head. Jason's eye clouded over, a little at a time, until he saw the world through a soft, gray haze, and he couldn't tell the white chess pieces from the black without holding them up close. His knees stopped carrying him to the plain. He stopped diving the pond in his seventieth year, one cold morning when he sat on the edge of it with his legs in the water and understood that he would not come out the other side if he went in. He sat there for a while anyway, listening to the island breathe.
He fished from the rocks instead, with a stick and a line, the way he had in his first week on the island.
The mask lay on its ledge at the back of the cave, white and perfect and untouched, with the crest beside it. Neither of them ever talked about it. Sometimes, late in the evening, Jason would catch Alexander looking at it from across the fire, with an expression he couldn't read. Sometimes he caught himself doing the same.
In his pocket, where it had been since the day the Resolute came, he still carried the white pawn. The first piece he had ever carved. It had worn smooth from his fingers over the years, until its head and collar were almost gone. He never took it out. But he always knew where it was.
* * *
Alexander came for the last time in Jason's ninetieth year.
He came in the dry season, in the morning, with two great gray battleships that stayed far out beyond the reef, huge and silent, patrolling slowly back and forth along the horizon while he was ashore. He was eighty-five. He had retired from the Admiralty the year before. He had come, he said, because a man should have one voyage in his life that nobody had ordered him to make.
He climbed out of the boat into the shallows very slowly, with a sailor holding each arm. Jason was waiting for him on the beach, leaning on a stick.
They looked at each other for a while.
"You look terrible," Alexander said.
"You've said that before."
"It was true then, too."
* * *
They went fishing.
They sat on the flat rocks at the edge of the lagoon, side by side, two old men with two sticks and two lines, the way they had sat there sixty years ago, when one of them had been young and grieving and the other had been young and lost. The water was clear and green and still. The fish came and went beneath them in the shade of the rocks, and ignored their hooks.
Far out on the horizon, the two great battleships moved slowly along the edge of the world, gray and enormous, their funnels breathing thin lines of smoke into the blue sky.
"Look at them," Alexander said. "Ten thousand tons of steel each. Forty guns between them. Two thousand men." He shook his head. "Guarding two old fools who can't catch a fish."
"They're guarding you."
"They're guarding the island," said Alexander. "I told them that. They don't understand it, but they're very good about it."
They caught nothing all morning. It didn't matter. They sat in the sun and talked about nothing, the way they had talked about nothing for sixty years: the weather, and the fish, and a new bird that had come to nest on the cliff, which Alexander named something ridiculous within the hour.
Near noon, Alexander went quiet.
He sat with his line slack in the water and his old hands loose on the stick, looking at nothing. Jason knew that silence. He had been listening to it for sixty years.
"Do you ever wonder," Alexander said at last, "where you'll go? After. When your voice is done with you."
"Every day."
"Home, you think? Your Earth?"
"Maybe." Jason watched a fish slide out of the shade of the rocks and back again. "Maybe somewhere worse. It never tells me anything until it's too late to argue."
Alexander nodded slowly. He didn't say anything else. He didn't need to. They both knew what the question had really been, and that neither of them would ask it out loud.
Jason turned his head and looked at him. At the white hair, and the bad shoulder, and the thin pink line of the scar still running up from his forehead after sixty years. At the boy he had pulled out of the sea, sitting beside him with a fishing stick, eighty-five years old.
"Alexander," he said. "Wherever it takes me, I'll find a way to see you again. Old friend."
Alexander looked at him for a long moment. Then the corner of his mouth moved, the way it always had, just before he said something insufferable.
"You'll have to find me first," he said.
"I'll find you."
Alexander laughed, softly, and looked back at the water. But Jason saw his hand tighten on the fishing stick, and stay that way for a long time.
* * *
In the afternoon, they played chess.
Not on the new board. Alexander went into the cave, slowly, and came out with the old one, the one he had carved from a plank of driftwood in their third year together. Its squares had faded almost to nothing, and it was stained with salt from the storm. He set it down on the flat rock by the cave mouth, with the old pieces beside it, the ones Jason had carved by firelight sixty years ago, the night he told Alexander about his father. All of them, except the knight that had looked like a dog, and one white pawn that had been taken early in that game anyway, and had lived in Jason's pocket ever since.
Then, from his pocket, Alexander took out a small cloth bag, and emptied it onto the board. A single piece tumbled out: a black knight, carved in pale driftwood charred dark in a fire, very carefully, by an unpracticed hand.
"I made it," Alexander said. "On the voyage. It took me three weeks." He cleared his throat. "It looks more like a dog than yours did."
Jason picked it up and held it very close to his clouded eye, and turned it over, and laughed until he had to put it down.
Then Alexander set up the pieces. Not at the start. He set them up the way they had been, sixty years ago, on the night before the fleet came. Every one, in its place. He didn't have to think about it. The white knight, forward. The black bishop, pinning it.
"We never finished it," he said.
"No," said Jason. "We never did."
They finished it.
It took them the rest of the afternoon. They played slowly, the way old men play, with long silences between the moves and a great deal of arguing. Jason had to hold every piece up to his eye to see it. Alexander's hands shook when he moved. The two battleships crossed and recrossed the horizon. The sun moved slowly across the sky and began to go down.
And in the end, with the light going gold over the sea, Alexander picked up his white knight, the same knight he had moved on his last night on the island sixty years before, and set it down on its final square.
Jason looked at the board.
"That's mate," he said.
"It is," said Alexander. He sounded astonished. "It is, isn't it?"
"You'll never let me forget this."
"I'll remind you every day," said Alexander serenely, "until I win the next one."
* * *
He left at sunset.
They walked down to the beach together, very slowly, Alexander leaning on the arm of a sailor and Jason on his stick. The boat was waiting in the shallows. Out beyond the reef, the lamps were coming on aboard the two great ships.
At the edge of the water, they stopped.
Alexander turned and looked at him. For a long moment, he didn't say anything. His old face was very calm in the golden light, and his eyes were wet, and he didn't wipe them.
Then he put his forehead against Jason's, the way sailors did in the Republic, at the end of a long voyage.
"Until next time," he said.
Jason didn't answer.
He stood in the shallows with his hand on his stick and watched the boat pull away across the lagoon, and through the gap in the reef, and out across the darkening sea toward the lamps. He watched until it had reached the great gray ship, and until he couldn't see it anymore.
Then he raised his hand, once, toward the sea.
Far out on the water, from the deck of the battleship, a small light swung slowly back and forth, three times.