The climb back up to the cave took him a long time.
He did it slowly, one step at a time, with his stick in one hand and the other on the rock. He stopped halfway to rest, the way he always did now, on the flat stone where the path turned, and looked back at the sea. The lamps of the two great ships were moving away toward the east, very small, very far. He watched them for a while. Then he went on.
The cave was dim and quiet. He lit the fire the way he had lit it every evening for seventy years, with dry grass and small sticks and patience, and blew on it gently until it caught. The light came up and filled the cave, warm and orange, and moved on the walls.
He looked around at it all.
The cistern, cool and full beside the entrance. The racks, rebuilt after the storm, with the day's fish drying on them. The wall of charcoal drawings, faded and smeared and redrawn a hundred times: the map, and the skulls and crosses, and the mushroom at the very top with its small, careful skull. Glorianna's drawing of the island at dawn, pinned beside it, curling at the corners. The flat stone with the weather scores scratched into it, two columns side by side, which he had never quite been able to throw away.
The coat on its spur of rock at the back, gray-blue and patched and faded, with its little silver lighthouses shining.
And beside it, on the ledge, the mask and the crest.
He sat down by the fire, slowly, and ate a piece of fish. It tasted the way fish always tasted. He ate all of it, and licked his fingers, and wiped them on his knee.
The old chessboard lay on the flat rock beside him, where Alexander had left it. The pieces still stood where the game had ended, with the white knight on its last square and the black king caught behind it. Jason looked at it, and found that he was smiling.
"Historic victory," he said out loud.
The fire crackled.
* * *
He lay down on his bed of leaves, on his side, facing the fire, the way he had slept for seventy years.
It was a good bed. He had remade it every season, with the soft green leaves from the edge of the forest that didn't leave a rash, and it smelled faintly of them, green and clean. He pulled the blanket Alexander had brought him up over his shoulder. His knees ached. His hands ached. His eye was very tired.
He reached into his pocket, and took out the pawn.
It was worn so smooth now that it was barely a pawn at all. A small white shape, round at the top and wide at the bottom, polished by his fingers into something like a pebble. He held it up close to his eye in the firelight and looked at it. He remembered carving it, on the night he told Alexander about the house with the crooked gate, and the Sunday afternoons, and his father taking off his glasses to laugh.
It can only go forward, he had said, holding it up in the firelight. One square at a time. But if it makes it all the way to the other side of the board, it can become anything it wants.
He closed his hand around it, and held it against his chest.
* * *
He thought about the raft.
He didn't mean to. It came to him the way things came to him now, easily, from nowhere: the raft on the first morning, rising and falling on the swell. The sun on the back of his neck. Two plastic stills bobbing on their cords, and a can of something that might once have been peaches. A twenty-year-old boy in a sweatshirt, sitting in the middle of all that water, saying okay, okay, think to nobody at all.
He thought about the shark, and the storm, and the grotto on the first night, lying on the stone with his head bleeding while a voice told him that everyone else was done.
He thought about the thirtieth morning, sitting beside a line of thirty sticks, doing the sum in his head. Twenty-one thousand, nine hundred. He had looked down the beach, and started to laugh, because there wasn't enough room. There wasn't anywhere near enough room.
He had lived on this island for seventy years. He did the sum again now, slowly, the way he had done it then. Twenty-five thousand days, a little more.
There had been enough room. There had been room for all of it.
* * *
He thought about his parents.
He could still see them, after all this time. Not their faces, exactly, not anymore. But his mother calling out from the next room, is anyone winning yet? And his father, bent over the chessboard in the window, frowning at it through the reading glasses he pretended not to need. He thought about the crooked gate, and the kitchen with the radio, and a dish called lasagna that he had once called fine to his mother's face.
He thought about Sarah, with her head bent over her notebook and a strand of hair falling across her face.
He didn't know what was on the other side. He had never known. For seventy years, the voice had told him nothing, and he had stopped asking. He didn't know whether he would open his eyes in a lecture hall, or on a black beach under a violet moon, or nowhere at all.
He found that he wasn't afraid.
* * *
Last of all, he thought about Alexander.
He thought about a pale shape in the waves below a cliff, in the rain, rising and falling. About a young man in the ruins of a blue coat, sitting across the fire, talking about pastry. About the good rope in all the wrong places. About a boy of twenty-two laughing on the floor of this cave, with his arms wrapped around his stomach. About a knight moved forward on a board by a dead fire, in a cave full of silence, on the evening a ship sailed away.
About two old men on the rocks by the lagoon, with two sticks and two lines, catching nothing.
Until next time.
He hadn't answered. He had already given his answer that morning, on the rocks, and he had meant every word of it, even if he had no idea yet how he would keep it. He had known, standing in the shallows, that there wouldn't be a next time here. He thought Alexander had known too. He had seen it in his face, in the golden light, with his eyes wet and his forehead pressed against Jason's. It was all right. They had said everything there was to say, a long time ago, and then gone on saying it anyway, for sixty years, over chessboards and fishing lines and fires. It had been enough. It had been more than enough.
He had not been alone. Not in the way that mattered.
And now he was.
* * *
The fire burned down slowly.
Outside, the sea came up the beach and drew back, and came up again, the way it had every night for seventy years. The wind moved in the trees at the edge of the forest, over the rows of graves and the flowering tree. A bird called once from the cliff, the new one, the one Alexander had named something ridiculous, and then was quiet.
Jason lay on his side by the fire with the pawn in his hand and listened to it all.
His breathing slowed. His hand relaxed a little around the pawn, but didn't let go. The light of the fire moved gently on his face, on the gray beard and the closed eye and the old scar where the other one had been, and on his left arm, lying on the blanket, with its fine black lines running from the fingertips to just below the shoulder.
He was very tired. It was a good tiredness. The kind that came at the end of a long day's work, when everything that needed doing had been done.
Peacefully, he thought. In my sleep.
He was almost there when the fire stopped moving.
He felt it more than saw it. The flames went still, in the middle of their flicker, and the light on his closed eyelid stopped shifting. The sea outside fell silent between one wave and the next. The bird on the cliff did not finish its call.
Jason did not open his eye. He had felt this silence before, in a lecture hall, and in the shallows beside a boat, and on a beach with his foot on the sand. He knew exactly what it was.
Jason Keller.
The voice was calm, and clear, and came from nowhere at all. It was the same as it had been seventy years ago. It had not aged a day.
"I know," Jason said. His voice was barely a whisper. "I'm almost done. You don't have to tell me."
The voice waited.
Jason lay very still, with the pawn in his hand and the frozen firelight on his face. He thought about a raft, and a shark, and a cliff in the rain. He thought about twelve sticks at the edge of the forest, and an old man wading into a lagoon in his coat, and seventy years of a life that someone else had chosen for him, one calamity at a time.
He was not angry. He was too tired to be angry. That was what made it true.
"One day," he said quietly, "I will find you. And I will kill you."
For a moment there was nothing at all.
Then the voice answered, and for the first time in seventy years, there was something in it. Not regret, and not amusement. Something warmer than either, and much more frightening.
I look forward to it, said the Enigma.
The fire moved again. The wave finished breaking on the beach below. The bird on the cliff called once more, and was quiet.
Jason fell asleep.
The fire burned down to embers, and the embers to ash. The stars wheeled slowly over the island: the Anchor, and the long curve beneath it, and low in the west, dim and red and calm, the Drowned Queen's eye.
At the back of the cave, on its ledge of stone, in the very last of the light, the white mask lay with its narrow eyes turned toward the sleeping man by the fire.
It had not been facing that way before.