Jason ran until the sounds of the beach were gone, and then he kept walking, deeper into the forest, until it was fully dark.
He stopped at last in a hollow under the great fruit trees, where he had slept on some of the worst nights of his first year, and sat down with his back against a trunk. He was shaking. He couldn't tell whether it was from the running or from something else.
Tomorrow, whatever you decide, I'll respect it.
He believed the admiral. That was the trouble. He believed that the old man meant every word, and that tomorrow morning he would stand on the beach and listen, and nod, and let Jason go back to his cave.
But Alexander wouldn't.
Jason knew him too well. Alexander would come looking for him at first light, and find him, because Alexander had walked every path on this island beside him and knew all of his hiding places. And then he would stand in front of him with that look on his face, the one he'd had in the shallows, tears running down it and not wiping them away, and he would ask again.
And Jason didn't know whether he could say no twice.
He sat there in the dark for a long time, listening to the forest, and thinking. Then he got up and started walking toward the grotto.
* * *
The pond was black under the night sky, a perfect circle of nothing in the center of the stone floor. A little starlight came down through the cracks in the grotto's roof and lay on the water without going into it.
Jason sat on the edge and put his legs in. The cold climbed through his feet into his shins, and his heart started to pound, the old way.
He had never done it at night. He had never done it alone, not since the day he'd found the mask, when he hadn't much cared whether he came out the other side. Every other time, there had been Alexander beside him, and a rope around his waist, and the small, steady tug from behind telling him he wasn't alone in the dark.
There was no rope tonight.
Breathe, said Alexander's voice, in his memory. Slowly. From the bottom up. You know how.
Jason breathed. In, deep, and hold it, and out, long and slow. He did it five times. On the fifth, he filled his lungs to the very bottom, and slid into the water.
It was darker than he had ever known darkness could be. There was no gray light above him, no faint green glow, nothing at all. He found the rock wall with his hands and pulled himself down it, and counted. One meter. Two. Three. The pressure built behind his ruined eye. The faint current touched his face, the island breathing out, and he followed it with his fingertips until he found the mouth of the tunnel.
He went in.
The rock pressed against his shoulders. The fear rose up in him, enormous and cold. He let it come, and let it pass, the way he had been taught. He counted his pulls. He kept one hand on the wall. Somewhere in the middle of the tunnel, where it bent downward, he felt for the rope that wasn't there, out of habit, and for one terrible moment the panic nearly had him.
Then it was gone, and he was still moving, and his hand struck open water.
He kicked upward and broke the surface, gasping, into cold, still air.
There was no light at all in the chamber. He dragged himself out onto the stone by feel and lay there on his back, dripping and shivering, and listened to his own breathing echo off walls he couldn't see. Somewhere above him, the air came down through the cracks in the rock, cool and fresh and smelling faintly of the forest.
The pawn was still in his pocket. He closed his hand around it.
Then he curled up on the cold floor of the tomb with no dead in it, and waited for morning.
* * *
Alexander didn't sleep either.
He sat by the fire in the cave until the small hours, with his father beside him, neither of them speaking. The sailors had pitched a canvas shelter on the beach, and every so often the wind carried their voices up, low and uneasy. Out beyond the reef, the lights of the fleet rode at anchor, and the Resolute's great dark shape blotted out the stars.
"He'll come back," his father said at last. "When he's calmer."
"He won't," said Alexander.
He knew it the way he knew the weather. He had lived beside Jason for five years, and he knew the difference between Jason angry and Jason decided. What he had seen on the beach this evening had not been anger.
At first light, he went looking.
He went everywhere. He went to the hollow under the fruit trees, and the high rocks above the plain, and the ledge on the north shore where Jason sometimes sat to watch the sea. He went to the stream and the lagoon and the old snare lines. He found the place in the forest where Jason had sat against a trunk in the night, the leaves still pressed flat, and followed his tracks for a while until they vanished on the stony ground.
He came back to the beach at midday empty-handed, and found his father waiting for him.
* * *
"We have to talk about the fleet," his father said.
They were standing apart from the others, at the far end of the beach, where the rocks ran out into the sea. His father had changed into a dry coat and put his cap back on, and he looked like an admiral again. Alexander found that he hated it.
"The Kestrel brought dispatches this morning," his father went on. "The free captains struck the southern convoys eleven days ago. Four merchantmen burned, and two escorts. They'll strike again. Every day we sit here—"
"Give me five days."
His father stopped.
"You searched five years for me," Alexander said. "Every rock in every sea, Ames told me. The whole Admiralty told you to stop, and you didn't. I'm asking you for five days. Put the men ashore. Search the island properly, all of it. Then I'll go wherever you want."
"Alexander."
"He gave me five years, Father. He shared every fish he caught with me when he was half-starved himself. He taught me to build a cistern and a boat. He pulled me out of the sea twice, and the first time it nearly killed him. I'm not leaving him on this rock because the war can't wait a week."
His father looked at him. Alexander made himself hold his gaze. It was one of the hardest things he had ever done. All his life, he had lowered his eyes first. All his life, the cold voice at the back of his mind had whispered that this was the only thing he was good for.
The voice was very quiet today.
"Three days," his father said at last. "Not five. Three. I'll put two hundred men ashore, and they'll search every hand's width of this island. And if we haven't found him by the third evening, we sail." He paused. "That's not an order, Alexander. It's what I can give. I have eleven thousand men in this fleet, and every one of them has a father too."
Alexander swallowed.
"Three days," he said.
* * *
They searched for three days.
Two hundred men came ashore in long lines of boats, and spread out across the island in chains, calling and beating the undergrowth with sticks. They went through the forest and across the plain, and down into every gully and up onto every ridge. They lowered men on ropes down the face of the cliff to look into the caves along it. They went into the grotto with lanterns and searched every corner of it, and looked at the pond, black and still in the center, and walked around it, and went out again.
Alexander walked with them, and called Jason's name until his voice gave out.
On the second evening, he went back to the grotto alone.
He stood at the edge of the pond with a lantern in his hand and looked down into the black water. The sailors had been through here twice, and not one of them had thought twice about it. Why would they? It was a pond in a cave. There was nothing in it but cold water and stone.
Only two people in the whole world knew what was on the other side.
Alexander set the lantern down on the rock. He sat on the edge of the pond and put his feet in the water, and felt the cold climb up through his shins, and sat there for a long time.
He could go through. He had done it a dozen times, with Jason in front of him and the rope between them. He knew every turn of the tunnel. He could be in the chamber in two minutes, with the lantern wrapped in oilcloth, and find Jason curled up in the dark, and drag him out by force if he had to. Jason was strong, but Alexander was younger, and he'd done it before, carried him half-dead through a storm.
And then what?
Carry him onto the Resolute tied hand and foot? Watch him sit in a cabin for the rest of his life, staring at the wall, the way he had stared at the sea before Alexander came? Take away the only door Jason had, because Alexander couldn't bear to lose him?
That's what you want, said the cold voice, very softly. Isn't it? To keep him. Not to save him. To keep him.
For once, Alexander didn't argue with it.
He sat there until the lantern had burned low. Then he leaned forward over the water, close enough that his breath rippled the surface, and spoke into the dark.
"I know you're there," he said quietly. "I'm not coming in."
The water didn't answer.
"I'm angry with you," Alexander said. "I want you to know that. I'm so angry I can't think. But I'm not coming in." He stopped, and swallowed, and went on. "We sail tomorrow evening. I'll come back. I don't know when, but I'll come back, and you'd better still be alive when I do, because you owe me about forty games of chess."
He waited a little longer. Then he picked up the lantern and went out.
* * *
In the chamber beneath the island, lying in the dark on the cold stone, Jason heard it.
He didn't hear the words. The tunnel was too long for that, and the water too deep. But the air that came down through the cracks in the rock carried sound strangely, and he had been lying in silence for two days, listening to the muffled shouts of sailors somewhere far above him, and he knew that voice. He would have known it anywhere.
He lay there with his hand closed around the pawn, and didn't move, and didn't make a sound, until long after it had stopped.
* * *
On the third evening, the boats went back out to the ships.
Alexander was the last to leave the beach. His father was waiting for him in the stern of the admiral's boat, and he said nothing, and didn't hurry him.
On the first evening of the search, his father had given him a coat. It was a lieutenant's coat of dark blue wool, with brass buttons down the front and gold braid on the cuffs. On its collar, on either side, was a small badge of silver: a lighthouse, with rays of light spreading from its lamp. It was the badge of the Morgans. It had been his father's coat, once, thirty years ago, when he was a young man, and he had kept it in a sea chest in his cabin all that time.
Alexander took it off now, and folded it carefully, and climbed up to the flat rock in front of the cave, and laid it there, where the sun would find it in the morning.
Then he went into the cave one last time. The chessboard lay by the dead fire, the driftwood pieces still arranged as they had left them in the middle of their last, unfinished game. Alexander looked at it for a moment. Then he knelt and moved one of the white pieces forward, and stood up again, and went out.
"Is that his?" his father asked, when Alexander climbed down into the boat. He was looking up at the rock, at the neat dark bundle lying on it.
"It's his now," said Alexander.
His father looked at him. Then he nodded, and gave the order, and the oars came down.
Alexander sat in the bow and didn't look back at the island. He looked straight ahead, at the great gray side of the Resolute rising out of the dusk. He sat very straight, with his hands on his knees, and he did not cry, not until he was alone in his cabin with the door closed and the ship's engines shuddering awake beneath him.
On the bridge, the admiral stood at the rail with his telescope in his hand, looking back at the island long after it had become too dark to see. The officer of the watch waited for some time to ask him whether they should make full speed. When he finally did, the admiral took a long time to answer.
* * *
Jason came out of the pond the next morning, into gray light and silence.
He knew before he reached the grotto mouth that they were gone. The island sounded the way it had sounded before Alexander came: wind and waves and birds, and nothing else.
He climbed the cliff path to the top.
Far to the east, at the very edge of the world, there was a long, low smudge of smoke, fading into the morning haze. He stood and watched it until it was gone, and for some time afterward.
Then he went back down to the cave.
He saw the coat on the rock before he reached it. He stood looking at it for a while, not quite understanding. Then he picked it up. It was heavy, and dry, and warm from the sun. The little silver lighthouses on the collar caught the light.
Inside the cave, everything was just as he had left it. The racks and the gourds, the cistern, the charcoal drawings on the wall. Someone had left a crate beside the fire: blankets, and ship's biscuit, and the bag of coffee, and the signal rocket in its tin box. And the chessboard lay in its place by the dead fire, with all the pieces standing just as they had been.
Almost.
Jason knelt down beside it. He looked at it. He knew that game. He had been thinking about it for three days, in the dark, and he knew exactly where every piece had been.
One white knight had moved.
It was a good move. It was, in fact, a very good move, the best Alexander had ever made, and it put Jason's queen in a difficult position that he would need to think about for some time.
He sat back on his heels, and laughed, and then he wasn't laughing anymore.
Much later, when the sun had gone down, he got up and took the coat to the back of the cave. There was an old spur of rock there, high on the wall, beside the empty ledge where the mask used to lie. He hung the coat on it carefully, by the collar, and smoothed down the sleeves, and stood back.
It hung there in the firelight, dark blue and gold, with its little silver lighthouses shining.
He didn't touch the chessboard. He left the knight where it was.