They went up through the sleeping ship with the lamp shaded and Alexander between them, one arm over each of their shoulders.
He was heavier than he looked. He kept apologizing for it in a thin, feverish whisper, and Glorianna kept telling him to be quiet, and he kept not being quiet. On the mess deck, they had to step over the sleepers one by one. Old Garnet muttered something in his sleep as they passed, and smiled.
On deck, the night was clear and moonless, and Scald Rock loomed black against the stars. Jason's boat was still tied alongside where they had left it, bumping gently against the black hull.
"Wait," Glorianna said.
She had stopped at the top of the ladder and was looking aft, toward the tall funnels, and the skylight of the engine room beneath them, glowing faintly red.
"This ship is faster than anything the Republic has in these waters," she said. "When they wake up, they'll come after us. We'd be lucky to get ten miles."
"We can't sink her," Jason said. "There are sixty people asleep below."
"I don't want to sink her." She was already moving toward the engine room hatch. "Give me five minutes. I grew up in a shipyard."
She took four. When she came back up, she was streaked with coal dust to the elbows, and she was carrying a heavy brass fitting in each hand, and a long iron bar over her shoulder. She threw all three over the side, one after another, into the black water.
"Feed valves," she said, a little breathlessly. "And the tool they'd need to make new ones. And I've jammed the rudder chains with a crowbar where it'll take them a day to find it." She wiped her hands on her skirt, leaving long black streaks. "They'll drift. They won't sink. And they won't catch anyone for a week."
Alexander was leaning against the rail, gray-faced, looking at her.
"I told you," he said faintly to Jason. "I told you she argued with the foremen about hull designs."
"You told me they were terrified of her."
"They were right to be."
Glorianna ignored them both. She had gone to the chart table under the bridge and was going through the drawers, quickly and methodically. She came back with a rolled chart under one arm and a heavy flare pistol in her other hand.
"Corvin's," she said. "She marked every Republic patrol in these waters. Red pencil." She shoved the flare pistol into Jason's belt. "Now can we please leave this ship?"
* * *
They sailed through the rest of the night, with no lights, and the black shape of the Black Tern shrinking behind them against the stars until it was gone.
Alexander lay in the bottom of the boat with his head on Glorianna's lap. His fever climbed through the dark hours until he was shaking with it, and talking to people who weren't there, and at dawn Jason took the small pouch from around his neck and opened it.
Inside were strips of dry, brown bark. He had carried a pouch like it for years. He had drawn the tree they came from on the wall of the cave, with a small cross beside it.
"Chew this," he said, putting a strip between Alexander's teeth. "Don't swallow it. Just chew."
"What is it?" Glorianna asked.
"It brings a fever down." Jason watched Alexander's jaw move slowly. "There's a wall at the back of my cave with everything on the island drawn on it. What heals, and what kills. We started it together, after the mushrooms." He paused. "Things that want to kill us, and how badly."
Alexander made a sound that might have been a laugh.
By noon, the fever had broken. By evening, he was sitting up, weak and hollow-eyed and hungry, eating dried fish out of Jason's hand and complaining about it.
* * *
It was on the second night that he told Jason about his father.
They were sitting in the stern together while Glorianna slept curled in the bow under the admiral's coat. The wind was steady. The sail was full and quiet. Above them, the stars were very bright, and low in the west, dim and red, the Drowned Queen's eye was just visible above the sea.
"It was quick, at the end," Alexander said. "I want you to know that. They came over the rail from both sides, and he was on the bridge with his pistol, and he didn't give an inch. It was quick."
Jason didn't say anything. He waited, the way Alexander had once waited for him.
"But before that," Alexander said, and stopped, and started again. "Before that. When we saw them coming out of the fog. When we knew. There was a moment, maybe a minute, when there was nothing left to do but wait for them. And he turned to me, on the bridge, and he said something."
His voice had gone very quiet. He was looking at the sea.
"He said, 'We should have stayed on that island a few more days. I didn't understand, back then, how much he meant to you. We could have saved years of your life, if only I had been more attentive.' And then he said..." Alexander's voice broke. He waited, and breathed, and got it back. "He said, 'I'm sorry, my son.'"
For a long time, the only sound was the sea against the hull.
Jason thought about an old man standing in the shallows in a soaking coat, with his hand on his son's knee. Tomorrow, whatever you decide, I'll respect it.
"He kept his word," he said at last. "He told me he'd respect what I chose. He did. That's more than most people ever do."
"He never forgave himself for it." Alexander wiped his face with the heel of his good hand. "He never said so. But he never did."
"There was nothing to forgive."
"Tell him that." Alexander laughed, and it came out wet and cracked. "Gods. I wish you could have told him that."
* * *
"I went back," Alexander said, later that night.
Jason turned his head.
"Twelve years ago. I had my own frigate by then. I took her out of the southern patrol for a week without orders and sailed to the position my father's navigator had marked on the chart. I knew it by heart. I'd been looking at it for eight years." He was quiet for a moment. "There was fog. The navigator swore we were right on top of it. We sailed back and forth for three days, and sounded the bottom, and there was nothing there. Deep water, all the way down. No reef. No island."
Jason said nothing.
"I told myself we'd got the position wrong," Alexander said. "I went back to the patrol and took my reprimand and never told anyone but Glorianna. But I never quite believed it." He looked at Jason. "I've thought about it for twelve years. Your island doesn't want to let people go. I knew that. I didn't know it didn't want to let people come back, either."
Jason looked out at the dark sea for a long time.
"The Cormorant found it," he said.
"Yes." Alexander's voice was very quiet. "I've been thinking about that too."
* * *
They saw the Republic cruiser on the afternoon of the third day, exactly where Corvin's red pencil had said it would be.
It was a long gray ship with two funnels, steaming slowly along the edge of the horizon from east to west, and when Glorianna stood up in the bow and fired the flare pistol, the red star went up into the blue sky and hung there, blazing, and the cruiser turned toward them at once. They could see the white water climb at its bow as it came up to speed.
Jason brought the boat's head into the wind, and let the sail go slack, and they waited.
No one said anything for a while.
Then Alexander turned to him. He was pale still, and thin, and his shoulder was strapped tight against his chest. But his face was steady.
"You're going back," he said.
"Yes."
Alexander nodded slowly. He looked at the approaching cruiser, and at the sea, and at Glorianna in the bow, and then back at Jason.
"Twenty years ago," he said, "I stood in the water on your beach and shouted at you. I told you it was a voice in your head. I told you you'd rather die there than live with us. I made you run into the forest and hide in a tomb for three days to get away from me." He took a breath. "I'm not going to do that again."
"Alexander—"
"You came for me. You left the island, and you didn't know whether you'd ever find it again, and you came anyway." His voice shook. "I'm not going to hold you back, Jason. Not this time. Not ever again. Go home."
Jason couldn't speak.
He reached down into the locker under the stern seat and took out the admiral's coat, and held it out. Alexander looked at it. Then he took it, and held it against his chest with his good arm, over the four small holes.
"Thank you," he said.
Then he leaned forward and put his forehead against Jason's, the way sailors did in the Republic, he had told Jason once, when they parted at the end of a long voyage. They stayed like that for a moment, with the boat rocking gently beneath them and the cruiser's engines growing louder across the water.
"Your move," Jason said.
Alexander pulled back and stared at him. Then his face broke open, and he started to laugh, and to cry, and to do both at once.
"You answered the knight," he said.
"Twenty years later."
"Was it good?"
"You'll hate it."
* * *
The cruiser's boat came alongside a little after that, full of sailors in blue with rifles, and a young officer in the bow who went white to the lips when he saw who was sitting in the stern. Alexander climbed into it with Glorianna's help, and turned, and looked back.
Jason had already raised the sail.
He didn't wave. Neither did Alexander. They looked at each other across the widening water, and then Jason put the tiller over, and the wind took the boat, and it heeled and began to run away toward the south, alone.
* * *
Glorianna stood beside her husband on the cruiser's quarterdeck and watched the small sail shrink toward the horizon.
Around them, the ship was full of noise. Officers were shouting orders. Sailors were crowding along the rails to look at the famous Captain Morgan, the admiral's son, back from the dead for the second time in his life. The cruiser's captain was waiting at a respectful distance to be told what had happened. Somebody had brought a surgeon. Somebody had brought a chair.
Alexander didn't sit in it. He stood very straight at the rail with his father's coat clasped against his chest, and watched the sail, and didn't say a word.
Glorianna watched him instead. She had been married to him for eighteen years. She knew the difference between Alexander still and Alexander holding himself still, and she knew exactly how long he could do the second before it broke.
When the sail was a white speck, she moved closer, until her shoulder was touching his.
When it was gone, she put her hand flat against the small of his back, where no one on the quarterdeck could see it. She felt him shaking. She kept her hand there.
"Stand up straight," she murmured. "They're all looking at you. Your father's men. You're a Morgan, and they need to see one."
"I know."
"You can fall apart later. In the cabin. I'll hold the door."
"I know." He drew a long breath, and let it out, and turned from the rail. His face was calm and gray and perfectly composed, and his eyes were wet, and only she could see it. "Captain," he said to the waiting officer, in his father's quiet voice. "I need to speak with you about the Black Tern."
Glorianna kept her hand on his back all the way to the cabin door. When it closed behind them, she held him while he wept, for a long time, and she did not let go.
* * *
The voyage back took Jason eleven days.
He sailed alone, and slept in snatches, and marked his position on Wren's chart at noon, and found the Anchor every night. He talked to nobody. He thought, mostly, about fog.
I didn't know it didn't want to let people come back, either.
On the eleventh morning, he reached the position.
He knew it before he checked the chart. He knew the color of the water, and the long slow swell running up out of the southwest, and the shape of the clouds building in the east the way they always built over land. He knew all of it, the way he knew his own hands. He stood up in the boat and looked toward the horizon, and his heart was beating so hard he could feel it in his throat.
There was nothing there.
Blue sea, running away in every direction, empty to the edge of the world. No green hump. No dark cliff. Nothing.
Jason stood in the boat and looked at it for a long time.
Once you leave, you will never be able to come back.
Then he sat down, and took the tiller, and held his course.
He didn't know why. There was nothing else to do. He held his course for an hour, and then another, with the sun climbing and the wind steady and the empty sea all around him. He didn't look at the chart again. He looked at the water, and the swell, and the clouds, and he steered by them the way he had learned to read them over thirty years, from a cliff and a beach and a cave mouth.
In the middle of the afternoon, a gull came out of the east, and wheeled once over the boat, and went back the way it had come.
A little while after that, he saw the cliff.
* * *
The boat came through the gap in the reef in the golden light of evening, with the coral close enough on either side to touch. The lagoon opened out ahead of him, green and still. The beach curved away white under the cliff. The Cormorant still rode at anchor outside the reef, rusting, empty. The cave mouth was dark. Above the sand at the edge of the forest stood a row of twelve sticks.
Jason let the sail fall, and the boat drifted in, and its keel grated on the sand.
He sat there for a moment. Then he climbed over the side, into the shallows, and waded up the beach, and set his foot on the dry sand above the tideline.
The world stopped.
It only lasted a second. The waves froze where they were, halfway up the beach. A gull hung motionless over the cliff. The light itself seemed to stop moving, gold and still. Jason stood in it with one foot on the sand and couldn't breathe, and waited for the voice.
No voice came.
Nothing spoke. Nothing turned its head toward him. There was only the stillness, and the silence, and the feeling, very clear and very close, of being looked at.
Then the wave finished breaking. The gull cried. The light moved.
Jason stood on the beach with his heart hammering and understood.
It had never been a warning. Or it had been, but that wasn't what it had been for. Once you leave, you will never be able to come back. It had been a question, set in front of him twenty years ago, and left there, waiting. The Enigma had wanted to know what he would do with it. Whether he would stay, out of fear. Or leave, out of hope. Or leave for something else, knowing what it cost, and then come back anyway, because he had chosen to.
It had been testing him.
And now, without a word, it had seen the answer.
Jason stood there for a long time on the sand, with the sea behind him. Then he walked up the beach, past the three lines of sticks, and climbed the path to his cave, and went in, and lit the fire.