The fever came and went in waves, like the sea.
When it came, Alexander was back on the Resolute's bridge, in the fog, with the shells screaming overhead and his father standing at the rail with a pistol in his hand, perfectly calm, giving orders in the same quiet voice he used at the dinner table. When it went, he was here: lying in the dark at the bottom of a ship, with the stink of bilgewater and old rope in his nose, and a chain around his ankle, and a hole in his shoulder that throbbed with every beat of his heart.
He didn't know which was worse.
"You're awake," said Glorianna.
She was sitting beside him with her back against the curved hull, her knees drawn up, her long red hair tied back with a strip torn from her own sleeve. There was a chain around her ankle too, bolted to the same ring in the deck as his. In the faint light that came down through the grating from the lantern outside, her face was gray with exhaustion, and there was a dark bruise along her jaw where one of Corvin's men had struck her with a rifle butt. She had broken his arm for it with the boathook. Alexander had never loved her more.
"I was dreaming," he said. His mouth was very dry.
"I know. You were giving orders." She put a hand on his forehead, and frowned. "It's worse."
"It's fine."
"It is not fine, Alexander Morgan. It is very much not fine." But she said it gently, and she kept her hand where it was, cool against his skin.
He closed his eyes.
He had been trying not to think about his father. It was impossible, down here in the dark with nothing else to do. He kept seeing him on the bridge, and then on the deck, at the end, with the free captains coming over the rail, and then he kept seeing the rest of it, and he didn't want to see the rest of it, and he couldn't stop.
"Tell me about the pastries again," Glorianna said quietly. "The ones on the dock steps. In the snow."
He knew what she was doing. He let her do it anyway.
* * *
The hatch opened a little while later, and the lantern came down the ladder, swinging. It was the young sailor who sometimes brought the soup instead of the old cook. He set the pot down outside the grating, and the guard, a big, sullen man named Gully with his arm in a sling, unlocked it and pushed two tin bowls through with his foot.
"Good one tonight," the young sailor said. He sounded almost dazed. "Garnet's got a new cook. You never smelled anything like it."
Then the smell reached Alexander.
He had been lying with his eyes closed. He opened them. For a long moment, he couldn't move at all.
It was fruit. Ripe, heavy, sweet fruit, warming in the sun, the way the great trees smelled on the far side of the forest in a good season. And underneath the sweetness, rich and deep and savory, the smell of meat roasting over an open fire, fat crackling.
He was twenty-two years old, lying on the floor of a cave with his arms wrapped around his aching stomach, laughing so hard it hurt, while a man with one eye wheezed beside him. I'll never forget that smell as long as I live.
No, Jason had said. Neither will I.
"Oh, that smells wonderful," Glorianna said softly. She was already reaching for the bowl. "Oh, gods. I didn't know I was this hungry."
Alexander's hand closed around her wrist.
She looked at him in surprise. He was holding on hard, harder than he meant to. His heart was pounding so fast that the wound in his shoulder had started to scream.
"Don't," he whispered.
"Alexander, you need to eat. You need your strength, you're burning up—"
"Don't eat it. Please." He didn't let go. "Trust me."
She looked at his face. Whatever she saw there, it was enough. She took her hand away from the bowl.
Outside the grating, Gully had sat down on a coil of cable with his own bowl on his knee, and was eating with his head bent low over it, making small, contented noises. The young sailor had gone back up the ladder with the lantern.
Alexander picked up his bowl, slowly, and made a show of blowing on it, and then, when Gully's head was down, he tipped it into the black water sloshing in the bilge beneath the deck boards. He did the same with Glorianna's. Then he set both empty bowls back by the grating, and lay down again, and waited.
"What is it?" Glorianna breathed. "What's in it?"
"Mushrooms," Alexander said. He found that he was shaking. "I think. Gods. I think it's mushrooms."
She stared at him in the dark as if he had gone mad.
Out beyond the grating, Gully had started to laugh.
* * *
In the captain's cabin, Esme Corvin had not touched her soup.
It sat on the table between them in its covered pot, sending up thin wisps of steam and that impossible smell, and she had not so much as lifted the lid. Jason sat across from her and did not look at it.
"I don't eat what I haven't watched being cooked," she said. "An old habit. It's kept me alive for thirty years." She smiled faintly, and the scar at the corner of her mouth pulled. "You understand."
"I understand."
The cabin was small and bare, with a single lamp swinging from a hook in the ceiling and a desk bolted to the deck under the stern windows. There were no books, no pictures, nothing that said anything about the woman who lived there, except for a rack of pistols on the bulkhead and a long, thin sword in a plain sheath beside it. The admiral's coat lay folded on the desk, where her men had put it. Wren's logbook lay on top.
"Now," she said. "The convoys."
Jason told her.
He had spent five years of nights in a cave with Alexander, listening to him talk about the Republic's ships. Its squadrons, and their stations, and the long convoy routes that ran between the islands like veins. He had drawn them in the ash with a stick while Alexander corrected him. It had all been twenty years ago, and it was probably all wrong now, but it was detailed, and it was confident, and it was the Republic's own, and he told it slowly and carefully, the way a man tells something he has memorized.
Corvin listened without moving. When he was done, she was quiet for a long time.
"Some of that is out of date," she said at last. "The Heron Islands station was closed eight years ago."
"Wren said the dispatches were old."
"Hm." She was watching him with her steady gray eyes. "And some of it I didn't know." She drummed her fingers once on the table. "It's a fair start."
"There's something else," Jason said.
He nodded at the admiral's coat on the desk.
"I didn't tell your men. I didn't know who I could trust. There's something sewn into the lining, under the collar. Papers. I felt them when I folded it in the boat. I didn't cut it open." He looked at her. "I thought it should be you."
For the first time, something moved in Corvin's face. It was very small, but Jason saw it: the sudden, sharp hunger of a hunter who smells game.
She got up, and went to the desk, and unfolded the coat. She laid it out flat with the collar toward her, and ran her fingers along the seam below it. She drew a thin knife from her belt.
Jason got up too, and came to stand beside her, looking down.
"There," he said. "Just under the lighthouse."
She bent over the collar. The lamp swung slowly above them.
Somewhere far overhead, on the deck, a bell should have been ringing. It was the change of the watch. Jason had heard it ring every four hours since he came aboard, eight quick strokes, as regular as a heartbeat. It had rung at the end of every watch since he came aboard.
It did not ring now.
Corvin's knife stopped.
She lifted her head slowly and looked at the ceiling. Jason watched her understand it. He watched it go through her in an instant, the missing bell, and the silence, and the untouched pot on the table, and the stranger standing at her shoulder, and he watched her right hand leave the coat and go, very fast, toward the rack of pistols on the bulkhead.
He was faster.
He had learned, in twenty years, to move when the wind moved. To be absolutely still, and then not.
It was over very quickly. She made almost no sound. When it was done, he lowered her gently to the floor of her cabin, and stood for a moment with the old knife in his hand, breathing, and listening to the silence of the ship around him.
Then he took the lamp down from its hook. He picked up the admiral's coat, and Wren's logbook, and the chart and the compass from the desk, and went out.
* * *
The Black Tern was a ship of sleepers.
They lay along the benches of the mess deck, and slumped against the bulkheads, and sprawled across the passageways, sixty-three men and women with their bowls still in their laps and their spoons still in their hands. Some of them were smiling. Old Garnet lay curled on the galley floor beside his stove, snoring gently, his bandaged hand tucked under his cheek.
Jason walked through them with the lamp, quickly and quietly.
He was halfway across the mess deck when one of them moved.
It was a young woman near the forward bulkhead. She stirred, and groaned, and her eyes opened a crack, and looked at him, unfocused and confused. Her hand twitched toward the pistol at her belt, and then fell away again, and her eyes closed.
Jason stood very still until her breathing had slowed again. Then he walked faster.
Not two days, he thought. Not with what was left. Hours, maybe. Maybe less.
He found the ladder to the aft hold, and went down it into the dark.
* * *
The guard was sitting on a coil of cable outside the grating, with his head sunk on his chest and his empty bowl rolled away across the deck. The keys hung at his belt. Jason took them without waking him.
Then he lifted the lamp, and looked through the grating.
There were two people behind it, chained to a ring in the deck.
One was a woman with long red hair and a bruised jaw, sitting up very straight against the hull. She had placed herself between the grating and the man beside her, and she was looking at Jason with an expression of fierce, desperate readiness, as if she were prepared to fight him with her bare hands.
The other was lying down, with his head in her lap. His face was gray and wet with fever. His hair, which had been dark, was going gray too, at the temples, and there were deep lines at the corners of his eyes that hadn't been there before. There was a thin white scar running up into his hairline from his forehead. His left shoulder was bound up in strips of stained white cloth.
He was looking straight at the lamp.
For a long moment, neither of them said anything at all.
Then Alexander Morgan began to laugh. It was a weak, cracked, breathless sound, and it hurt him, and he didn't stop.
"I knew it," he said. "I knew it. The moment I smelled it. I knew."
Jason's hands were shaking so badly he could barely get the key into the lock. It took him three tries. The grating swung open with a screech of rusted hinges, and he was on his knees on the filthy deck beside them, and he didn't remember getting there.
"You recognized it," he said. His voice didn't work properly.
"Of course I recognized it." Alexander reached up with his good hand and grabbed the front of Jason's shirt and held on. His grip was very weak. "I told you I'd never forget it as long as I lived. Did you think I was lying?"
"No."
"I never lie about food." His eyes were wet. He was still laughing, a little, and crying at the same time, and he didn't seem to notice either. "Gods, Jason. Look at you. You're old."
"So are you."
"I am distinguished." Alexander's grip tightened. "You left the island."
It wasn't a question. Jason didn't answer it.
Alexander looked at him, and Jason watched him understand. All of it. The frozen world, and the voice, and the door. What it had cost. His face changed, and for a moment, he couldn't say anything at all.
"You idiot," he whispered finally. "You stupid, stubborn, magnificent idiot."
"You owe me forty games," said Jason.
The woman with the red hair had been watching them both without a word. Now she let out a long, slow breath, and some of the fierce readiness went out of her shoulders.
"So," she said. "You're the island man."
Jason looked at her. She had a strong, freckled face, and clever eyes, and she was holding Alexander's head in her lap as if she would kill anyone who tried to take it.
"He told me about you," she said. "For twenty years. Every single day. I used to think he'd made you up." She looked at him, at his eye and his beard and the black lines on his arm, and something in her face softened. "He didn't do you justice."
"You must be Glorianna," Jason said. "He told me about you, too."
"All good things, I hope."
"He said you told him he had the posture of a wet heron."
Glorianna laughed. It was sudden and startled and a little wild, and it echoed off the hull of the sleeping ship. Then she clapped a hand over her mouth, and looked up toward the ladder, and they all went still, listening.
Nothing moved above them.
"We have to go," Jason said. "Now. It won't hold them long."
He bent over the ring in the deck, and found the right key on the second try, and the chains fell away from their ankles with a heavy iron clatter.