He spent the whole of the next day cooking.
He went out onto the plain at dawn and came back at noon with six birds, fat and gray, their necks wrung so quickly that none of the rest of the flock had stirred. He went to the great trees on the far side of the forest for fruit, the best of the season, heavy and sweet and golden. He dug roots by the stream, and picked the soft green leaves that grew in the shade of the cliff and tasted faintly of pepper, and carried it all back to the cave in a net over his shoulder.
Then he built the fire in the stone oven Alexander had helped him make, twenty-five years ago, and started.
Kit came and watched for a while. Jason let him pluck one of the birds, and showed him how to do it without tearing the skin, and Kit chattered the whole time about his sisters and his mother's goats and the white fish, which he had already shown to everyone on the island at least twice. Jason answered when he had to. Then he sent him back to the grotto to tell the captain that the meal would be ready at sundown, and that they should all come to the cave, and bring their own bowls.
When the boy was gone, Jason took the gourd from the back of the cave and broke the rest of the wax away.
He crushed the dried mushrooms between two stones, as fine as flour, and stirred the powder into the stew with the bones and the roots and the fruit. He had thought for a long time the night before about how much to use. Too little, and they would only be happy for an hour. Too much, and some of them would never wake at all, and he would not have to do anything.
He found, to his own surprise, that he didn't want that. He didn't know why it made a difference. It did.
He used half of it, and sealed the gourd again with fresh wax, and put it back on its shelf.
* * *
The smell came up out of the pot as the sun went down, and the moment it reached him, Jason was twenty-seven again, lying on the floor of this same cave with Alexander laughing beside him.
It was exactly as he remembered. It was ripe fruit warming in the sun, and meat crackling over an open fire, and it filled the cave and spilled out of the mouth of it and drifted down the cliff to the beach, heavy and sweet and impossible. His mouth flooded. His stomach clenched with a hunger so sudden and fierce it almost doubled him over, and he had to stand very still with his hand on the edge of the oven until it passed.
On the beach below, he heard voices rising. Then footsteps on the path.
They came up to the cave in a crowd, all twelve of them, Wren at the front and Kit bouncing at his elbow, and every single one of them had the same look on his face. It was the look Alexander had had when the smell first hit him, twenty-three years ago. Surprise, and then something close to longing.
"Gods above," Brask said. He had stopped dead in the mouth of the cave with his nose in the air, and his big face had gone soft with wonder. "What is that?"
"Birds," Jason said. "And fruit. And some roots from the stream."
"That's not birds. I've cooked birds for thirty years. That's—" Brask breathed in again, and shut his eyes. "I don't know what that is. You're going to tell me how you did it, island man. You're going to tell me if I have to sit on you."
The men laughed, and crowded in around the fire, and held out their bowls.
* * *
Jason filled them one by one.
He filled Wren's, and Brask's, and the twins'. He filled Kit's to the brim, because the boy held it out with both hands and grinned up at him. He filled the bowls of the sentry and the helmsman and the quiet, heavy man with the scar across his nose, and the others whose names he had never learned. He filled his own, and sat down with it on his knee, and didn't eat.
Hollis came in last, and held out his bowl without a word, and Jason filled that too.
For a little while, the cave was very quiet except for the sound of eating.
Then Wren put down his spoon and looked at Jason across the fire with an expression of complete astonishment.
"That," he said, "is the finest thing I have ever put in my mouth. In my whole life. And I have dined at the Congress table in Freeport."
The cave erupted. They were all talking at once, and laughing, and holding out their bowls for more. Brask was begging for the recipe, and the twins were fighting over the last of the fruit, and Kit had gravy all the way up to his ears and was grinning like a lantern.
Jason filled the bowls again.
Only Hollis ate slowly. He sat a little apart, near the back of the cave, his bowl on his knee, and he ate like a man doing a duty, one careful spoonful at a time, and between the spoonfuls he looked at things. At the charcoal drawings on the wall, the map and the skulls and the crosses. At the neat racks, and the gourds, and the flat stone with the old weather scores scratched into it. At the chessboard by the fire, with its single white knight standing forward of the others.
And at Jason.
* * *
It started with the laughter.
Jason had been waiting for it. The twins were first. One of them said something about the other's hair, which was exactly the same as his own, and they both started to laugh, and couldn't stop. Then Brask was laughing too, his great belly shaking, tears running down his cheeks. Then all of them. Wren was leaning back against the wall with his hand over his eyes, wheezing. Kit had slid sideways off his rock and was lying on the floor of the cave, laughing up at the roof.
"The shadows," the boy said, delighted. "Look at the shadows. They're dancing."
Jason looked down at his own untouched bowl.
"Captain," said a voice at the back of the cave. "Captain Wren."
Nobody paid any attention.
Hollis had stood up. Jason hadn't seen him do it. He was standing at the very back of the cave, by the woven screen, and he had pulled it aside, and he was holding something in his hands. It was folded, dark blue, heavy, and in the firelight, two tiny points of silver gleamed at its collar.
"Captain," Hollis said again. He was swaying slightly, and his voice was thick, but he was not laughing. "Captain, this is a Morgan coat. The lighthouse. It's Morgan's. He's Morgan's man, Captain, he's—"
He dropped the coat and fumbled at his belt. His hand came up with a pistol in it. It swung wildly across the cave, past the laughing men and the dancing shadows, looking for Jason.
"He's poisoned us," Hollis said. "He's—"
The pistol went off.
The noise in the cave was enormous. Stone chips rained down from the roof. For a moment, every face turned toward the sound, slow and puzzled, as if they were trying to remember what it meant.
Then Hollis's knees folded, very gently, and he sat down on the floor of the cave, and then lay down on his side, with the smoking pistol still in his hand and his pale eyes open and blank.
Wren looked at him. Then he looked at Jason.
He was still smiling. But there was something coming into his face now, far behind the smile, slow and struggling, like a man trying to wake from a deep sleep.
"Jason," he said, very carefully, as if the word were heavy. "What... did you..."
He didn't finish. His head tipped back against the wall of the cave, and his eyes closed.
One by one, they stopped laughing.
* * *
Jason sat by the fire for a long time after the last of them had gone still.
The cave was very quiet. The fire crackled. The shadows moved on the walls, slower now, the way shadows always had. Twelve men lay around him on the stone floor, breathing slowly and deeply, their faces slack and peaceful in the firelight.
He had known they would look like that. He hadn't known it would be so hard.
He took out the old knife.
It was the knife from the plastic box on the raft. The knife he had cut his first notch with, and gutted his first fish, and carved the chess pieces and the white fish that Kit wore around his neck. The blade was worn so thin now from thirty years of sharpening that it was barely wider than a finger, and the wooden handle had long since been replaced with one he'd carved himself. But it was still the same knife.
He had never used it on a man.
He got up.
* * *
He did it the way he did everything on the island: carefully, and in order, and without stopping.
He started with Hollis, because Hollis was the one he was most afraid of. Then the sentry, and the helmsman, and the heavy, quiet man with the scar. The twins, one after the other, lying side by side where they had fallen together. Brask, who took a long time, because he was so big. Then the others whose names he had never learned.
Then Wren.
He knelt beside the captain for a moment before he did it. Wren's face was calm, almost smiling, the red scarf fallen loose around his throat. He had been kind to Jason. He had sat beside him on the rocks with a bottle and offered him a way off the island, the second man in Jason's life ever to do so. He had meant it.
He had also stood on the deck of a sinking ship and watched his men shoot an old man four times through the heart. And he had laughed about the rope in the square at Freeport.
Jason did what he had come to do.
* * *
That left Kit.
The boy lay on his back on the floor of the cave, where he had slid off his rock, one arm flung out and his face turned toward the fire. There was still gravy on his chin. The white driftwood fish had fallen out of his shirt and lay on his chest on its string, rising and falling slowly with his breath.
Jason knelt beside him for a long time.
He thought about leaving him. He thought about it more carefully than he had ever thought about anything. He could leave him asleep and go, and let him wake up in two days alone, on an island with eleven dead men and a gunboat he couldn't sail, and nobody coming for him, perhaps for years. He could take him along, bound, in the bottom of a boat, to the ship where Alexander was held, and hope that a fifteen-year-old boy who had laughed about ropes and squares would keep quiet for the sake of the man who had given him a wooden fish.
He thought about Alexander in the dark hold, with a hole in his shoulder.
He thought about all the things that could go wrong.
His hands were shaking so badly that he had to put the knife down on the stone and sit back on his heels and breathe, slowly, from the bottom up, the way Alexander had taught him. He breathed until his hands were still.
Then he picked it up again.
When it was done, he closed Kit's eyes with his thumb. He took the white fish from the boy's chest and put it into his hand, and folded the fingers over it.
Then he went out of the cave and sat down on the rock in front of it, in the dark, where Alexander had left the coat twenty years before, and did not move until the sun came up.
* * *
It took him two days to bury them.
He dug the graves at the edge of the forest above the beach, in the soft ground under the trees, one after another in a long row. He carried them down from the cave one at a time. Brask he had to drag. He laid them in the ground with their hands folded, and filled in the earth over them, and pushed a stick into the soil at the head of each grave.
He buried Kit last, a little apart from the others, under a flowering tree, with the white fish still in his hand.
When he stood up from the final grave, it was late on the second afternoon, and he looked back along the row, and understood what it looked like. Eleven sticks in a line at the edge of the trees, and one apart.
He went into the grotto before he left the beach. The rebels' gear was still stacked at the back of it, where they had left it. He found the admiral's coat folded on top of Brask's sea bag, and he folded it again, carefully, over the four small holes, and took it with him.
He turned away from it.
* * *
On the third morning, he rowed out to the Cormorant.
The rebels' boat was heavy, and it had been a long time since he had rowed anything, but the sea was calm and the gunboat wasn't far. He climbed aboard up a rope ladder that swayed against the rusty hull, and stood for a while on the deck, alone, in the silence.
It was a strange, dead place. It smelled of coal smoke and oil and old sweat, and everything on it was worn and patched and mended, like the ship itself. There were scorch marks along the rails where shells had hit, and a long, ragged hole in the deck near the stern, roughly boarded over.
He went below.
Wren's cabin was small and cramped and full of books. There was a narrow bunk, a table screwed to the floor, a sea chest, a rack of charts. There was a framed drawing on the wall of a woman laughing, done in pencil, very skillfully. Jason looked at it for a moment, and then away.
The logbook lay on the table, open. He sat down in Wren's chair and pulled it toward him.
The writing was cramped and slanted and entirely foreign, loops and hooks in long lines that meant nothing at all. Then he looked at it a little longer, the way he had looked at the name on the Cormorant's bow, and the words came to him anyway, from somewhere at the back of his mind. Rendezvous with Black Tern, Scald Rock, twelfth of the month. Prisoners aboard her. Congress at Freeport on the twentieth. And below, in the margin, a line of numbers and a small, careful drawing of a rock like a broken tooth, with a star beside it.
He found the chart that matched it in the rack. Scald Rock was a speck in an empty ocean, eight days' sail to the northwest, if the wind held. Wren had marked the route to it in pencil.
He took the chart, and the logbook, and a compass from the table. He took a coil of good rope. In a locker by the galley he found a rack of knives, long, sharp, and steel-bright, the finest blades he had seen in thirty years, and he took two of them and wrapped them in cloth.
Then he climbed back down the ladder into the boat and rowed back to the island.
* * *
The sun was setting when the boat grounded on the sand.
Jason climbed out and stood in the shallows beside it, with the water lapping around his knees, and looked at it. It was a good boat, broad and sturdy, with a mast that could be stepped in the bow and a sail folded under the thwarts. It could be sailed by one man, if he knew what he was doing.
He looked out at the sea, where the Cormorant rode at anchor beyond the reef, rusty and empty and still.
Then he turned and looked back at the beach. The long gray line of old sticks. The short line after it. And, above them, at the edge of the trees, the new row.
He stood there, between the boat and the island, until it was dark.