The man in the dark coat walked along the rows of graves slowly, the way people walk through a church.
Jason watched him through the little brass telescope from the clifftop. He watched him stop at the head of each grave and look down at the stick pushed into the soil, and move on to the next. He went all the way along the first row, and all the way along the second. Then he stood at the end for a while, looking back.
Then he walked over to the flowering tree, a little apart from the others, where Kit lay alone.
He stood there for a long time. Then he took off his cap, and held it against his chest, and bowed his head.
Down on the beach, his eight sailors knelt in the sand with their rifles ready, and watched the cliff, and the forest, and did not move.
When the man in the dark coat finally turned around, he looked straight up at the clifftop. Straight at the rocks where Jason lay. Jason knew he couldn't possibly see him. He held his breath anyway.
"My name is Silas Brannock," the man called. His voice was deep and unhurried, and it carried across the beach without seeming to be raised at all. "Commodore of the southern squadron of the Free Fleet. Tobias Wren was one of my captains, and my friend for twenty years. Those were his men, in the ground behind me." He paused. "And that one was a boy called Kit, from Tallow, who I promised his mother I would bring home."
The wind moved in the grass. The sea washed up the beach and drew back.
"I know you're up there," Brannock said. "I've come for you."
* * *
He did it the way Jason would have done it. Carefully, and in order.
He split his men into two groups of four. One group started up the cliff path toward the cave. The other went into the forest, toward the plain and the grotto beyond it, moving in a line, ten paces apart, each man watching the ground in front of the man ahead of him. They were good. Jason could see it. They were quiet and patient and they had done this before.
Brannock himself stayed on the beach, and sat down on a rock by the water with a rifle across his knees, and waited.
Jason slid back from the edge of the cliff, and went down into the hidden path behind the rocks, and began.
* * *
The first man went into the pit on the forest path by the stream.
He was the second in the line, and he stepped where the man in front of him had stepped, because he was careful. But the man in front of him had been light and small, and he was heavy, and the woven mat that had held the first man's weight gave way under his. He went down without a sound. The others stopped, and crouched, and one of them crept forward to look into the pit, and came back very pale.
After that they moved slower.
The second man stepped on a wire near the edge of the plain, and a deadfall came down the slope above him, a log as thick as his body, and the man behind him shouted and dragged him clear by the collar. He lived. His leg didn't. They left him propped against a tree with a tourniquet on his thigh and his rifle in his lap, and went on, three of them now, very slowly.
On the cliff path, the group of four heard the shout from the forest and stopped. They were almost at the cave. They crouched in the rocks below it and looked up at the dark mouth, and one of them raised his rifle and fired into it, once, twice, the shots slamming off the stone inside.
Nothing moved.
From the firing post above the grotto, three hundred and forty paces away across the head of the lagoon, Jason watched them through the telescope. He knew the distance exactly. He had paced it a dozen times. He had marked it on the stock of the rifle in a tiny, careful line.
He lay down behind the rock, and settled the rifle, and breathed out slowly, and fired.
The man with the raised rifle fell sideways into the rocks.
The other three dropped flat. Jason was already gone, sliding back through the gap behind the post and down the hidden path along the cliff ledge, the rifle across his back. By the time they had worked out where the shot had come from and fired back at the empty rock, he was two hundred paces away, on the ridge above the plain, lying down again behind a different rock, looking down at the three men from the forest as they came out of the trees.
* * *
It took most of the day.
He didn't enjoy it. He had thought, lying awake at night over the last five years, that he might. That something in him might have grown hard enough, in thirty years alone, to find it satisfying. It didn't. It felt like the cave on the night of the soup, only slower, and longer, and colder. He did it anyway, carefully, in order, the way he did everything. He did it because the alternative was a rope in a square in Freeport, and because he had not come back to the island to die on it with a bullet in his back.
The men from the cliff path tried to rush the cave, and found it empty, and found the tins rattling on their wire across the back of it, and came out again too fast. The men from the forest tried to cross the plain in the open, and found out why nobody should. One of them, the last, made it almost all the way to the grotto before Jason found him. He was young. He had ink on his neck, a line of dots, very new.
Jason thought about Kit, and fired anyway.
By the middle of the afternoon, the only sound on the island was the wind, and the sea, and, far away at the edge of the forest, a man with a ruined leg calling hoarsely for someone to come and help him.
Jason went down and helped him. He splinted the leg with two sticks and a strip of sailcloth, and gave him water from his gourd, and bound a handful of the soft leaves that kept a wound from going bad over the torn skin. The man stared at him the whole time, white-faced, with his mouth open, as if he were looking at something that shouldn't exist.
"Your commodore," Jason said. "Where is he?"
The man swallowed. "The beach," he whispered. "He's still on the beach. He said he'd wait."
* * *
Brannock was sitting on the same rock where he had been sitting that morning, with the rifle across his knees. He had not moved. He watched Jason come out of the trees at the bottom of the cliff path and walk down across the sand toward him, and he didn't raise the rifle.
When Jason was twenty paces away, he stopped.
For a long time, they looked at each other.
Brannock was older than he had seemed from the clifftop, sixty at least, with deep lines around his eyes and a heaviness in his shoulders that looked like it had been there for a long time. He looked at Jason's face, and his missing eye, and his gray beard. Then he looked at his arm.
For a moment, he didn't say anything at all.
"They told me about that," he said at last, quietly. "In Freeport. The Black Tern's crew. I thought it was sailors' talk. The kind of thing that grows a little every time it's told." He shook his head slowly. "It isn't."
He was still looking at the arm, at the fine black lines running from the fingertips to just below the shoulder, dark against the weathered skin.
"You know what they call you?" he said. "In the taverns. They call you the ghost of the southern sea. I thought that was sailors' talk too." He looked back up at Jason's face. "But it suits you. Gods help me, it does. You look like something that's already been dead a long time and hasn't noticed."
"I'm not dead," Jason said.
"No. Not yet." Brannock almost smiled. "I have seven good men dead on your island, and a boy under that tree, and a friend in the ground behind me. And a ship out there with a hundred and twenty more who will come ashore if I signal, and die one by one in your pits and your wires, until there aren't enough of them left to row back." He looked out at the sea. "I've seen enough men die today. I've seen enough men die in my life."
He stood up, slowly, and set the rifle down against the rock.
"I was an officer in the Republic navy once," he said. "Thirty years ago. They ordered me to burn a village on an island called Hesk, because the fishermen had been feeding the free captains. I burned it. I did it well. Then I walked into the sea and swam to the nearest free ship, and I've been fighting them ever since." He unbuttoned his coat. There was a pistol on his hip, a long, heavy, old-fashioned thing with a worn wooden grip. "I don't want to die in a pit in your forest, ghost. And I don't think you want to shoot me from a rock. I think you're as tired as I am."
Jason said nothing.
"The old way, then," Brannock said. "The way officers used to settle things, when I was young. On the beach. Pistols. Thirteen paces each, turn and fire." He looked at Jason's missing eye, and then away, almost apologetically. "I know it's not fair. I'm sorry for that. It's all I have."
Jason looked at him.
"All right," he said. "But I choose the ground."
* * *
He chose the stretch of beach below the cliff path.
He had paced it more times than he could count. He knew every step of it, from the foot of the path to the white stone at the water's edge that marked two hundred paces from the post on the clifftop. He knew exactly how many of his own strides lay between the dark rock with the barnacles on it and the long, bleached log half buried in the sand. Twenty-six. He had walked it a hundred times, with a rifle, counting.
Brannock looked at the ground, and then at Jason, and something in his face changed slightly.
"You've measured it," he said.
"Everything," said Jason. "Every step on this island. I can't see how far away things are. So I learned where they are."
Brannock looked at him. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed, a short, deep, genuine sound.
"Wren would have liked you," he said. "Gods, he would have liked you."
They stood back to back in the middle of the stretch, between the rock and the log. The sun was low over the sea, and their shadows stretched out long across the sand. The wind was freshening from the west. Jason could feel Brannock's shoulders against his, broad and warm and very steady.
"On three," said Brannock. "Count your paces aloud, so we both know."
"One," said Jason, and stepped.
He counted. He didn't need to count. He knew where each step would fall, on the sand he had walked for thirty years. At thirteen, his foot came down beside the long bleached log, exactly where he had known it would.
He turned.
Brannock had turned too. He was standing beside the dark rock with the barnacles on it, perfectly placed, his pistol coming up in one smooth, practiced movement, fast, so much faster than Jason had expected.
Jason didn't look at him. He didn't need to. He knew exactly how far away the rock was.
Both pistols fired at once.
Something tugged hard at Jason's left arm, just above the elbow, and burned. He stood still, swaying slightly, with the smoke drifting away from his hand.
Across the sand, beside the dark rock, Brannock sat down.
He did it slowly, almost carefully, the way a tired man sits down at the end of a long day. His pistol fell out of his hand into the sand. He looked down at the front of his coat with an expression of mild surprise, and then up at Jason, and then out at the sea.
Jason walked over to him and knelt down beside him.
Brannock was breathing in short, shallow gasps. He looked up at Jason's face, and then at his left arm, where a line of blood was running down through the black lines, bright and red, from the place where his bullet had grazed it.
"Not a ghost, then," he said faintly. "Ghosts don't bleed."
"No."
"I'll tell them." Something that was almost a smile moved at the corner of his mouth. "Not that they'll believe me."
He was quiet for a moment, looking at the sea.
"Hesk," he said. "The island. It had a beach like this one. White sand. Nets drying on the rocks." His eyes were going unfocused. "I think about it every day."
Jason took his hand. Brannock's fingers closed around his, weakly, and held on.
He died a little while later, with the sun going down into the sea in front of him. Jason sat beside him on the sand until it was dark.
* * *
The warship sent one more boat, in the dead of night, with no lights and muffled oars.
Jason heard it from the cave. He heard it ground on the sand, and men whispering, and feet going up the beach toward the forest, toward the tree where he had left the man with the splinted leg. He lay by the fire with the rifle beside him and listened to them find him, and lift him, and carry him back down to the water. He didn't get up. He let them go.
In the morning, when Jason climbed to the clifftop, he could see men crowded along her rail, looking at the island through telescopes. He could see officers on her bridge, arguing. And he could see, when he turned and looked out to the west, why none of them were looking back at him for very long.
The sky was changing.
It had been clear at dawn. Now a long line of cloud was rising out of the western horizon, so dark it was almost purple, and so tall that its top was lost somewhere far up in the sky. It stretched from one edge of the world to the other. As he watched, lightning moved inside it, silently, lighting it from within like a lamp behind a curtain, again and again. The wind had dropped completely. The sea had gone flat and glassy and strange, and the birds had left the cliff. All of them. He could not hear a single one.
Behind him, out beyond the reef, he heard the warship's anchor chain come rattling up, and her engines start, and her funnels begin to pour out smoke. She was turning away, east, as fast as she could go, running before the thing in the west.
Jason stood on the clifftop and watched the wall of cloud come.
He had seen a great many storms in thirty-five years on this island. He had ridden them out on a raft, and in the cave, and in the open sea beyond the reef, swimming, with a friend's weight dragging at his arm. He had learned to read every one of them days before it came.
He had never seen anything like this.