Alexander Morgan woke up because something was hitting him in the face.
It was rain, cold and hard and driven sideways by the wind, and for a long moment he lay still beneath it without understanding anything at all. His whole body ached. His mouth tasted of salt and blood. Somewhere very close, waves were breaking against rock with a sound like cannon fire.
The last thing he remembered was the deck tilting.
He remembered it clearly, the way people remember the moment before a fall: the ship heeling hard under a sky gone green-black, the shouts of the crew torn away by the wind, the mainmast groaning somewhere above him. Then a wall of water, and cold, and nothing.
He sat up too fast and nearly blacked out again.
He was lying on a shelf of black rock at the foot of a cliff. The sea churned white a few meters below him, throwing spray up over the edge, and behind him the cliff rose into the storm until he lost its top in the rain. There was no ship, no wreckage, and no sail anywhere on the water. There was only the rain and the rock and the roar of the surf.
"Hello?" His voice cracked. "Is anyone—"
Then he saw the man.
He lay a few paces away, half on the rock and half in a shallow pool of seawater, one arm flung out toward Alexander as if he had been reaching for him. At first Alexander was sure he was dead. He was terribly thin, all angles and hollows, and his clothes had worn down to rags. His hair and beard were long and matted with salt, and one side of his face was covered by a crude patch of leaves and cloth.
Alexander scrambled over to him on his hands and knees, and stopped.
A branch of coral had gone into the man's side just above the hip. It was a jagged, pale spike as thick as two fingers, and it was still there. Blood ran from around it in thin streams that the rain washed away almost as fast as they came.
"Oh, gods," Alexander breathed. "Oh, gods, no."
The man's eye opened.
It was blue, a pale, washed-out blue, and it looked at Alexander without surprise or fear or anything else he could name. It was the emptiest look he had ever seen on a living face.
"You're alive," Alexander said stupidly. "Hold still. Hold still, I'll—"
He had no idea what he would do. His father had made him sit through the fleet surgeon's lectures, and he remembered almost nothing of them except that you should never pull out whatever had gone in. His hands hovered over the wound, shaking.
"I'm not a surgeon," he said. "I don't know what to—"
The man's lips moved. Alexander bent closer.
"Mask," the man whispered. His voice was dry and faint, barely there under the storm. "On the beach. White mask."
"What?"
"Other side of the island. Through the forest." Each word seemed to cost him something. "Bring it here."
Alexander stared at him. "You're bleeding to death, and you want a mask?"
The man didn't answer. He only looked at him with that flat, empty eye.
"No," Alexander said. "I'm not leaving you. We need to stop the bleeding, we need—" He looked around wildly at the rock and the sea and the rain, as if something useful might appear out of them. "We need to get you out of this weather, at least. I'm not leaving you here alone."
"Then I die," the man said.
He said it the way someone might remark that it was raining. There was no plea in it and no fear, only a fact laid down on the rock between them.
Alexander's throat closed.
He had grown up on the decks of his father's ships, and he knew the difference between a man who was begging and a man who was simply telling you how things stood. This was the second kind.
"Fine," he said, and hated how badly his voice shook. "Fine. But I'm getting you out of the rain first."
There was a cave behind them, a dark mouth in the cliff a little way above the rocks. Alexander got his arms under the man's shoulders and dragged him toward it as carefully as he could, and the man made no sound at all, not even when the coral scraped against the stone. He weighed almost nothing.
Inside, out of the wind, Alexander found the ashes of an old fire, a heap of dry leaves, and a spear leaning against the wall. Someone had been living here, he realized, and had been living here for a long time. He laid the man down on the leaves.
"Don't die," he said. "That's an order."
The man's eye had already closed.
* * *
The climb nearly killed him.
The cliff was slick with rain and the wind kept trying to peel him off it, and he could see almost nothing in the dark. He found his handholds by feel, jamming his fingers into cracks and his boots onto ledges barely wider than his thumb. Twice his foot slipped and he hung by his arms with his heart in his throat and the surf booming somewhere far below.
He's going to die anyway.
The voice was his own, cold and reasonable, and it had always been there, as far back as he could remember. It had spoken to him in his father's study and on the deck of his first ship, and it had never once said anything kind.
You're going to break your neck on this rock for a stranger and a trinket.
He kept climbing.
When he finally hauled himself over the top, he lay on his back in the wet grass for a long moment, gasping, with rain falling into his open mouth. Then he got up and started walking.
A wide plain stretched ahead of him, the grass flattened by the wind into long silver waves. Beyond it, darker than the dark sky, stood the forest. He crossed the plain at a stumbling run and plunged in among the trees, and the storm changed its voice around him, turning from a roar into a thousand hissing, creaking, whipping sounds. Branches lashed his face. Roots caught his boots. He lost his way almost at once and found it again only by following the ground downhill, toward a deeper, steadier sound that could only be the sea.
Then the trees ended, and he was on the beach.
The sand was pale, almost white even in the dark, and it ran away in both directions in a long, empty curve. The waves were huge here, rolling in out of the blackness and exploding into foam. And there, a little above the waterline, lay the mask.
Alexander walked up to it slowly.
It was white, perfectly white, as clean as if someone had set it down a moment ago. Rain was falling on it and the drops beaded on its surface and slid straight off without leaving a single trace. It lay in the sand, yet there was not one grain of sand on it. Its face was smooth and almost human, with narrow eye slits and fine carved lines running across it like veins beneath skin.
He picked it up. It was cold, and much lighter than it looked.
What is a mask going to do for him?
He didn't know. But he had seen the man's eye when he said then I die, and the man had believed it completely. Alexander decided, standing alone in the rain on a beach he had never seen before, that he would believe it too.
He tucked the mask inside his coat and started back.
The forest was worse the second time, and the plain was longer, and going down the cliff in the dark was far harder than climbing it had been. He slipped once near the bottom and slid the last few meters on his back, scraping his hands raw against the rock, and he lay at the foot of the cliff for a moment with his eyes squeezed shut before he could make himself get up.
By the time he stumbled into the cave, the storm was beginning to break. A gap had opened in the clouds, and moonlight fell through the cave mouth across the man lying on the leaves.
In that light, Alexander saw how much worse it had gotten. The leaves beneath the man were dark and soaked, and his breathing had turned shallow and wet, each breath a small, catching rasp.
"I have it," Alexander said. He dropped to his knees beside him. "I brought it. Now what?"
The man didn't answer. His eye stayed closed.
Alexander took the mask out of his coat and looked at it, and then at the man's gray, sunken face. He had no idea what he was supposed to do. There were no instructions, no words, nothing but a white face with narrow eyes, as cold as ever in his bloody hands.
He placed it over the man's face.
It settled there easily, as if it had been made for him.
Alexander waited. He waited for light, or a sound, or some kind of change, anything at all that would tell him he hadn't just risked his life for nothing.
Nothing happened.
The mask lay still. The man lay still beneath it, his chest rising and falling in the same shallow rasp. Outside, the rain slowed to a patter and the surf went on booming against the rocks.
"Please," Alexander whispered.
Nothing.
He sat back against the wall of the cave, suddenly too tired to hold himself up. His hands were covered in blood, the man's and his own, and when he looked at the mask he saw that none of it had stayed there. Every smear had slid off the white surface as if it had never touched it at all.
He laughed once, a small, broken sound, and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
It was a long time before he noticed that the blood around the coral had stopped spreading across the leaves.