Epilogue: Sixteen Years Later

The morning of Sennet's sixteenth birthday, Ixara woke before dawn and lay listening to her daughter argue with the wind.

It was a thing the girl did. She had done it since she could walk: stood at the edge of the terrace in the gray hour before sunrise, barefoot, with her braids unbound, and held a conversation with the weather in a low steady voice, in three languages. Ixara could not hear the words from the hammock. She did not need to. She knew the shape of them. Where have you come from? How long will you stay? What do you want?

She lay with her eyes shut and her hand on the empty place beside her.

The hammock was cool. Garrick had risen an hour ago. She had felt him go, as she felt everything now: the quiet withdrawal of his warmth, the soft pad of his feet on the planks, the faint click of the door. She knew where he was. He would be in the chart-house at the head of the cove, with his spectacles pushed up into his graying hair and a cup of bitter island tea cooling at his elbow, going over the watch-reports of the night.

He did it every dawn. He had done it for sixteen years.

She smiled in the dark.

…

The village had grown.

She saw it from the terrace, as the light came up: a green-roofed scatter of houses along the curve of the cove, with smoke rising straight from a dozen cook-fires and a stream running bright through the center. There were nearly nine hundred Ahtelan now. The sick had risen, and the old had lived, and in the years since the Heart came home there had been more births than the island had known in a century. Children ran everywhere. They swung from the lianas. They fished from the rocks. They shouted in Ahtelan and in English and in the clipped hybrid argot of the harbor, a bright tangle of tongues that no linguist in London would ever have believed.

And on the hill above the cove, shaded by a grove of tamarind and teyu, stood the school.

It was a long low building of pale wood, open on three sides, with a roof of thatched palm and a garden of herbs at the back. A bell hung from a beam. Beneath it, on a bench of woven cane, in a gray muslin gown with a pen behind her ear, sat a woman of thirty-three with a mass of black-brown hair and a scrap of paper in each hand.

"No, no, no," said Odette, to the empty classroom. "It's not he go, it's he goes. Third person singular. I've told you a hundred times." She scratched out a line. "Sennet! Is that you?"

"It's me, Aunt."

"Come and look at this. Daro's boy has spelled 'cannon' with a k."

"He does it on purpose."

"I know he does it on purpose. He's nine. They all do." Odette looked up. She was brown from the sun, lean and straight, with the clear gray eyes of her brother and a scatter of laughter-lines at the corners. Her signet ring hung on a cord at her throat. She had not coughed in sixteen years. She ran the school, the library, the dispensary, and an increasingly fierce campaign to establish an Ahtelan press, and she had put Pike in his place at four separate Council meetings. She was the happiest person Ixara knew.

She waved a hand.

"Happy birthday, darling. Don't be late for breakfast. Hatch's cousin's custard, with the nutmeg. I had Tobias make it special."

"Aunt, there's no such thing as Hatch's cousin's custard."

"There is now."

Sennet laughed.

…

Ixara watched her cross the terrace.

She was tall. Taller than Ixara, and nearly as tall as her father, long-legged and lean as a hunting cat, with her mother's dark cocoa skin and the straight, square, determined jaw of the Wynmores. Her hair fell to her waist in a hundred braids, tied with cords of green and violet. She wore a short tunic of bark-cloth and a belt of braided hide, and at her hip, in a sheath of ray-skin, a knife with a handle of fish-bone. Her feet were bare and callused.

Her eyes were gray and green.

They had not changed. They were the same two grave, ancient, amused eyes that had looked up from a basket in the stern of a boat. But they had grown into a face that made the village girls blush and the old men fall silent. She walked with a loose, rolling, easy stride, a sailor's gait, learned on her father's decks. She carried a long staff of black ironwood. And as she came, the wind that had been teasing at her braids fell still, and the leaves of the teyu tree bent toward her, very slightly, as plants bend toward the sun.

She sat down on the edge of the terrace and put her head on Ixara's knee.

"Good morning, Mother."

"Good morning, little bird."

"I'm not little."

"No. I know." Ixara stroked the braids. "Sixteen. I remember when you were the size of a loaf."

"I remember it, too."

"You do not."

"I do." Sennet looked up, with those two strange eyes. "I remember the boat. I remember Pike's hands. I remember the lantern. I remember Father's face." She smiled. "He was crying. He thought I didn't see."

"You saw."

"I saw everything. I always do." The smile faded a little. "It's been a heavy gift."

"I know."

"Sometimes I wish I didn't."

"I know, child."

They sat together in the dawn, in the cool green hush, and below them the cove brightened from gray to gold.

…

She had been taught well.

Ixara knew it with a kind of aching pride that never quite eased. She had taught her the songs. She had taken her into the forest at three, and shown her the roots; at five, she had sat with her in the shrine and listened to the Heart. At seven, Sennet had walked into the dream alone and returned with the name of a tree that had been dead for a thousand years. At ten, she had healed a fisherman's broken leg with her hands. At twelve she had spoken to the sea, and the sea had answered. There was nothing in the old lore that the girl had not mastered, and a great deal that she had discovered for herself.

And Garrick had taught her the rest.

It had been a strange education. He had begun it on the beach, when she was four, with a stick and a patch of wet sand. He had drawn a coastline. He had drawn a harbor, and a fleet. He had shown her how a line of ships turned, and why the weather gauge mattered, and where the guns of a frigate could and could not reach. She had listened with her chin in her hand, and then she had picked up the stick and moved the ships. And Garrick had sat back on his heels and stared.

She's better than I am, he had said that night. She's four.

She is her father's daughter.

She is nothing of the kind. She's something else entirely.

They had gone on. He had taught her navigation and gunnery, mathematics, the history of every naval war since Salamis. He had taught her to read the weather and to read a man. He had taught her to fence, and to swim, and to shoot. He had taken her out in the cutters, and let her command. He had put her aboard the Albatross, in the hands of Jory Pell, who was thirty now and had a gray streak in his hair and a green-and-violet pennant at his masthead, and let her sail her to Madeira and back. And at every step, with a quiet, unwavering, terrible tenderness, he had taught her the one lesson that he had learned in a cellar full of smoke:

You do not win by being stronger. You win by being ready.

…

They ate breakfast in the long hall.

It was the custom. On the day a child of the village turned sixteen, the whole Council ate with her. They sat on mats round a low table, in the cool green light, under the great lamp of the Heart. There was fruit, and fish, and the custard that did not exist. There was Kesh, ancient now, with a white beard and a voice like gravel. There was Tuwa, ninety if she was a day, wrapped in a shawl. There was Daro, thick through the chest and gray at the temples, with a wife and four children and the heavy easy authority of a war-chief. There was Dr. Pike.

He had grown old.

He sat at the foot of the table with his spectacles on his nose and a vast book open beside his plate. His hair was white. His hands shook a little, but his eyes were as sharp as ever. He had spent sixteen years on the island, writing. He had examined three thousand patients. He had charted the pulse, the lungs, the blood. He had written eleven volumes on the Aurelith's effect on living tissue, none of which he proposed to publish. "They'd call me a madman," he said, cheerfully. "Or worse, a Methodist."

Mrs. Hatch's grave lay under the tamarinds above the school.

She had died six years ago, in her sleep, at seventy-six. She had left the island's first kitchen-garden, a recipe for plum pudding, and a note pinned to her pillow that read I told you so. Tobias had wept for a week. Then he had put on his black coat, and taken charge of the kitchens, and went about the village looking like an undertaker with a grievance, and the island had never eaten so well.

There were letters. They came twice a year, by Nell's cutter, which had made a very good living ferrying cargo between Wapping and the Canaries. Nell herself had come once, five years ago, a stout weathered gray-haired woman with a patch over one eye, and had spent three days drinking Kesh under the table. She had left with a trunk of ashbloom seeds and a promise to return.

Perpetua wrote from Paris.

Her letters were long, witty, and wicked. She had married a marquis. She had buried him. She was running a salon in the rue Saint-Honoré, where the wits of Europe gathered to say clever things about the Crown. She sent news. The Duke of Draymoor had died in the Tower, two years after his trial, of a fever. The Meridian Society had dissolved. The Consistory of the Lantern had been reformed by Act of Parliament, and its last Magister, our friend Osmund Crale, had resigned his office in the winter after the burning, burned the Order's registers in the courtyard of Lanternhold, and walked barefoot to Rome. He had entered a silent house in the Apennines. He had not spoken since. I have it from a Dominican, she wrote, that he spends his days copying out the names of the people he condemned. He has reached eleven hundred. I think it will take him the rest of his life.

Ixara had read it twice. She had put it away, and said nothing, and went out to the garden and sat in the sun.

…

The black sails came in the afternoon.

She was in the shrine, and heard the bell. It was the great bronze bell at the head of the cove, which had not rung in sixteen years. It rang once, twice, three times, slow and deep and tolling, and the sound went out across the green mountain and set the birds flying up from the canopy in a roar of wings.

She ran.

She ran as she had not run in years, out of the shrine and down the terrace steps and along the path through the trees, with her heart hammering and her skirt in her fist. She passed the school. Odette stood in the door with her hand to her mouth, the children clustered round her skirts. She passed the village, where the women were gathering their babies and the men were running for their spears. She reached the headland, and the old stone watch-tower, and the crowd that stood about its foot, and pushed through, and climbed.

Garrick was at the top.

He stood at the parapet with a long brass telescope in his hand. He had changed his coat. It was the black coat of a sea-captain, his oldest, patched at the elbow. His hair was gray. His face was lined and brown. He looked, she thought with a sudden catch, exactly as he had looked on the deck of the Albatross sixteen years before, tall and lean and still, with his eyes on the horizon.

"How many?" she said.

"Seventeen."

"Seventeen."

"Seventeen sail." He did not lower the glass. "Eleven ships of the line. Four frigates. Two transports. They are three leagues out, bearing west-northwest, steering for the cove." He paused. "They fly no flag."

"No flag."

"Nor does the leader." He handed her the glass. "Look."

She raised it.

The sea lay flat and shining under the afternoon sun. Beyond the headland, low on the horizon, a line of sails stood against the blue. She saw them as a row of dark teeth. They were not white. They were not the color of canvas. They were black, every one, tall, square-rigged, rigid as iron, and under each, a hull of black-painted oak bristled with gunports. They came on in a long line abreast, slowly, with the deliberate unhurried weight of a thing that knew its own strength.

She knew what they were.

She had seen them in the smoke.

She had seen them in the vault, in the Hall, in the first moment of her vision: a black ship on a black sea, and sails like the wings of a bird. She had seen them in the cell, in the dark. She had seen them every night in her dreams for sixteen years, and had told herself, each dawn, that they were only a dream.

She lowered the glass.

"It's begun," she said.

"Yes."

"Sixteen years."

"Exactly sixteen." He took her hand. His was warm and rough and steady. "The child said it would be. She said she would stand on a cliff, with a spear, and a hundred ships below her."

"Not a hundred."

"No. Seventeen. It's a beginning."

She closed her eyes.

Mother, she thought. I am not ready.

I will never be ready.

But I am here.

…

Sennet was on the cliff.

She stood on the edge of the headland, a hundred feet above the sea, where the wind came in off the water in great sweet gusts, and the surf thundered against the rocks below. She had her staff in her hand. She wore her tunic and her knife. The wind took her braids and flung them out behind her, a banner of green and violet and black, and the sun struck her face.

She was not looking at the ships.

She was looking at her parents. They came up behind her, slowly, hand in hand, and stopped. Ixara saw the girl's shoulders rise and fall. She saw the gray eye and the green turn, with that grave, ancient, patient look, from one face to the other.

"They're here," said Sennet.

"Yes."

"I knew they would be." Her voice was low and steady. It did not shake. "I felt them. Three nights ago, in the dream. I did not want to tell you. I wanted you to have one more birthday."

"We know."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be." Garrick stepped forward. He laid a hand on her shoulder. It was a gentle touch, and it trembled. "You had us for sixteen years. That's more than most."

"Father."

"I mean it."

"I know you do." She turned. She looked at him, and a smile touched the corner of her mouth, quick and rueful. "You're going to tell me I'm ready."

"Are you?"

"I don't know."

"Good. Then you are." He squeezed her shoulder. "I have never in my life been ready for anything. It never stopped me. It only made me careful."

Sennet laughed.

She turned back to the sea.

The fleet was nearer. Ixara could see it without the glass now: the black sails filling the horizon, the foam at the bows, the long dark hulls riding the swell. She could see the guns. She could see, small as ants on the nearest deck, the red coats of marines. She could hear, faintly, over the roar of the surf, the thin high sound of a trumpet.

Behind them, up the path, she heard the Ahtelan gathering. They came in silence, hundreds of them, with spears and bows and slings, and stood in rows along the edge of the headland, looking out. Daro was at their head, grim and gray, with a war-club in his hand. Kesh leaned on his staff. Pike had come, with his big book clasped to his chest, white and shaking. Odette stood among them with a bundle of bandages and her chin raised. Jory's black-sailed Albatross lay at anchor in the cove, her guns run out, her crew at their stations.

No one spoke.

They were waiting.

They were waiting for her.

Sennet stood at the edge of the cliff with her back to them all. The wind blew, warm and sweet. The surf boomed. Slowly, with infinite deliberation, she lifted her staff. She planted it on the rock. And she raised her head, and for the first time Ixara saw her daughter as she would be: not a girl at all, but a woman grown, tall and terrible and shining, with the sea at her feet and the sun on her face and the light of the Heart in her eyes.

She spoke quietly. She did not turn her head.

"Mother."

"Yes."

"Father."

"Yes."

"I'm going to need you both."

"We are here," said Ixara.

"We are not going anywhere," said Garrick.

Sennet nodded.

She drew a long breath. Her gray eye and her green eye burned in the westering light. She looked out across the glittering water, at the seventeen black ships coming on with the whole weight of an old world behind them. And she smiled, a small, fierce, joyous smile, the smile of a girl who has been waiting all her life for a door to open.

"Let them come," said Sennet.