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Chapter 1
Part I: The Call
The lighthouse had been blind for two years when the sea came clapping its hands, slapping foam up the cliff as if to wake the island. Mara watched from the boathouse, fingers tight around the splintered railing, the wind worrying her hair into her eyes. The tower’s glass crown sulked black against thunderclouds, no beam cutting the dusk, no patient heartbeat sweeping the horizon. It looked like an old giant with its eye put out.
“They’re saying the freighter’s already past Gull Spit,” Tavi said, hauling a coil of rope onto his shoulder as if it weighed nothing. He had the sea salt changeable in him—brown and blue like a shallow cove, quick with a grin except when he wasn’t. Tonight he didn’t grin. “If the light doesn’t come on, they’ll hit the teeth.”
Mara’s throat tightened. She had turned her back on this tower when her mother’s coat came home empty—found on the upper stairs, slick with brine and mourning. She had oiled the brass and polished the lens as a girl, held the wick steady while storms hurled themselves at the glass. When the last storm stole her mother, Mara left the island without a backward glance. And now she was back, standing among the same rusted tools, everyone’s eyes on the daughter who refused to climb those stairs.
“The lens,” she said. “The light won’t throw without it.”
Tavi nodded. “Dropped into the Devil’s Mouth the night the lantern blew. The elders tried at one tide, but…” He lifted his hands, a helpless gesture. “Holes breathe. The current is mean. No one wanted to follow the keeper’s daughter into a grave.”
“Good,” Mara said, before she could stop herself. “I won’t ask them to.” The sea slapped, insistently. Somewhere a buoy bell clanged. She felt again the heat of lantern glass on her cheek, the rasp of her mother’s voice: The sea doesn’t hate you, little light. It’s just too big to notice if it hurts you by accident. It will hurt you anyway. So look, and listen. Learn the rhythms and you can dance with a storm without being thrown.
Mara straightened. “We have one window. Last of the low tide, before the storm swallows it. Help me with the lines.”
Tavi’s grin found its way back, like a lifeline tossed across a gap. “That’s the Mara I remember.”
