Chapter Two
The storm had blown itself out by morning, and the sea lay flat and silver under a sky the color of milk. Gulls wheeled above the harbor, quarreling over nothing, and the fishing boats rocked at their moorings as if they, too, were tired from the night. Up on the headland the old lighthouse stood with its lamp gone dark, a white finger pointing at the clouds.
Mara climbed the hill with a basket of bread on one arm and a coil of rope on the other. She had promised her grandfather she would check the lamp before noon, and she meant to keep that promise, though every step up the wet path made her boots slide. At the top she stopped to breathe and looked back at the village, small and crooked below her, smoke curling from every chimney.
Inside, the tower smelled of salt and lamp oil. She began to climb the spiral stairs, counting them the way she always did. Somewhere above her a shutter banged in the wind, and she thought of the children in the village who would soon be racing along the beach in search of treasure the storm had thrown ashore, and how they would tease her for spending the bright morning indoors with dusty glass and old brass. She reached the lamp room and wiped the lenses one by one. In the third pane she found a crack no wider than a hair, and in the crack, caught like a pressed flower, lay a single feather of deep and shining blue. She had never seen a bird that color. Not on the cliffs, not in her grandfather’s books, not anywhere.
She turned the feather in the light. It was warm, as if it had only just left the bird, and when she held it near the great lens the glass began, very faintly, to glow.
“Well,” said a voice behind her. “You found it before I did.”
Mara spun around. A boy stood at the top of the stairs, soaked to the knees, his hair full of sand. He looked about her age, and he was grinning as if the whole morning had been arranged for his amusement.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “Nobody comes up here but us.”
“I came in with the tide,” he said, as though that explained everything. “And that feather is mine. Or it will be, once you help me find the other two.”
“The other two?”
He crossed to the window and pointed past the harbor, past the last buoy, to where the water turned from grey to a deep and impossible blue. “The storm shook them loose last night. One is in the village. One is out there.” He glanced back at her, and for the first time the grin slipped. “And if they’re still apart when the light goes on tonight, your lighthouse won’t be the only thing that stays dark.”
Mara looked at the feather, still glowing softly in her palm, then at the boy, then at the long blue line of the horizon. Below them a gull cried once and was quiet. She thought of her grandfather, of the lamp, of every ship that had ever found its way home by the light of Wren Point.
“All right,” she said, and tucked the feather into her coat. “Where do we start?”
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