Chapter 339
The lighthouse still dark, grey sky paling over the Mouth's mist. The white cottage at its foot, its door open so you can hear the sea. And on its step, in a lantern-girl's coat too big for her, blinking at the sky like someone who's forgotten what sky is: Vaka.
holding the little lamp from beside her bed, its flame small and warm in the grey morning. Mingus sitting against her leg, wagging. Mörda behind her in the doorway, grey, thin, smiling the astonished smile of someone who slept once.
looking up the black tower. At the dark lamp-room.
setting her jaw. Standing. Wobbling on legs that have walked nowhere for nine years. Mingus pressing against her to hold her up.
A girl climbing them slowly, one hand on the wall, the little lamp in the other, a golden retriever climbing beside her one step at a time, matching her pace exactly. Mörda floating up behind, her bare feet not touching.
ajar. Through it, a bandaged man sitting on the step below the lens, wide awake, his chin on his fists. And beside him, sitting against the dark lens-housing, a red-bearded giant, asleep.
looking up as the girl comes in. Holding a finger to his lips. Then seeing who it is. His face going soft.
kneeling in front of the sleeping giant. Looking at his face: four hundred years of never-sleeping in the lines of it, the slitted eyes shut, the beard like sea-foam on his chest.
lifting her little lamp, holding it up to his sleeping face, the way she held it up to every dreamer on a sinking ferry.
opening. Slitted. In a dark room, where he has seen nothing at all since the Sweep but what the Beam touches. And in front of them, lit by a lantern-girl's lamp, a face.
The dark lamp-room at the top of Fyren, grey dawn through the great window. A giant sitting on a step against a shuttered lens, his eyes open, and kneeling in front of him a girl of nineteen, thin as fifteen, holding a small lamp up to his face, its light on both of them, gold and warm. Beside her a golden dog with his tail going. In the corner, a bandaged man on the step, grinning, and a grey woman in the doorway with her hand over her mouth.
And in the giant's slitted eyes, reflected small: her face.
reaching out one huge hand, slowly, and laying it on her head, the way you'd touch something to be sure it's there.
(Mörda, in the doorway, looks away, smiling. That voice across the water was two voices.)
standing, stretching, every joint cracking.
getting up off the step. Slowly. Like a mountain getting up. Looking at the step as if he'll miss it. Going to the shutter-lever.
The shutters opening, clack clack clack, the lens catching the flame, and the Beam pouring out across the Current again, sweeping the dawn, the Deep, the Mouth, the Shallows. Fyren lit.
at the crank, the Beam swinging over the Shallows, and his slitted eyes going wide: the crescent's gone. The Order's fleet and the black-and-silver hunters, all of them under sail in the dawn, heading the same way, away, in a long line on the horizon: toward Ferdinand.
at the window beside him.
Krydog in Fyren's little dinghy with a pair of oars, Mingus already in the bow, Vaka climbing in with her lamp and a lantern-girl's coat.
on the jetty, not getting in, her black hair floating, the dawn making her thin.
at the lens, turning the Beam onto the Mouth's wall of mist, the mist parting, a door of silver.
The dinghy shooting through the Mouth in the Beam's one heartbeat, Krydog rowing like a man possessed, Vaka holding her lamp up in the bow, Mingus barking at the mist. Through. The door closing behind them, on time this time. Nothing sheared.
at the lamp-room window, watching the little boat go out into the Shallows in his Beam. And then doing something he has never done in four hundred years: turning the Beam to follow one boat. Lighting its way. Choosing it.
open on the lamp-room desk, and Hallbard's huge hand writing in it, slow: Fyren dark one night. Keeper slept. Vaka woke. One small boat chosen.
The lashed Marka and Upp Igen under sail on a clear sea, and behind them, coming up fast in a long silver lane of light from a lighthouse far behind, a dinghy: a bandaged man rowing, a girl with a lamp, a golden dog standing in the bow.
at the Marka's stern, seeing it. Going white. Then vaulting the rail into the sea before anyone can stop him.
Mingus leaping out of the dinghy's bow at the same moment, and the two of them meeting halfway in the sea in a tangle of fur and arms and spray, Kompis's face buried in a wet golden neck, the dog licking his ear, both of them sinking and coming up.
(Mingus licks his face, very thoroughly.)
rowing past them, grinning.
The Up-Again crew at the Upp Igen's rail roaring as their captain climbs aboard, Tihi flinging herself at him, Roffe lifting him off his feet, Emma holding his face, Flexsnus leaning and pretending not to have been worried, Perne crying one crimson tear from the masthead, Daniel nodding. Jeppson at the bow, not moving.
walking through his crew to the bow. To Jeppson. To the raw cut across the stem, pale, flat, weeping a little cork, where the bandaged fist used to be. Looking at it a long time.
laid flat on the raw wood where the carving of it used to be.
beside him, one eye shut, measuring his captain's fist with a boxwood rule, his chisel already out in his other hand, a block of new oak at his feet.