Read Chapter 6: The Lighthouse Hour

The wind had found its teeth again by the time Yann climbed the spiral stairs of the Kermor light. Salt spray rattled against the glass like thrown gravel, and the beam swung its slow, indifferent arc over a sea the colour of hammered lead. He set the lantern wick low—not for the light, but for himself—and sat on the iron landing with his back against the cold stone.

He had both lockets in his coat pocket. Silver against silver, they clicked whenever he moved. Isolde. Marie-Anne. Two names. One erased from the manifest, the other a dead woman's maiden name that had set Anne-Marie's hands trembling around her teacup.

He did not sleep.

He tried. He closed his eyes and let the storm sing its old song—the creak of rigging, the slap of water on hull, the particular silence of a man alone on watch. But every time his breathing slowed, he saw the row of nine names in Father Le Bris's registry, and above them, in a fainter hand, a correction to the passenger count. *Ten souls. Correction: nine.*

Someone had wanted the tenth to never exist.

Yann opened his eyes.

The beam had passed. The glass was black, then grey, then black again. He checked his pocket watch by the faint glow of the ember lamp: 1:47. Thirteen minutes to the hour the boy had warned him about. The hour the dead kept.

He stood, crossed to the window, and pressed his forehead against the cold pane. The sea below churned white against the reef, and beyond that, nothing but darkness and the ragged edge of the storm. He counted his heartbeats. Slow. Steady. The heart of a man who had already drowned once, in every way that mattered.

At 1:58 the rain stopped.

Not eased. Stopped. As if a hand had closed over the sky. The wind died in a single held breath, and the silence was so sudden that Yann felt it in his ears, a pressure like being underwater.

He reached for the brass spyglass on the ledge and raised it to his eye, scanning the black water. Nothing. Just the swell, curling against the rocks. He turned the glass west, across the open sea—

The schooner was there.

No sail, no light, no sound. She sat low in the water, broadside to the light, her hull streaming weed and shadows. The Marie-Claire. He knew her now, from the registry sketch Father Le Bris had shown him—three-masted, square-rigged, a clipper's narrow waist and proud bow. She rode the swell as if anchored, though no anchor line dropped from her chains.

On her deck, a figure stood at the rail.

A woman in white. Her dress moved like fog in a wind Yann could not feel. She faced the shore—faced the lighthouse—and one arm was raised, pale against the dark, pointing.

Not at him.

Past him.

Yann swung the spyglass along the line of her arm. The beam of the lighthouse had completed its rotation and now swept over the cliff path to the east, illuminating the low stone wall and the gorse bent flat from the storm. Beyond that, where the ground rose toward Anne-Marie's cottage—

She was pointing at the village.

At Saint-Armel.

Yann lowered the glass. The woman's arm had not moved. She stood as still as a figurehead carved from bone, and though he could not see her face through the distance and dark, he felt the weight of her gaze settle on him. On the tower. On the two pieces of silver burning in his pocket.

He counted the names again. The crew had been nine. The highborn girl had been the tenth, smuggled aboard by her father, hidden in the captain's cabin. Anne-Marie had called her *the captain's daughter*—but the innkeeper's wife had used another word for the woman who left the second locket.

*Tall. Fair. Dressed like someone who had not grown up on this coast.*

Yann pressed the spyglass harder against his eye socket, trying to see her face. The ship rolled, slow and silent, and the woman swayed with it, still pointing. Her arm was not flesh. It was too white, too fine—like a bone bleached by thirty years of salt and sea.

Then the ship began to turn.

Not a manoeuvre. She simply rotated, as if on a turntable, her bow swinging away from the light, toward the deeper black of the channel. The woman at the rail did not move. She kept her arm extended toward the shore, and as the ship swung, it swept across the horizon like the hand of a clock—pointing at the village, at the church, at the manor on the hill.

At the de Kerandraon house.

Yann's breath fogged the glass. He blinked, wiped the lens with his sleeve, and looked again.

The woman was gone. The deck was bare, masts stripped of every shred of canvas, and the ship was underway—not sailing, but sliding, hull cutting a silent wake through the dying swell. She headed toward the reef where Yann had first seen her vanish, and as she neared the rocks, she did not break apart. She simply went under, like a blade sinking into a sheath of black water.

One second she was there. The next, the sea was empty, and the rain began again—soft at first, in fits, then hard, hammering the glass in sheets.

Yann lowered the spyglass.

His hands were steady. They had been steady since the wreck of the *Jeanne d'Arc* had taken his crew years ago, steady through every storm watch and every sleepless night since. But when he unbuttoned his coat to check the pocket over his heart, his fingers fumbled.

Both lockets were still there.

He drew them out. The silver was cold—colder than his skin, colder than the brass of the spyglass. And on the face of the second locket—the one engraved *Marie-Anne*—he saw something new.

A scratch.

Thin and bright, as if made by a needle, cutting across the name in a single short line. He turned it over. On the back, where the surface had been smooth and blank when the innkeeper's wife had pressed it into his palm, there was now a mark.

An anchor. Crude, but unmistakable—carved deep into the silver, the flukes scored with care.

Yann stared at it. His thumb traced the grooves. This was not a woman's jewellery. This was something a sailor might carve, in a dark hour, with the point of a knife.

The woman from the inn had left the locket. He had assumed she was the one who had carved it—or that it had come from her, untouched. But the mark was fresh. The mark was *new*.

He turned quickly to the window. The sea was empty. The rain fell in curtains, and the beam of the Kermor light swept its solemn arc over the village below—over the church spire, over the clustered roofs, over the manor on the hill.

The woman in white had been pointing at the village. But she had not been pointing at the de Kerandraon house.

Yann shifted his gaze down. Down, past the manor gates, past the harbour wall, to the inn where he had eaten supper. Where a pale woman in mourning clothes had left him a silver locket carved with a name that was not hers—and a fresh anchor mark that made his blood run cold.

She had been pointing at him.

At the inn. At the woman who had given him the second locket.

At whoever would be waiting for him when he returned.