Chapter 12: The Lighthouse at the Right Hour

The lighthouse was visible from the coastal path only at certain angles, when the fog thinned enough to permit it — a white column above the cliff-line, its lamp not yet lit at this hour, indistinguishable from the last grey of the sky except by the fact of its stillness. Everything else in Ashveil moved, at least a little. The lighthouse did not.

Maren had been looking at it for three days.

She left Aldric's house at four forty-seven, when the afternoon light had already given up the pretense of being light and was negotiating its retreat into something more honest. She told him she was going to Petra's. He had looked up from the paper he was reading — not a newspaper, something older, dense with close type — and said, with the precision of a man who had been expecting this, that she should be back before full dark.