fic: The Lighthouse
(do i need a note for this? it's been so long since i posted original fic i don't remember what potential readers might or might not expect. it's about 3700 words.)
Sabin doesn’t like heights and doesn’t trust the sea, and he knows Fate has a sense of humor because he fell in love with a lighthouse keeper. Marcus is solid and reassuring in body and fanciful and romantic in his soul, and even after nearly four years, Sabin’s heart twists with anxiety when Marcus tells him “I’m going to whistle for ships” and “Leave a lantern in the window for me”, pulls on his oilskin coat, takes the lantern hanging by the door, and walks out of the keeper’s cottage into the teeth of a storm.
This is Marcus’s job, Sabin knows. It’s what allows the two of them to live in the little lighthouse keeper’s cottage, and what allows Sabin to set up his workshop in the first floor of the lighthouse, his woodworker's tools and equipment and raw materials, so he can still practice his trade.
This is home. To keep it, Marcus must go out into a world made gray and formless and only half visible by driving rain and thick, overlapping clouds, in order to maintain his lighthouse and the giant lamp at the very top. And to keep him, Sabin slaps a lid on his worry and takes up his own work. There's little he can do by way of fabrication inside the cottage, but he can still sketch and design and plan.
He doesn’t feel as if he’s gotten very far into it when the door blows open and Marcus says, breathless and surprised, “There’s someone out there. Get your coat and come with me.”
“Who would be out in this storm?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want him to slip and fall down the cliff. Come on.”
Sabin isn’t sure what kind of help he’ll be, but Marcus is standing in the open door letting in the wind and rain and looking impatient, and sometimes there’s no point in arguing. So Sabin puts on his coat, pulls up the hood, and follows Marcus out of the cottage.
The rain pelts his face despite the hood and he reconsiders. The lighthouse and the keeper’s cottage are on a promontory jutting out into the sea, a sharp finger of land pointing away from towns and farms and civilized people. The cliffs fall black and jagged to the rocks below. Sabin knows Marcus will keep him far enough from the edge that falling off it is no risk, even in this weather, and yet.
It’s a long drop, especially for a man who doesn’t like heights.
He grabs Marcus’s sleeve, and when Marcus turns a questioning look on him, he says “Why don’t I stay here and hold the lantern to guide you.”
“I need the light. I won’t let you fall into the sea. I promise.” He twists his wrist, grabbing Sabin’s hand, and pulls him away from the cottage and into the gloom.
To Sabin’s great surprise, there is indeed someone out here, a dim figure without a coat creeping along the edge of the land. His heart skips at the thought of this person losing their footing and sliding over the side. The rain and the growing dark make it increasingly hard to see where the land ends and the air begins, even with the lantern in Marcus’s hand, and the ground is slippery under his boots as he and Marcus reach the stranger.
“What are you doing out here?” Marcus demands. He has a grip on the person’s upper arm, tight enough to hold but not so tight as to hurt. This close, the stranger doesn’t look very big, or very old. “Come with us.” He turns, pulls the stranger back towards the cottage. Sabin follows, both relieved that they’ve retrieved this mad stranger, and anxious about the storm-roiled sea an unknown distance to his right.
Light from the lamp inside turns the front windows of the keeper’s cottage into glowing glass squares, guiding the three of them home and welcoming them inside. Marcus puts the lantern on the table. He and Sabin shrug out of their oilskins, hang them on hooks next to the door, wipe their wet faces on their not-as-wet sleeves, and get a good look at the stranger they’ve just rescued.
The stranger is a girl, fourteen or fifteen and skinny, wearing boys’ pants and a sweater made heavy and shapeless from the rain. A tangled braid of brown hair hangs down her back.
“What were you doing out there?” Marcus repeats, at the same time Sabin pulls a chair away from the table and tells her to sit. “Who are you?”
“My name’s Katrin,” she says.
“I’m Marcus, this is Sabin. Where did you come from?”
“If I tell you, you’ll send me back.” Her chin lifts.
“You can’t leave those clothes on,” Sabin says. “You'll catch cold. Marcus, get her something dry to wear.”
“I want to know what you were doing on the Point,” Marcus says to Katrin. “You could’ve blown over the cliff and been killed.” His voice is tight and Sabin is probably the only person, including Marcus himself, who can hear the tremor in it.
“Marcus,” Sabin says, putting a hand on his arm. “Get her a nightshirt.”
“But - “
“Go.”
Marcus presses his lips together, turns on his heel, and stomps into the other room.
“He was afraid,” Sabin tells Katrin. Marcus is making a lot of noise and Sabin is tempted to shut the door. “His job is to protect people and it would destroy him if someone fell off the edge of his land.”
“I’m not stupid,” Katrin says. “I know that.”
“But what were you doing out there? Are you running from home?”
Her chin lifts again. “And what if I am?”
“We should take you back when the rain stops.”
“I won’t go.”
“No?”
“Fine,” Marcus huffs, appearing with a nightshirt - Sabin’s, to judge from the length - and holding it out to Katrin. He gestures to the back room with his free hand. “I put a towel on the bed so you can dry off.”
“Bring your clothes out here and we’ll hang them by the stove,” Sabin adds.
Katrin takes the nightshirt and vanishes behind the door.
“I’m sorry I made you go out in that,” Marcus says. The windows rattle as if to support his apology. “I thought I’d need help. What did she say to you?”
“I think she’s running from home, and she doesn’t want to go back.”
“We can’t take her now anyway.” Marcus looks out a window at the storm and taps his nose thoughtfully. He knows this part of the country better than Sabin does, and is no doubt trying to calculate where Katrin might have run from, and why. He’s calmer than he was. Banging drawers around must have vented some of his fear. “She’ll stay here tonight and we’ll make a decision in the morning.”
By the time Katrin emerges from the other room, wearing Sabin’s nightshirt and with her arms full of wet clothes, Sabin has lit the stove and shaken tea into a mug, and Marcus has gone back outside.
“Where is he?” Katrin asks. She’s still wearing her boots.
“Getting something I can make for dinner. Let me take those.” He pulls the chairs away from the table, draping her sweater over one and her pants over the other. They drip. “I’m making you some tea to warm you up. Do you want to tell me why you ran?”
She just looks at him.
The door blows open and slams shut. “Salt fish, carrots, those greens you like,” Marcus says. He turns to Katrin. “Are you hungry? The storm is still blowing. You’ll stay with us tonight.”
“Thank you,” she says. She sits in the chair with her pants drying over the back and looks at Sabin. “If I tell you, do you promise not to make me go back?”
“I don’t think I can,” he says. “But I promise not to judge you.”
“My mother had another child after me, a girl. She didn’t live. My father hired on a merchant ship, a two year contract, but he never came home.”
“Lost at sea?” Marcus asks. “Did the ship return without him?”
Katrin shrugs. “Does it matter? We never saw him again. I think it was the baby’s death that drove him away.”
“How old were you?” Sabin asks gently. The kettle starts to whistle. He pours water into the mug and hands it to her.
“Seven when he left. Ten when my mother remarried. She gave her second husband a boy, then twin girls.” She leans over the mug, breathes in steam. “She doesn’t have time for me. She won’t miss me.”
“She’s your mother,” Marcus says, sounding faintly scandalized.
Another shrug. “She has the babies. Well, Pol’s four, he isn’t really a baby anymore. He’s a handful. So are the twins. And her husband - “ She pauses. She sips her tea. “I don’t want to be in the house with him.” She trains a direct gaze on Sabin and then Marcus, who is standing near the table with his hands full of greens and carrots and dried fish. “No one will look for me here and I know you won’t hurt me.”
How can you know that? Sabin wants to ask her, even as he thinks he already knows the answer. Marcus is broad in the shoulders and solidly built, and while he's no taller than the average man, he walks with purpose and can be intimidating appearing out of a storm in his oilskin coat with the hood pulled up. But his eyes are kind, his hands are gentle, and his blond hair, worn unfashionably long and right now pulled back with a piece of string, is more likely to cause a girl to mock him than to fear him. And Sabin, while a little taller than the average man, is neither particularly broad nor excessively strong. His hands are marked with tiny scars from his years working with wood and the sharp instruments that cut and shape it, but no casual observer has ever looked at his hands or his face and thought him dangerous.
Marcus walks around Katrin to hand Sabin his bounty. Sabin dumps it on the table and turns to find a knife to cut up the carrots.
“I came from Bottin,” Katrin tells her mug.
“Bottin is... a day’s ride,” Marcus hedges. “At least. Depending on when you leave and how you go. Why did you come so far? You didn’t walk that whole way.”
“I told you.”
“You caught a ride on a wagon,” Sabin suggests. “Bad luck to hit the storm.”
Katrin just shrugs. Sabin’s pretty sure that’s all they’re going to get out of her.
“Well,” Marcus says, and repeats himself - “You can’t go home tonight. You’ll sleep in the bed, we’ll sleep out here.”
“Dinner first,” Sabin tells him, and points to the other chair. “Sit.”
Because Katrin won’t tell them any more about herself, Marcus entertains her with old seafaring stories and the history of the lighthouse and a couple of farm country myths from his childhood. Sabin tells her about the town where he grew up, north and inland, and that Fate laughed when he and Marcus met.
“I don’t like heights,” he explains. “When I first came here, Marcus took me up to show me the lamp - he was so proud of it - it was night, and while I couldn’t see the sea, I could hear it crashing at the bottom of the cliff.”
“I told him to look up,” Marcus says, smiling. “Not even out at the horizon - up at the stars.”
“He knew if I looked down, I’d leave and he’d never see me again.”
“Would you have gone back home?” Katrin asks pointedly.
“I wasn’t running from anything. Besides, I had work in town.”
“Thank you for letting me stay.”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” Marcus says. “It’s too bad you couldn’t have come in better weather. I could take you up to see the lamp too.”
“Not in this wind,” Sabin says. He gathers the plates and forks and mugs, puts them in the washbucket.
Katrin announces that she’d like to go to sleep now, so Marcus and Sabin fetch a spare blanket from the back room and leave her to her privacy.
“She couldn’t have left Bottin later than yesterday,” Marcus says, as Sabin washes the dishes and he dries. “She might have known the storm would cover her tracks today, but did no one come after her?”
“She said no one would miss her,” Sabin reminds him.
“What are we going to do with her?”
“Right now? Let her sleep.”
But it’s a good question. What are they going to do with a fifteen-year-old girl? All of Marcus’s maps are rolled up in the other room, save for a map of sea routes along the coastline that’s tacked to the wall, but Sabin is nearly certain that Bottin is inland. Did Katrin come to the Point intending to work here? What could she possibly know about working at a lighthouse?
But by that token, what did he know? And he stayed. And she isn’t afraid of the place, like he was.
Marcus blows out the lamp sitting on the table and he and Sabin arrange themselves on the floor. Sabin makes a command decision, wraps his arms around Marcus, and murmurs “We’re going to keep her” in his ear.
“She’s not a puppy, Sabin,” Marcus says, and Sabin can hear him grinning.
“No, she’s a fifteen-year-old girl who’s afraid to be around her stepfather. We can’t let her go back home.”
“But what are we - “
“Marcus. You know I’m right.”
Marcus sighs. “I know. You are. We’ll have to move into the lighthouse. There isn’t enough room for all of us in here. She’ll want her privacy.” He shifts, trying to settle himself on the floor. “What if her people come for her?”
“I don’t think they will. Why would they look here?”
“She did.”
Sabin considers that. Is it reasonable that a girl from some inland town would know about the lighthouses along the coast? If her father tried to escape the memory of his dead child by going to sea, maybe it is. But then why did she choose the lighthouse on the Point? Is it just the closest one to Bottin?
She said she knew he and Marcus wouldn't hurt her. A single lighthouse keeper, a man without a wife - that kind of man might.
But does any of that mean her mother or stepfather or anyone else will be able to tease out where she ran?
“What kind of man,” Marcus starts to say, then cuts himself off. “I can take her as an apprentice. Someone will have to guard the Point when we’re gone.”
“‘When we’re gone,’” Sabin snorts. “As if you’ll ever leave this place.”
“Oh, I don’t know. What if you get tired of living on the edge of nothing?”
“Stop.”
“Someday you’ll look out at the sea and think ‘She knows I don’t trust her, even after all these years when she never harmed me’, and you’ll be filled with shame and have to leave, and I’ll have to go with you.”
“You’re terrible.”
“I know. But you still love me.”
“More than yesterday, not as much as tomorrow.” He kisses the back of Marcus’s head.
“You don’t mind we’ll have to move into the lighthouse?”
“Why would - “
“Because we’ll have the top floor. The stairs to the deck will be right there.”
“That doesn’t mean you’re getting me up them.”
“You say that now.” Marcus twists his head around, and Sabin loosens his hold enough for Marcus to roll over to face him. “Do you still think Fate is laughing at you?”
“All the time.” He grins. He can laugh back. “In the morning we’ll ask Katrin if she wants to stay and be your apprentice. I’m pretty sure her answer will be yes, and then we’ll work out how to fix up the lighthouse for habitation.”
Marcus kisses Sabin on the nose and rolls over again to face the stove. Sabin listens to his breathing even out, listens to him fall asleep, and thinks about the future. It isn’t such a mad idea to move into the lighthouse from the keeper's cottage. For the first few decades of its existence, at least according to Marcus, it housed the lighthouse keepers. It has three floors, enough space to give Katrin her privacy, and sturdy enough to assuage Sabin’s fear of falling off the edge of the cliff. There’s a lot of work to be done in cleaning it out, and he'll have to move his workshop into the cottage, but now there are three of them to do it.
Marcus tends to make a decision, or agree with Sabin's decision, and trust things will work out. But Sabin has to formulate a plan. And so he does, while Marcus and Katrin sleep and the storm blows itself out to sea.
In the morning Marcus takes Katrin's still-wet clothes outside to dry in the sun, and she and Sabin make breakfast. She has nothing to wear but Sabin's nightshirt, and she looks like a child sitting in a chair with her knees pulled up and the shirt pulled down over them, her face serious as Marcus and Sabin explain their plan.
“What do you think?” Marcus asks, when they're finished. “Do you want to stay on the Point and be my apprentice? I'll write to the governors of the Lighthouse Service. I should be able to get some money for you.”
“And when you're not helping him,” Sabin adds, “you can help me.”
“Doing what?” Katrin asks.
“I'm a woodworker. Furniture, cabinetry, sometimes bowls, boxes, spoons.”
“He's very good at making spoons,” Marcus says, grinning.
“I have my workshop on the first floor of the lighthouse. I've never had an apprentice.”
“I don't want to be a woodworker,” Katrin says. “I'd rather apprentice to you,” she tells Marcus.
“Sabin knew you'd say yes,” he says. Katrin just shrugs.
“I should have told you last night.” She fiddles with the hem of Sabin's nightshirt. “I asked my mother once where my father went when he left us. What town did he sail from, did she know? She thought it was a place called Knockdown.”
“Nock Town,” Sabin says, enunciating, surprised.
The nearest town, a brisk hour's walk from the lighthouse. The promontory of land on which the lighthouse and the keeper's cottage sit is marked on maps as Point Nock.
“I know, I found a map. Nock isn't by the sea, so I know it's not where he sailed from, but there was a lighthouse on the map. And one of the innkeepers in Bottin told me about the two men who live in it.” She looks up, first at Sabin and then at Marcus. “I know I won't find him. It's been eight years, and wherever the ship sailed from, it wasn't here.”
“He could have found a ship's agent in town,” Marcus muses. “Sometimes they pass through here looking for crew.” He turns towards the back room, where his own maps are rolled and stacked, heavy sheets of paper printed with sea lanes and star charts and the geography of the country. He thinks the answer to Katrin's unasked question might be written on one of them, Sabin knows. “We might be able to determine - “
“I don't want to go to sea,” Katrin says, stopping him. Her voice is firm, her face set. “I want to stay here.”
“Are you sure - “ Marcus starts to say, then cuts himself off. “Of course you're sure. Who wouldn't want to spend her days at the edge of the cliff, watching over the sea and all the ships that sail on her?” He takes her hands. “I think you came to us because you heard her call.”
Katrin snorts, a sound of gentle mocking that Sabin has made many times himself, but she's almost smiling.
“That's settled,” Marcus continues. He pulls on Katrin's hands. “Now that the sun is out I can take you up my tower to see the lamp. If you're going to be my apprentice, you need to learn the lighthouse. You can clean up, right?” he asks Sabin, and before Sabin can answer, he's pulled Katrin out of the chair and out of the keeper's cottage.
Sabin leaves the dirty dishes and mugs and follows them out. He stays on the first floor of the lighthouse, taking inventory of his workshop and trying to determine how he'll arrange everything in the cottage. They'll install the stove in here, set up the kitchen, leave some room for storage. Katrin will take the second floor, he and Marcus will have the third. When her clothes are dry, they'll go into town and find her something appropriate to wear that isn't his nightshirt.
He twirls a spoon in his fingers, considering. He never thought he'd have children of his own, once he was old enough to realize he'd never want a wife, but he also never thought he might someday suddenly acquire a daughter, appearing in the midst of a storm because the lighthouse on the Point seemed the safest place to her.
But what is a lighthouse, except a beacon? It can warn ships away from sandbars or rocks, and it can signal the welcome presence of land to men who have been too long at sea. Marcus is full of romantic ideas about the many purposes and meanings of his lighthouse, but to Sabin it has only ever meant two things. It symbolizes the things of which he is afraid - heights, the sea - and it is the home of the person he loves, which is Marcus. Katrin was right to come to them.
Sabin doesn’t like heights and doesn’t trust the sea, and he knows Fate has a sense of humor because he fell in love with a lighthouse keeper. Marcus is solid and reassuring in body and fanciful and romantic in his soul, and even after nearly four years, Sabin’s heart twists with anxiety when Marcus tells him “I’m going to whistle for ships” and “Leave a lantern in the window for me”, pulls on his oilskin coat, takes the lantern hanging by the door, and walks out of the keeper’s cottage into the teeth of a storm.
This is Marcus’s job, Sabin knows. It’s what allows the two of them to live in the little lighthouse keeper’s cottage, and what allows Sabin to set up his workshop in the first floor of the lighthouse, his woodworker's tools and equipment and raw materials, so he can still practice his trade.
This is home. To keep it, Marcus must go out into a world made gray and formless and only half visible by driving rain and thick, overlapping clouds, in order to maintain his lighthouse and the giant lamp at the very top. And to keep him, Sabin slaps a lid on his worry and takes up his own work. There's little he can do by way of fabrication inside the cottage, but he can still sketch and design and plan.
He doesn’t feel as if he’s gotten very far into it when the door blows open and Marcus says, breathless and surprised, “There’s someone out there. Get your coat and come with me.”
“Who would be out in this storm?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want him to slip and fall down the cliff. Come on.”
Sabin isn’t sure what kind of help he’ll be, but Marcus is standing in the open door letting in the wind and rain and looking impatient, and sometimes there’s no point in arguing. So Sabin puts on his coat, pulls up the hood, and follows Marcus out of the cottage.
The rain pelts his face despite the hood and he reconsiders. The lighthouse and the keeper’s cottage are on a promontory jutting out into the sea, a sharp finger of land pointing away from towns and farms and civilized people. The cliffs fall black and jagged to the rocks below. Sabin knows Marcus will keep him far enough from the edge that falling off it is no risk, even in this weather, and yet.
It’s a long drop, especially for a man who doesn’t like heights.
He grabs Marcus’s sleeve, and when Marcus turns a questioning look on him, he says “Why don’t I stay here and hold the lantern to guide you.”
“I need the light. I won’t let you fall into the sea. I promise.” He twists his wrist, grabbing Sabin’s hand, and pulls him away from the cottage and into the gloom.
To Sabin’s great surprise, there is indeed someone out here, a dim figure without a coat creeping along the edge of the land. His heart skips at the thought of this person losing their footing and sliding over the side. The rain and the growing dark make it increasingly hard to see where the land ends and the air begins, even with the lantern in Marcus’s hand, and the ground is slippery under his boots as he and Marcus reach the stranger.
“What are you doing out here?” Marcus demands. He has a grip on the person’s upper arm, tight enough to hold but not so tight as to hurt. This close, the stranger doesn’t look very big, or very old. “Come with us.” He turns, pulls the stranger back towards the cottage. Sabin follows, both relieved that they’ve retrieved this mad stranger, and anxious about the storm-roiled sea an unknown distance to his right.
Light from the lamp inside turns the front windows of the keeper’s cottage into glowing glass squares, guiding the three of them home and welcoming them inside. Marcus puts the lantern on the table. He and Sabin shrug out of their oilskins, hang them on hooks next to the door, wipe their wet faces on their not-as-wet sleeves, and get a good look at the stranger they’ve just rescued.
The stranger is a girl, fourteen or fifteen and skinny, wearing boys’ pants and a sweater made heavy and shapeless from the rain. A tangled braid of brown hair hangs down her back.
“What were you doing out there?” Marcus repeats, at the same time Sabin pulls a chair away from the table and tells her to sit. “Who are you?”
“My name’s Katrin,” she says.
“I’m Marcus, this is Sabin. Where did you come from?”
“If I tell you, you’ll send me back.” Her chin lifts.
“You can’t leave those clothes on,” Sabin says. “You'll catch cold. Marcus, get her something dry to wear.”
“I want to know what you were doing on the Point,” Marcus says to Katrin. “You could’ve blown over the cliff and been killed.” His voice is tight and Sabin is probably the only person, including Marcus himself, who can hear the tremor in it.
“Marcus,” Sabin says, putting a hand on his arm. “Get her a nightshirt.”
“But - “
“Go.”
Marcus presses his lips together, turns on his heel, and stomps into the other room.
“He was afraid,” Sabin tells Katrin. Marcus is making a lot of noise and Sabin is tempted to shut the door. “His job is to protect people and it would destroy him if someone fell off the edge of his land.”
“I’m not stupid,” Katrin says. “I know that.”
“But what were you doing out there? Are you running from home?”
Her chin lifts again. “And what if I am?”
“We should take you back when the rain stops.”
“I won’t go.”
“No?”
“Fine,” Marcus huffs, appearing with a nightshirt - Sabin’s, to judge from the length - and holding it out to Katrin. He gestures to the back room with his free hand. “I put a towel on the bed so you can dry off.”
“Bring your clothes out here and we’ll hang them by the stove,” Sabin adds.
Katrin takes the nightshirt and vanishes behind the door.
“I’m sorry I made you go out in that,” Marcus says. The windows rattle as if to support his apology. “I thought I’d need help. What did she say to you?”
“I think she’s running from home, and she doesn’t want to go back.”
“We can’t take her now anyway.” Marcus looks out a window at the storm and taps his nose thoughtfully. He knows this part of the country better than Sabin does, and is no doubt trying to calculate where Katrin might have run from, and why. He’s calmer than he was. Banging drawers around must have vented some of his fear. “She’ll stay here tonight and we’ll make a decision in the morning.”
By the time Katrin emerges from the other room, wearing Sabin’s nightshirt and with her arms full of wet clothes, Sabin has lit the stove and shaken tea into a mug, and Marcus has gone back outside.
“Where is he?” Katrin asks. She’s still wearing her boots.
“Getting something I can make for dinner. Let me take those.” He pulls the chairs away from the table, draping her sweater over one and her pants over the other. They drip. “I’m making you some tea to warm you up. Do you want to tell me why you ran?”
She just looks at him.
The door blows open and slams shut. “Salt fish, carrots, those greens you like,” Marcus says. He turns to Katrin. “Are you hungry? The storm is still blowing. You’ll stay with us tonight.”
“Thank you,” she says. She sits in the chair with her pants drying over the back and looks at Sabin. “If I tell you, do you promise not to make me go back?”
“I don’t think I can,” he says. “But I promise not to judge you.”
“My mother had another child after me, a girl. She didn’t live. My father hired on a merchant ship, a two year contract, but he never came home.”
“Lost at sea?” Marcus asks. “Did the ship return without him?”
Katrin shrugs. “Does it matter? We never saw him again. I think it was the baby’s death that drove him away.”
“How old were you?” Sabin asks gently. The kettle starts to whistle. He pours water into the mug and hands it to her.
“Seven when he left. Ten when my mother remarried. She gave her second husband a boy, then twin girls.” She leans over the mug, breathes in steam. “She doesn’t have time for me. She won’t miss me.”
“She’s your mother,” Marcus says, sounding faintly scandalized.
Another shrug. “She has the babies. Well, Pol’s four, he isn’t really a baby anymore. He’s a handful. So are the twins. And her husband - “ She pauses. She sips her tea. “I don’t want to be in the house with him.” She trains a direct gaze on Sabin and then Marcus, who is standing near the table with his hands full of greens and carrots and dried fish. “No one will look for me here and I know you won’t hurt me.”
How can you know that? Sabin wants to ask her, even as he thinks he already knows the answer. Marcus is broad in the shoulders and solidly built, and while he's no taller than the average man, he walks with purpose and can be intimidating appearing out of a storm in his oilskin coat with the hood pulled up. But his eyes are kind, his hands are gentle, and his blond hair, worn unfashionably long and right now pulled back with a piece of string, is more likely to cause a girl to mock him than to fear him. And Sabin, while a little taller than the average man, is neither particularly broad nor excessively strong. His hands are marked with tiny scars from his years working with wood and the sharp instruments that cut and shape it, but no casual observer has ever looked at his hands or his face and thought him dangerous.
Marcus walks around Katrin to hand Sabin his bounty. Sabin dumps it on the table and turns to find a knife to cut up the carrots.
“I came from Bottin,” Katrin tells her mug.
“Bottin is... a day’s ride,” Marcus hedges. “At least. Depending on when you leave and how you go. Why did you come so far? You didn’t walk that whole way.”
“I told you.”
“You caught a ride on a wagon,” Sabin suggests. “Bad luck to hit the storm.”
Katrin just shrugs. Sabin’s pretty sure that’s all they’re going to get out of her.
“Well,” Marcus says, and repeats himself - “You can’t go home tonight. You’ll sleep in the bed, we’ll sleep out here.”
“Dinner first,” Sabin tells him, and points to the other chair. “Sit.”
Because Katrin won’t tell them any more about herself, Marcus entertains her with old seafaring stories and the history of the lighthouse and a couple of farm country myths from his childhood. Sabin tells her about the town where he grew up, north and inland, and that Fate laughed when he and Marcus met.
“I don’t like heights,” he explains. “When I first came here, Marcus took me up to show me the lamp - he was so proud of it - it was night, and while I couldn’t see the sea, I could hear it crashing at the bottom of the cliff.”
“I told him to look up,” Marcus says, smiling. “Not even out at the horizon - up at the stars.”
“He knew if I looked down, I’d leave and he’d never see me again.”
“Would you have gone back home?” Katrin asks pointedly.
“I wasn’t running from anything. Besides, I had work in town.”
“Thank you for letting me stay.”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” Marcus says. “It’s too bad you couldn’t have come in better weather. I could take you up to see the lamp too.”
“Not in this wind,” Sabin says. He gathers the plates and forks and mugs, puts them in the washbucket.
Katrin announces that she’d like to go to sleep now, so Marcus and Sabin fetch a spare blanket from the back room and leave her to her privacy.
“She couldn’t have left Bottin later than yesterday,” Marcus says, as Sabin washes the dishes and he dries. “She might have known the storm would cover her tracks today, but did no one come after her?”
“She said no one would miss her,” Sabin reminds him.
“What are we going to do with her?”
“Right now? Let her sleep.”
But it’s a good question. What are they going to do with a fifteen-year-old girl? All of Marcus’s maps are rolled up in the other room, save for a map of sea routes along the coastline that’s tacked to the wall, but Sabin is nearly certain that Bottin is inland. Did Katrin come to the Point intending to work here? What could she possibly know about working at a lighthouse?
But by that token, what did he know? And he stayed. And she isn’t afraid of the place, like he was.
Marcus blows out the lamp sitting on the table and he and Sabin arrange themselves on the floor. Sabin makes a command decision, wraps his arms around Marcus, and murmurs “We’re going to keep her” in his ear.
“She’s not a puppy, Sabin,” Marcus says, and Sabin can hear him grinning.
“No, she’s a fifteen-year-old girl who’s afraid to be around her stepfather. We can’t let her go back home.”
“But what are we - “
“Marcus. You know I’m right.”
Marcus sighs. “I know. You are. We’ll have to move into the lighthouse. There isn’t enough room for all of us in here. She’ll want her privacy.” He shifts, trying to settle himself on the floor. “What if her people come for her?”
“I don’t think they will. Why would they look here?”
“She did.”
Sabin considers that. Is it reasonable that a girl from some inland town would know about the lighthouses along the coast? If her father tried to escape the memory of his dead child by going to sea, maybe it is. But then why did she choose the lighthouse on the Point? Is it just the closest one to Bottin?
She said she knew he and Marcus wouldn't hurt her. A single lighthouse keeper, a man without a wife - that kind of man might.
But does any of that mean her mother or stepfather or anyone else will be able to tease out where she ran?
“What kind of man,” Marcus starts to say, then cuts himself off. “I can take her as an apprentice. Someone will have to guard the Point when we’re gone.”
“‘When we’re gone,’” Sabin snorts. “As if you’ll ever leave this place.”
“Oh, I don’t know. What if you get tired of living on the edge of nothing?”
“Stop.”
“Someday you’ll look out at the sea and think ‘She knows I don’t trust her, even after all these years when she never harmed me’, and you’ll be filled with shame and have to leave, and I’ll have to go with you.”
“You’re terrible.”
“I know. But you still love me.”
“More than yesterday, not as much as tomorrow.” He kisses the back of Marcus’s head.
“You don’t mind we’ll have to move into the lighthouse?”
“Why would - “
“Because we’ll have the top floor. The stairs to the deck will be right there.”
“That doesn’t mean you’re getting me up them.”
“You say that now.” Marcus twists his head around, and Sabin loosens his hold enough for Marcus to roll over to face him. “Do you still think Fate is laughing at you?”
“All the time.” He grins. He can laugh back. “In the morning we’ll ask Katrin if she wants to stay and be your apprentice. I’m pretty sure her answer will be yes, and then we’ll work out how to fix up the lighthouse for habitation.”
Marcus kisses Sabin on the nose and rolls over again to face the stove. Sabin listens to his breathing even out, listens to him fall asleep, and thinks about the future. It isn’t such a mad idea to move into the lighthouse from the keeper's cottage. For the first few decades of its existence, at least according to Marcus, it housed the lighthouse keepers. It has three floors, enough space to give Katrin her privacy, and sturdy enough to assuage Sabin’s fear of falling off the edge of the cliff. There’s a lot of work to be done in cleaning it out, and he'll have to move his workshop into the cottage, but now there are three of them to do it.
Marcus tends to make a decision, or agree with Sabin's decision, and trust things will work out. But Sabin has to formulate a plan. And so he does, while Marcus and Katrin sleep and the storm blows itself out to sea.
In the morning Marcus takes Katrin's still-wet clothes outside to dry in the sun, and she and Sabin make breakfast. She has nothing to wear but Sabin's nightshirt, and she looks like a child sitting in a chair with her knees pulled up and the shirt pulled down over them, her face serious as Marcus and Sabin explain their plan.
“What do you think?” Marcus asks, when they're finished. “Do you want to stay on the Point and be my apprentice? I'll write to the governors of the Lighthouse Service. I should be able to get some money for you.”
“And when you're not helping him,” Sabin adds, “you can help me.”
“Doing what?” Katrin asks.
“I'm a woodworker. Furniture, cabinetry, sometimes bowls, boxes, spoons.”
“He's very good at making spoons,” Marcus says, grinning.
“I have my workshop on the first floor of the lighthouse. I've never had an apprentice.”
“I don't want to be a woodworker,” Katrin says. “I'd rather apprentice to you,” she tells Marcus.
“Sabin knew you'd say yes,” he says. Katrin just shrugs.
“I should have told you last night.” She fiddles with the hem of Sabin's nightshirt. “I asked my mother once where my father went when he left us. What town did he sail from, did she know? She thought it was a place called Knockdown.”
“Nock Town,” Sabin says, enunciating, surprised.
The nearest town, a brisk hour's walk from the lighthouse. The promontory of land on which the lighthouse and the keeper's cottage sit is marked on maps as Point Nock.
“I know, I found a map. Nock isn't by the sea, so I know it's not where he sailed from, but there was a lighthouse on the map. And one of the innkeepers in Bottin told me about the two men who live in it.” She looks up, first at Sabin and then at Marcus. “I know I won't find him. It's been eight years, and wherever the ship sailed from, it wasn't here.”
“He could have found a ship's agent in town,” Marcus muses. “Sometimes they pass through here looking for crew.” He turns towards the back room, where his own maps are rolled and stacked, heavy sheets of paper printed with sea lanes and star charts and the geography of the country. He thinks the answer to Katrin's unasked question might be written on one of them, Sabin knows. “We might be able to determine - “
“I don't want to go to sea,” Katrin says, stopping him. Her voice is firm, her face set. “I want to stay here.”
“Are you sure - “ Marcus starts to say, then cuts himself off. “Of course you're sure. Who wouldn't want to spend her days at the edge of the cliff, watching over the sea and all the ships that sail on her?” He takes her hands. “I think you came to us because you heard her call.”
Katrin snorts, a sound of gentle mocking that Sabin has made many times himself, but she's almost smiling.
“That's settled,” Marcus continues. He pulls on Katrin's hands. “Now that the sun is out I can take you up my tower to see the lamp. If you're going to be my apprentice, you need to learn the lighthouse. You can clean up, right?” he asks Sabin, and before Sabin can answer, he's pulled Katrin out of the chair and out of the keeper's cottage.
Sabin leaves the dirty dishes and mugs and follows them out. He stays on the first floor of the lighthouse, taking inventory of his workshop and trying to determine how he'll arrange everything in the cottage. They'll install the stove in here, set up the kitchen, leave some room for storage. Katrin will take the second floor, he and Marcus will have the third. When her clothes are dry, they'll go into town and find her something appropriate to wear that isn't his nightshirt.
He twirls a spoon in his fingers, considering. He never thought he'd have children of his own, once he was old enough to realize he'd never want a wife, but he also never thought he might someday suddenly acquire a daughter, appearing in the midst of a storm because the lighthouse on the Point seemed the safest place to her.
But what is a lighthouse, except a beacon? It can warn ships away from sandbars or rocks, and it can signal the welcome presence of land to men who have been too long at sea. Marcus is full of romantic ideas about the many purposes and meanings of his lighthouse, but to Sabin it has only ever meant two things. It symbolizes the things of which he is afraid - heights, the sea - and it is the home of the person he loves, which is Marcus. Katrin was right to come to them.