The first thing Maren noticed about Kolvereid was the quiet.
Not the quiet of a village asleep beneath winter's hush, but something harder, more deliberate. The fishing boats stood frozen in their cradles along the frozen harbor, their hulls bearded with rime. Smoke did not rise from the cottages that lined the quay. A single gull hung on the air above the breakwater, wings motionless, watching her sledge slide down the coastal road.
She had been traveling for two days. The reindeer, loaned by a Sami herder whose name she had not caught, had slowed as the sea wind bit harder. Now the animal stopped at the edge of the village square and would not be coaxed forward, its broad head swinging toward the gray sprawl of rooftops as though scenting something wrong.
"Steady," Maren murmured, patting the coarse flank. Her breath came in plumes. The postmark on Nikolai's letter had read Kolvereid, Lighthouse Road. She could see the road now, a pale ribbon of compacted snow that curved past the church and up a headland.
No one came out to meet her.
She freed the sledge's lashings and pulled her traveling case from the cargo bed. Inside it lay the letter, a change of woolen stockings, the leather codebook she had bound herself the winter before, and a small pistol she could not reliably hit anything with. The reindeer stamped once, rolled a dark eye toward her, and then turned and began walking back the way it had come, its harness trailing.
"Good riddance, then," she said to its retreating flank.
The cold settled into her as she walked. Her boots crunched against ice hidden beneath the snow. She passed a fisherman's drying rack, its winter ropes hanging limp and stiff. Cod heads had been nailed to the posts as a charm against storms, their empty sockets white with frost. At the far end of the quay stood a granite monument to men lost at sea, its bronze plaque so green with corrosion that the names had become unreadable.
Maren paused, adjusting her mittens. Her fingers ached. She had been gripping the sledge's rail for hours, and the cramped muscles in her palms had not loosened.
The lighthouse itself came into view as she climbed the headland path. It rose from the black rock like a finger pointed at the low sky, whitewashed stone with a red lantern room at its crown. The glass of the lantern was dark. Beneath it, a low stone cottage crouched against the windbreak of a drystone wall, its chimney cold, its door ajar.
Something about that door made her stop. Village doors were not left open in February. Not on the coast, where the wind off the Norwegian Sea could freeze a man's lungs before he reached the threshold.
Maren climbed the remaining steps slowly, her weight even, her hand on the pistol beneath her cloak. The path was shoveled but not recent; the last footprints had been filled by a thin skin of fresh snow. Whoever had been here before her had walked some days ago.
She stopped at the door. The hinges had been forced. The wood around the lock was splintered outward, pale fresh timber showing through weathered paint. Inside, she could see the floor: planks, a rug kicked into a heap, and the corner of an overturned chair.
"Lykke?" she called. The lighthouse keeper's name, taken from the addressee line on Nikolai's letter, felt wrong in her mouth. She had written to a man she had never met. He had answered with a single line: Come quickly, bring the cipher. Then silence.
No answer came from inside. Only the wind, pushing at the broken door, making it rock on its hinges with a small wooden groan.
Maren pushed the door wider with her shoulder and stepped inside.
The cottage had been torn apart with a thoroughness that spoke of someone looking for something specific. Not a thief. A thief would have taken the iron candlesticks from the mantel, the good wool blankets from the chest. These lay scattered but present, their contents spilled across the floor. Drawers had been wrenched from a writing desk. Papers lay in drifts. A bookshelf had been pulled from its brackets and lay on its side, the spines of books bent.
The smell struck her next. Lamp oil, stale and sharp. Beneath it, something older, sour, the tang of milk gone off in a forgotten pan. And beneath that, faintly, the mineral scent of dried blood.
She crossed to the desk. Most of the papers were domestic: ledgers of lamp oil consumed, weather logs, a list of ships sighted. But pinned to the corner of the writing surface, beneath a brass paperweight shaped like an anchor, was a square of pale paper.
Maren's hands were still clumsy with cold. She picked up the paperweight, set it aside, and lifted the paper.
It was a woman's hand. She could tell from the loops of the letters, the slight backward slant. The ink was the same as the rest of the cottage's supplies, but the paper was finer, a stationery not sold in Kolvereid. It had been folded twice and pressed flat, then refolded. Someone had read it, smoothed it, read it again.
The words were few. Maren read them twice, her lips barely moving.
He knows what you carry. He has been patient. I am going to him now to buy time for you. Do not trust the harbor. The fifth brother is not your brother.
There was no signature.
Maren set the paper down. Her breath had stopped somewhere between the first and second reading, and she only noticed now because her chest ached with the need of it.
She turned and looked around the cottage with new eyes.
A woman's things had been rifled with the rest. A shawl of deep blue wool hung half off a peg by the cold hearth, its fringe caught on a nail. A pair of sturdy women's boots stood by the door, the left one missing its lace. On the shelf above the washbasin sat a jar of rose pomade, a tortoiseshell comb, and a small painted tin that had once held pepper biscuits from Trondheim.
The keeper's wife had lived here. The keeper's wife had left. Or had been taken.
Maren knelt beside the overturned chair and examined it. The leg had not simply broken; it had been cut. She could see the clean mark of a blade where the joint met the seat. Someone had wanted to be sure the chair could not be righted quickly. Someone who had wanted to slow a search.
She stood and went to the window. The glass was cracked but intact. From here she could see the harbor, the empty quay, the road climbing back toward the village. The reindeer was gone. Her sledge sat where she had left it, a dark shape against the snow.
Then she saw the other sledge.
It stood beside the church, half-hidden by the snow wall that bordered the cemetery. Smaller than hers, lighter, pulled by a single animal. The animal was gone, but the harness lay across the runners as though dropped in haste.
Maren went back to the desk. She gathered the letter, the paperweight, the woman's note, and slid them into her coat. She lifted the leather codebook from her case and set it on the desk where the woman's note had been. If whoever had come before her returned and found nothing of value, they would tear the place apart again. If they found only the codebook, they might take it and go. She would rather lose the book than her life.
The wind rose as she stepped outside, slamming the broken door against the wall with a crack that echoed off the headland. She flinched, then steadied herself against the cold.
She needed to find someone. Anyone. The keeper, the keeper's wife, a neighbor who might have seen who had done this. But the village below her lay still and shuttered, and the smoke she had looked for earlier still did not rise.
Maren walked down the headland path toward the church. The snow squeaked under her boots. As she neared the cemetery wall, she heard something.
A sound from inside the church. A scrape of wood on stone. Then a quick, indrawn breath, the kind a child makes when caught doing something they should not.
She stopped at the lychgate, her hand on the pistol, and listened.
The scrape came again. Then a small voice, pitched low and careful, said something in a language she did not recognize. A Sami word, perhaps. The cadence of it was different from Norwegian, the vowels rounder, the consonants softer.
"Show yourself," Maren said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt.
A long pause. Then a small figure rose from behind the gravestone nearest the church door. A boy, no older than ten, dressed in reindeer hide, his hood thrown back to show a face weathered brown by wind. His eyes were very dark and very watchful, and he did not step away from the gravestone. He used it as a shield, his hand resting on its top as though he could climb it if he needed to.
"I am not from the village," Maren said. "I came by sledge this morning. I am looking for the lighthouse keeper, or his wife."
The boy said nothing. He watched her the way a fox watches a hound.
"My name is Maren Halvorsen. I am from Trondheim." She lowered her hand from the pistol, slowly, so he could see. "Who are you?"
The boy's mouth moved. Then, in careful Norwegian: "Eirik."
"Eirik." She nodded. "Are you tending reindeer nearby?"
"My uncle's herd. We winter on the ridge above the fjord." He tilted his head toward the inland hills, a movement older than his years. "I came down for salt."
"Salt?"
"For the meat. We trade with the village store." His eyes flicked past her, up the headland, then back. "The store is closed. The man is gone."
"Gone?"
"With his wife." Eirik's small shoulders lifted. "I do not know where. Three days ago I came down. The door of the cottage stood open. I did not go in."
Three days. Maren filed the time away. "Did you see anyone else? Any strangers?"
The boy was quiet for a long moment. His hand tightened on the gravestone. "A man," he said at last. "On the road from the south. He walked past the church at night. I saw him from the ridge. He carried a long case."
"A long case?"
"Like a fisherman carries a spear. But longer." Eirik's voice dropped. "He did not stop at the inn. He went up to the cottage."
Maren let out a slow breath. The cold of it stung her teeth.
"Eirik," she said, "the keeper's wife left a letter. It says she went to meet someone, to buy time. Do you know what she meant?"
The boy shook his head. But his eyes had changed. There was something in them now that was not a child's caution. It was recognition.
"You have seen her," Maren said softly.
"I saw her leave." Eirik's voice was very small. "She walked down to the harbor. She took the small boat. The one with the blue trim."
"The boat is gone?"
"The boat is gone." He pointed toward the breakwater. Beyond it the sea lay flat and gray, stretching out to where the horizon met the sky in a colorless seam. "She rowed out past the light. I watched until I could not see her anymore."
"And no one has come back?"
"No one has come back."
The wind moved between them, lifting the fringe of Maren shawl. From the harbor, the single gull gave a long, hoarse call and rose, beating its wings toward the open water.
"The man with the long case," Maren said. "Did he come back down?"
"He came back down." Eirik hesitated. "But not the same way."
"What do you mean?"
"He came back down to the harbor. He stood there a long time. Then he went into the inn. The inn is cold now. But I saw a light there last night. Just for a moment. Then it went out."
Maren looked down the slope, toward the inn she had passed on her way into the village. Its sign hung motionless on its bracket. Its windows were dark.
"Thank you, Eirik," she said. "You should go back to your uncle."
"I know," the boy said. But he did not move.
Maren understood. He was alone. He had been alone since the village emptied itself around him, and he was waiting to be told he could stop being brave.
"Go home," she said. "Tell your uncle what you have seen. Tell no one else."
Eirik studied her face for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, and slipped around the gravestone. He moved without sound, his reindeer-hide boots leaving no print in the crust. Within a few steps he had vanished into the pale line of the ridge path, and Maren was alone with the dead.
She turned back toward the inn.
The inn door resisted her hand. Maren pressed her shoulder to it and felt the frame shudder against rusted hinges, the wood swollen tight against the sill. A gust of salt air pushed past her into the hallway, stirring dust from the floorboards, lifting a smell of stale ale and pine resin.
Inside, the taproom held its breath. A chair lay overturned near the hearth. Mugs stood in a row on the bar, unwashed, the dregs dried to dark rings. On the far wall, a portrait of a sea captain hung crooked on its nail, and Maren found her eyes drawn to the eyes in the painting: pale, watchful, the color of fog over black water.
Maren called out, though she did not expect an answer. Her voice fell flat against the plaster. Nothing answered but the small dry sound of the wind trying the shutters on the upper floor.
She righted the chair and sat. Her hands, she noticed, were trembling slightly from the climb, and she folded them together to still them. The shawl slipped from her shoulder. She caught it and pulled it back up, smelling the wool, smelling her own sweat and the brine that had stiffened the weave during the crossing from Rørvik.
The innkeeper had been a stout man with a red beard and a habit of clearing his throat before he spoke. She remembered him because she had met him only a week ago, when the telegraph line still carried the rumor that a man was asking questions at the lighthouse. She had not known then that she would come back to an empty village.
A door opened somewhere above her. Maren lifted her head.
Footsteps. Careful, deliberate, the creak of someone testing each board before committing weight. Then the staircase groaned under a heavier step, and a woman came into the doorway of the taproom.
She was tall, lean, her hair drawn back in a knot so tight it pulled at the corners of her mouth. Her dress was dark, well-cut, better suited to a parsonage than a fishing village. She looked at Maren as though she had been waiting for precisely this visitor and was neither surprised nor pleased to see her arrive.
"You must be from Trondheim," the woman said. Her voice was smooth, faintly accented from the Bergen side of the coast. "I heard a boat come in. There has not been a boat in four days."
"You are Sigrid Boe," Maren said.
"I am the schoolmistress, when there is a school. Who are you?"
"Maren Halvorsen."
"Halvorsen." The schoolmistress repeated the name as if weighing it. "From the merchant house in Trondheim. Your mother sends smoked salmon to my aunt in Bergen. Your father deals in cod and copper."
"Yes."
"Then you are not here for cod or copper." Sigrid Boe crossed the taproom and sat across from Maren, folding her hands neatly on the table. Her eyes were the color of slate, and they did not waver. "You are here because a man came asking questions about a trading post that has been buried for two hundred years, and you want to know why."
Maren said nothing.
"I will tell you what I told him," Sigrid Boe said. "Then you will leave, and I will go back to my empty classroom, and we will both pretend this village is not turning itself into a graveyard."
"Tell me."
The schoolmistress drew a slow breath.
"His name was Nikolai. He said he was a scholar from the university in Christiania. He carried a long case that he never let out of his sight, and he had the look of a man who had slept in his coat for several nights running. He came to the school two weeks ago. He asked to see the old records. I told him the parish chest was at the church, and he thanked me politely, and the next morning the church was open."
"Who let him in?"
"I did." Sigrid Boe's mouth tightened. "I had the key, and I was curious. He said he was writing a paper on early Dutch commerce along the coast. I believed him because I wanted to believe him, and because he had a letter from a professor I had heard of."
"Professor Lund."
"You know the name."
"I know the work."
"Then you know there is no record of a Dutch trading post near Kolvereid. The Dutch traded at Trondheim, at Bergen, at every major harbor. They did not trade here. There was nothing here to trade for. There were only fisherfolk and a single farm."
"And yet he asked about it."
"And yet he asked about it." The schoolmistress leaned forward. "He said he had found a reference in an old Dutch logbook to a 'small settlement under the white mountain, where the ice keeps what the sea gives up.' He asked if there were any local legends about ships coming in from the north during the cold years, when the gulf froze. I told him what my grandmother told me. I told him about the woman who walked out of the sea in 1621, carrying a child and a small wooden box. I told him she spoke a language no one in the parish recognized. I told him she lived three winters in the village, and then she walked back into the sea, and the child stayed behind and married a fisherman."
"What was in the box?"
"I do not know. The story does not say. The child never spoke of it. When she died, her things were buried with her."
"Where is her grave?"
Sigrid Boe was silent for a long moment. The wind rose outside, pressing against the shuttered windows with a long, low moan.
"Beside the church," she said finally. "The stone is gone. Only the mound remains. Nikolai asked to see it. I took him there on the third day. He knelt in the snow for an hour. He did not speak. When he stood up, his face was the color of tallow, and he asked me if I had ever seen the ice shift in the spring. I said yes. He asked if I had ever seen things come up out of the ice. I said no. He thanked me and walked back down to the harbor."
"And then?"
"And then the keeper's wife disappeared."
The word landed on the table between them like a coin. Maren felt the chill of it travel down her spine and settle in the small of her back.
"Tell me about her," Maren said.
"Inga. Inga Mork. She was not from here. She came from Lofoten, married the keeper two years ago. A quiet woman. She read a great deal. She wrote letters to her sister in Bodø every Sunday. She was last seen on the morning the parish council met to discuss the strange cracks that had opened in the cliff above the lighthouse. The men went up to look at the cracks. When they came back down, she was gone."
"Gone where?"
"No one knows. Her shawl was on the hook by the door. Her boots were under the bed. She had been making bread. The dough was still rising in the bowl. The lamp was still lit."
Maren looked down at her own hands, folded tight on the table. The knuckles were white. She forced them to relax.
"And Nikolai?"
"He stayed at the inn. He went out at night. The boy Eirik saw him. He came back the next morning with snow on his boots and nothing in his hands. The day after that, the village began to empty. Families left for relatives in Namsos. The men took the boats south. The priest locked the church and went to his sister's farm. By the fourth day there was no one left but me and the boy and the keeper, and the keeper has not come down from the light since."
"How long has that been?"
"A week."
Maren lifted her head. The schoolmistress was watching her with the steady, measuring gaze of a woman who had decided what she thought of her and was waiting to be proved right or wrong.
"You came here alone," Sigrid Boe said. "You did not bring your father's men. You did not telegraph the constabulary in Namsos. Why?"
"Because the constabulary would not come," Maren said. "Because my father does not know I am here. Because I have spent two years trying to forget a code I learned when I was apprenticed to a bookbinder in Trondheim, and a week ago I received a letter in that code, and the letter was postmarked from this village."
The schoolmistress did not move.
"The letter had no signature," Maren said. "It said only: 'Come to the lighthouse. Bring no one. The ice is opening.'"
Sigrid Boe was quiet for a long time. Outside, the wind shifted, and the inn sign creaked on its bracket, a single thin note like a finger drawn across a glass rim.
"The ice is not opening," the schoolmistress said at last. "It is January. The gulf has been frozen since November."
"I know."
"Then what does the letter mean?"
"I do not know. That is why I came."
Sigrid Boe stood. She crossed to the shuttered window and looked out through a crack in the slats. The harbor lay below them, gray water lapping at the empty boats, the lighthouse standing at the end of the breakwater like a white finger pointed at the sky.
"I will take you to the keeper," she said. "But I will not go inside the light with you. Whatever is happening in this village, it began with the man who came asking about the Dutch, and I have no wish to meet whatever he woke up."
"Agreed."
"And if we find Inga Mork alive, you will send for the constabulary in Namsos yourself."
"Agreed."
"And if we do not find her alive, you will tell her sister in Bodø what happened, in person, so that the sister can decide whether to forgive you or not."
Maren hesitated.
"Agreed," she said.
Sigrid Boe turned from the window. The thin line of light that came through the shutter fell across her face, and for a moment Maren saw something move behind the slate-colored calm, something that looked like the exhaustion of a woman who had been holding a village together by the force of her voice alone and had felt it slip from her, one household at a time, like sand through a closed fist.
"We leave at dusk," the schoolmistress said. "The keeper does not open his door for anyone during the day. He says the light is too bright. But at dusk he comes down to check the lamp oil, and if you are quick, you can get inside before he bolts it again."
"Where will we wait?"
"In the church. The priest left the side door unlocked. There is a bench by the chancel where I used to sit when I was a girl and the minister was too long about his sermon. We will sit there, and we will not light a candle, and we will wait."
Maren nodded.
Sigrid Boe gathered her shawl from the back of the chair. She moved toward the door, then stopped.
"The man who sent you the letter," she said, without turning around. "Did the code have a name?"
"It had a number," Maren said. "The number was seven."
"Seven."
"Yes."
"There were seven brothers in the Mork family, five of whom survived the wreck off Hitra in 1899. The keeper is one of them. Inga married into that family."
Maren felt the cold of the taproom settle against her skin.
"You think he sent the letter," she said.
"I think someone in that family knows what is in the ice," Sigrid Boe said. "And I think they have been waiting for someone to come and ask about it."
She opened the door. The wind pressed in, carrying the smell of brine and cold stone.
"We leave at dusk," she said again, and walked out into the pale afternoon, her footsteps quick and certain on the frozen path.
The dusk came on early, as if the fjord had swallowed the sun and held it under the water.
She found Sigrid Boe waiting outside the schoolhouse, her shawl pulled tight across her shoulders, her breath making small white clouds in the still air. Behind her, the schoolmistress stood in the doorway with her arms folded, watching them with an expression that Maren could not read.
"I have a lantern," Sigrid Boe said, "but we will not light it until we are inside the church."
Maren nodded. She had thought to bring something, a scarf, a coin, a piece of paper folded four times, but she had nothing. Her hands were empty. She let them hang at her sides.
They walked.
The path from the village to the church ran along the spine of the headland, between two fields of frozen grass and a low stone wall that had stood since the time of the Black Death. The wind off the fjord was steady and bitter. It pressed the wool of their coats flat against their backs and made their eyes water. Maren thought about the letter, the number seven, the name Mork, and how each of these small things was connected to the next by a thread she could not yet see.
They did not speak.
The church appeared as a dark shape against a darker sky. It was built of timber, painted red once, though the paint had weathered to a pale rust that looked almost like dried blood. The bell tower rose above the nave without a spire, and the windows were small and round, set deep into the walls like the eyes of an old man who has stopped caring what he sees.
Sigrid Boe led her around to the side door. It was, as the schoolmistress had said, unlocked. The iron latch gave under her hand with a small metallic sigh. They stepped inside.
The nave smelled of cold stone, damp wood, and the faint sweetness of old hymnals left too long in a closed room. There was just enough light left in the sky to make out the shape of the pews, the altar, the painted Christ on the wall above the chancel. His face had been retouched in some earlier century, and the new paint had not aged the same as the old, so that His cheeks looked too pink and His eyes looked too wide, as if He were surprised to find Himself there.
Sigrid Boe found the bench the schoolmistress had described. It stood against the wall to the left of the chancel, half hidden by a wooden column. They sat. They did not speak.
The light faded.
It came on slowly, the way dusk comes on in winter: not a single moment of change but a long, slow withdrawing, as if the day were being pulled back into the sea. The windows went from grey to violet to black. The painted Christ disappeared into the dark. The only light was the faint grey of the sky through the round windows, and even that dimmed until it was no light at all.
Maren could hear Sigrid Boe breathing beside her. She could hear the small creak of the bench under their weight. She could hear the wind outside, and beneath the wind, the slow sound of the fjord.
Then she heard footsteps.
They were light and quick, and they stopped outside the side door. The latch lifted. A small figure slipped in, pulling the door shut behind him, and stood very still in the dark.
"Eirik?" Maren whispered.
"It is me." His voice was soft, almost a breath. "I have come."
He moved toward them, and she felt his hand find hers in the dark. He was trembling. His fingers were cold, and they clutched something hard and flat.
"I was told you would be here," he said. "The man with the white dog told me."
"The man with the white dog is not here," Maren said. "He is on the ship."
"He is everywhere," Eirik said. "He is in the hills. He is in the church. He is on the road to the lighthouse. He has been waiting for you since you came."
Maren felt the fear rise in her chest. She tried to keep it out of her voice.
"Eirik. What do you have in your hand?"
"A piece of bone," he said. "I was to bring it to you. I was told to bring it to the woman who reads the letter. So I have brought it."
He pressed the thing into her palm.
It was cold and heavy and flat, roughly the size of a playing card but thicker. She turned it over with her fingertips. One side was smooth. The other side was incised with lines.
"There is a map on it," Eirik said. "It is not like the map on the paper you have. It is a different kind of map. It shows where the ice goes in the summer."
"Where the ice goes in the summer?"
"Yes. The man said you would understand."
Maren held the bone in both hands. The lines were cut deep enough that she could feel them clearly under her thumbs. They were not random. They formed a pattern.
"Will you tell me what it says?" Sigrid Boe whispered from the bench beside her.
"Not yet," Maren said. "I cannot see it yet. I need light."
"Then we go to the lighthouse," Sigrid Boe said. "Now."
They stood. Eirik slipped his cold hand into Maren's. She let him.
The three of them moved through the dark nave toward the side door. Maren's free hand trailed along the wooden column as she passed it. She thought of the painted Christ, surprised to find Himself there. She thought of the schoolmistress, waiting in the schoolhouse with her arms folded. She thought of the keeper, who had married Inga into the Mork family, who checked his lamp oil at dusk every night, who did not open his door during the day because the light was too bright.
They stepped out into the dark.
The wind hit them at once. It was colder now than it had been that afternoon, and it carried the smell of the fjord, brine and kelp and the faint metallic tang of ice. The path to the lighthouse was not the path they had taken from the village. It led down the back side of the headland, through a field of frozen grass and then along a low cliff that overlooked the rocks where the Mork brothers had lost their ship.
Eirik walked between them, his hand still in Maren's, his small steps quick and sure. He knew this path. He had walked it many times, she guessed, in the dark and in the day.
"How old are you, Eirik?" she asked him.
"Twelve," he said. "I will be thirteen in the spring."
"You tend reindeer."
"Yes. My father's herd. We move them between the coast and the hills, depending on the season. In winter we keep them near the forest. In summer we take them up to the high meadows. I know every path between."
"And the man with the white dog. Did he give you the bone?"
"No," Eirik said. "The bone was already in the church. It was under a stone in the floor, behind the altar. I knew about it. I had known about it for a long time. But I was not to touch it until someone came."
"Until someone came," Maren repeated.
"Yes. The man with the white dog said that someone would come who could read it. He said she would come from Trondheim. He said her hands would know the lines."
Maren looked down at the boy in the dark. She could not see his face. She could feel only his cold hand in hers and the small tremor of his breath.
"What is your name again?" she asked, although she knew it.
"Eirik," he said. "Eirik Mork."
Maren's step faltered.
"Mork," she said.
"Yes," the boy said. "I am one of them. There are five of us now, my father's brothers and my father's sisters and me. I am the youngest. The keeper is my uncle."
Sigrid Boe had stopped walking. Maren could hear her breath stop, then start again, slower.
"You are one of them," Sigrid Boe said. "And you brought her the bone."
"Yes," Eirik said. "Because I was told to. And because I want to know what is in the ice."
"What is in the ice?" Maren asked.
"I do not know," Eirik said. "That is why I brought it to you."
They walked on.
The path narrowed. The grass gave way to bare stone. Maren could hear the sea below them now, the slow suck and release of waves against rock. The wind off the water was sharper than the wind off the land, and it carried with it a smell that was not quite the smell of brine, something older, something mineral, like wet iron.
"There," Sigrid Boe said.
The lighthouse rose out of the headland like a candle on a black cake. It was a tall, square tower of whitewashed stone, with a black lantern room at the top and a small keeper's house built against its base. The light was not lit. The lantern room was dark. The windows of the keeper's house were dark. The whole place had the look of a thing that had been waiting a long time for someone to come.
Sigrid Boe led them around to the back of the house. There was a door there, wooden, painted the same rust-red as the church. The latch was down.
"Wait," Eirik whispered. "Let me go first. He knows me. He will not bolt the door if it is me."
He pulled his hand free of Maren's and stepped ahead. He knocked on the door, three soft knocks, then two. A pause. Then one.
The latch lifted from inside. The door opened a crack. A slice of warm yellow light fell across Eirik's face. Maren saw him blink.
"Uncle," he said. "I have brought them."
A voice came from inside. It was low and rough, the voice of a man who had spent a long time alone with the wind.
"Bring them in, then," it said. "Bring them in before the light finds them."
The door opened wider.
Maren stepped forward, across the threshold, into the warm yellow light of the keeper's kitchen. She still held the bone in her hand. She could feel the lines under her thumb, deep and clear, waiting for her to read them.
Behind her, the door shut. The latch fell into place. The wind pressed against the walls of the house, and somewhere far off on the black water, a bell began to ring, low and steady, the sound of something surfacing after a long time under the ice.