The Watchtower

indisposed and needed complete darkness for the duration of the trip. Will gave him the directions he’d written out and impressed upon him the importance of sticking to the route, “even if you’re told the south cliff road is out,” Will insisted. Once we were inside the coach and Will had made sure that the curtains were securely tied over the windows, he retreated to a corner and, drawing his hood low over his face, fell into a sleep that so externally resembled death I had to resist the urge to shake him awake.
    He could be woken, he told me, but I should only do so in an emergency since he would need all his resources when we reached Pointe du Raz. Since being bored out of my mind in a dark box with a nearly dead man for twelve hours wasn’t an emergency (I tried to read the Brittany guidebook or sketch in my notebook, which were in my backpack, but it was too dark), I let him sleep, but the moment the coach stopped and I smelled ocean, I sprang from its confines as if escaping my own tomb …
    … and nearly killed myself by falling over a cliff into the sea. The coach was stopped on a narrow track clinging to the side of a rock cliff.
    “Why did you stop here?” I asked in my fractured, modern-day French.
    The driver said something completely incomprehensible and jabbed a finger ahead of us. Peering around the front of the coach, I saw what the problem was. A large chunk of the road ahead had crumbled into the sea. Its remnant wasn’t wide enough for the carriage to pass. We’d have to continue on foot—I could see our tower destination below the road, not far off—only Will couldn’t do that until the sun had set.
    Shading my eyes, I looked out to sea where a fiery orange sun hung just above an island a few miles offshore. It would set in a half hour or so. We’d just have to wait.
    I conveyed this to the surly driver in a combination of hand signs and fractured French that made him sniff with the same disdain I’d encountered in a dozen waiters in Paris. Some things never change, I thought, sitting down on a rock to watch the sun set. As it descended toward the island, it seemed to settle for a moment at the top of a tower that stood at its center. The sight reminded me of something … after a moment I realized what. The ring Will wore—the one he had taken from Marguerite—was engraved with a tower topped by an eye surrounded by rays. I had learned last year that it was the symbol of the Watchtower. Was it a coincidence that the tower on the island looked so much like it?
    I took my Brittany guidebook out of my backpack and looked up the Pointe du Raz. The island, I saw right away, was the Île de Sein, which local legend claimed was the last remnant of the mythic island of Ys.
    Monsieur Lutin had told me that the fées de la mer —the boat people—came from Ys. Could the tower on the Île de Sein be the original Watchtower?
    What happened next suggested to me that it was.
    The sun dropped below the peak of the tower, filling its top chamber with orange light. A ray of light, like a flaming arrow, shot out of the tower and headed toward the mainland where I stood—almost directly at me, but not quite. The beam of light reached the next promontory to the north, where another tower stood, and turned the glass on top of that tower a fiery red, so bright I had to close my eyes against the glare.
    Behind my closed eyes I still saw the island tower, only the red light in my vision came from a fire burning from its battlements. Out of the fire shot a blazing arrow. I tracked its passage across the sea, across an impossible distance, its progress reflected in the black ocean, until it landed in the tower at Pointe du Raz. Immediately a fire burst into flame from the top of the second tower. Seconds later an arrow was shot from that tower, arcing south toward another promontory. Suddenly I was watching the scene from far above, my vision granting me a bird’s-eye view of the whole peninsula, and I could see the arrow reach a third tower and set ablaze there a third bonfire. I watched as the entire southern coast of Brittany was dotted with blazing signal fires, and then—as my view expanded—I watched the line of fires extend across France, stretching toward Paris. This, I understood, was an ancient alarm system created by the sisterhood of the Watchtower to warn humanity of some coming danger. But what was the danger? What was coming?
    I opened my eyes, alert to the threat, but the scene